The Dreyfus Affair in the Work of Marcel Proust: A Critique of Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva

The DreYfus Affair in the Work ofMarcel Proust 107 mE DREYFUS AFFAIR IN mE WORK OF MARCEL PROUST: A CRITIQUE OF HANNAH ARENDT AND JULIA KRISTEVA by Juliette Hassine Juliette Hassine is professor of comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. Her books include Esoterisme et ecrlture dans l'reuvre de Proust (paris: Minard, 1990), Marranisme et hebrafsme dans l'reuvre de Proust (paris: Minard, 1994), and Shira vemythos be-yetsiratah shel Dalia Ravicovitch (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1990). Fran~oise Rosset, the translator of this article, is Assistant Professor of Russian at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. In choosing to reflect on the Dreyfus Affair through a work of art such as Marcel Proust's A fa recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), commentators run the risk of betraying both historical and artistic truth.1 We must keep in mind that in the Recherche, the Dreyfus Affair is merely subject matter, along with war, high society, and homosexuality. It is fodder for composition, its purpose purely esthetic. The historical, philosophical and sociological theories that run through the Recherche do not necessarily reflect the convictions of its narrator or lMarcei Proust, Remerrlbrance of Things Past, rev. trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Random House, 1981 [orig. French ed. 1913-27)). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Proust will be drawn from this version, based on Pierre Clarac's and Andre Ferre's edition of Proust, A La recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (paris: Gallimard, 1954). In accordance with common critical practice, Proust's masterpiece will be referred to in the text as "the Recherche." Translations from other works are mine, unless an English version is cited. [Translator's note.) 108 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 of its author. Furthermore, the work would lose some of its value if it argued one ideology over another. The only true and legitimate motivation for a work of art is artistic inspiration. This seems to have escaped the great historian Hannah Arendt, particularly in 1be Origins of Totalitarianism, where Proust's work holds a privileged position: ' The chief reason, however, for the choice of the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain as an example of the role of Jews in non-Jewish society is that nowhere else is there an equally grand society or a more truthful record of it. When Marcel Proust, himself half-Jewish and in emergencies ready to identify himself as a Jew, set out to search for "things past," he actually wrote what one of his admiring critics has called an apologia pro vita sua. The life of this greatest writer of twentieth-century France was spent exclusively in society; all events appeared to him as they are reflected in society and reconsidered by the individual, so that reflections and reconsiderations constitute the specific reality and texture of Proust's work! Before discussing the validity of these premises, I shall suggest that the term apologia pro vita sua refers to justifying the existence of the Recherche, rather than that of Proust. Clearly, the work is intended that way, for it begins with the narrator's voice created as completely distinct from the author's. Furthermore, one must note that Arendt's reading is that of an artist-philosopher, rather than of an assiduous academic researcher. She broadly sketched whole historical periods, and endowed her sketches with the coherence and polish of a work of art. Arendt had the gift of embracing composite and complex realities in order to detect general laws, especially when discussing European society after the French revolution, a society in which Jews played a specific role. It did not seem relevant to her to make a distinction between Jews from Bordeaux and those from A1sace, between English Jews and German ones, etc. According to her own statements, she saw the Recherche as a record of society, whereas the work seeks to question all sociological laws and rectify historical commentary, gradually unveiling its ultimate purpose. Here we must refer to the Recherche itself. Recalling discussions with his friend Saint-Loup, the narrator argues that war is not strategic or scientific, ..it is something...