Some Scenes in Proust

In Epistemology of the Closet,¹ Eve wrote that Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time “has remained . . . the most vital center of the energies of gay literary high culture, as well as of many manifestations of modern literary high culture in general” (213). And yet, for all that, reading it—and reading it with Eve—was a lot of fun, which is a quality in her reading and teaching Eve prized. The problem with the novel, is not, she wrote, that it is “so hard and so good, but that ‘it’s all true.’ [With] Proust . . . what I most feel are Talmudic desires, to reproduce or unfold the text and to giggle” (240). I’m going to return to that laughter, and how giving into the desire to laugh animated Eve’s idea of Proust. But first I want to remark on what Eve, writing in 1990, had to say about the way some earlier books had treated, in “gay affirmative critical ways . . . the incoherences around homosexuality in Proust,” an approach that had, Eve felt, unfortunately compartmentalized Proust’s “treatment of sexual specification” (213). Everything about the way Eve led us through our nine-month tour of the novel at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1998–99 was decompartmentalized in the extreme—issues and trajectories bled into one another; the novel was an indivisible work not of “themes” (Eve’s scare quotes in Epistemology truly are scary; on top of which I’d never actually heard anyone call them scare quotes before Eve) but rather a novel, as Eve described it in her 1998 syllabus, of “preoccupations,” “motives,” “ambitions,” among them,

the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; alternatives to triangular desire; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls—to name but a few.

And we really did touch on all that.

For now I want to offer some highlights of the way Eve taught Proust, things she did not mention in her published writing about him. These are pictures of all of us together in the classroom, moments which I think reflect some of Eve’s—and the novel’s—larger preoccupations, motives, and ambitions.

The biggest surprise Eve had for us came at the beginning, because she asked us to start reading In Search of Lost Time not at the beginning, but with “Swann in Love,” almost three hundred pages into the first volume, Swann’s Way. I think most of us had either not read the novel or had read just a bit of the Overture—and gotten no farther. And that was the crux of it. Eve explained that she wanted to avoid “Combray”—and the Overture—because with its narrator so famously going to bed early and waiting for that good-night kiss from Maman, “it is so common to see ‘Combray’ isolated and fetishized in discussions of Proust, often with disastrous results for the critical assumptions and proceedings that then get applied to the rest of the novel.” She hoped that what she called “this rather drastic intervention” would “at least . . . deroutinize our sense of how ‘Combray’ is related to the other sections of the novel.”

That desire to defetishize brings us back to Eve’s giggle. In Eve’s and our reading of the novel, to return to “Combray” after “Swann in Love” and then move onto “Place Names: The Name” was a way of revealing the many kinds of novel In Search of Lost Time actually is—a novel poised, as Eve helped us see, between the Edwardian and the Victorian and the modern; an example of “international queer modernism,” as she called it in the course name (“Proust and International Queer Modernism”), but also a Victorian novel...