Proust’s Latin Americans by Rubén Gallo (review)

Arguing for a “cosmopolitan” model of literary comparatism in which canonical European authors are read alongside their “cultural others” (20), this study explores the presence of Latin Americans in Proust’s artistic and social circle, private life, and literary works, to the seductive end of “tropicaliz[ing]” (1) a writer who never ventured beyond the European continent. “Proust himself would not have known what it felt like to be a foreigner” (4), remarks Gallo, noting that his translations of Ruskin owed less to his command of English than to a doting and linguistically gifted mother. Born into privilege, Proust was for Gallo no less an “outsider”: a half-Jewish bourgeois homosexual who moved in aristocratic circles, he was in Julia Kristeva’s words “un étranger à soi-même” (5). The contradictory demands he encountered in Belle Époque society were akin to those met by assimilated foreigners: in both cases, the xenophobic national climate made any personal claims to French identity fragile. In this respect, the ruinous Panama Canal Affair “sparked a peculiar form of anti-Latin Americanism” with which French Jews in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair could identify (6).

The brief of this lively, wide-ranging study is broadly cultural, and its method biographical. In what ways, Gallo asks, do Proust’s contacts with Latin Americans in Paris—whether in the immediacy of love or through the mediate forms of art—illuminate larger questions of foreignness and the “dialectics of belonging and not belonging” (10)? Four principal figures are surveyed: the Venezuelan and German-Jewish composer Reynaldo Hahn, who was Proust’s first lover; the Argentine Gabriel de Yturri, who formed an openly gay couple with Robert de Montesquiou; Cuban-born poet and French Academician José-Maria de Heredia, whose daughters Proust befriended; and Mexican essayist Ramon Fernandez, a key interlocutor for Proust in the 1920s and his first serious critic. What distinguished these personalities from the exilic subjects that dot the twentieth century is the pleasure they took in “reinventing their identity” (3) on French soil. Rather than surrender to melancholy, these Latin Americans proved “joyful transplants” whose passion for France, its language, arts, and political and sexual freedoms was boundless (17). The prospect of rejection—of being outed—was the more painful for it.

Working from the epistolary record, published drafts, essays, and the text of La Recherche, Gallo alternates between strong individual portraits and short excurses (called “paperolles”) bearing on Latin American themes of the day. The opening chapter on Hahn surveys his rejection of Wagnerianism and his postwar embrace of national stereotypes as a “strategy of resistance” (70), notably in the Spanish-themed operetta Ciboulette (1923). Attuned to the past yet undeniably modern, both Proust and Hahn illustrated an “arrière-garde” esthetics (36), were it not, according to Gallo, for the playful “langasge” [sic] they used in correspondence. Gallo correctly describes this infantile, private language rife with repetition and inventive apostrophe as an “affective signifier” (39). Yet to compare its literary import to the “destruction of traditional syntax” (43) achieved by Khlebnikov’s trans-sense poetry or Marinetti’s parole in libertà is surely to overstate the case. More convincing is the gloss of Proust’s drawings addressed to Hahn: these pastiches of medieval iconography—previously discussed by Philippe Sollers in L’œil de Proust (1999)—allowed Proust to express sadomasochistic fantasies while entertaining the possibility that he and Hahn live happily one day under the same roof.

A second portrait stresses Proust’s specular identification with Tucumán-born Gabriel de Yturri, a commoner whose rastaquouère qualities fascinated Paul Verlaine and wholly seduced Montesquiou, now buried at his side. In his pastiche of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires entitled “Fête chez Montesquiou” (1904), Proust transposed onto a Spanish (rather than Argentine) invitee the hotbloodedness of Yturri, while in La Recherche he attributes other characteristics to Charles Swann—like the diabetic Yturri, he smells of rotten apples—and to working-class figures like Jupien and Morel. Gallo’s strongest claim here...