[In the following essay, Topping discusses Orientalism in Proust's fiction.]

In Le Côté de Guermantes, the third volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, the mature narrator exposes the dangers of preconceptions:

C'est ainsi qu'un cousin de Saint-Loup avait épousé une jeune princesse d'Orient qui, disait-on, faisait des vers aussi beaux que ceux de Victor Hugo ou d'Alfred de Vigny et à qui, malgré cela, on supposait un esprit autre que ce qu'on pouvait concevoir, un esprit de princesse d'Orient recluse dans un palais des Mille et Une Nuits. Aux écrivains qui eurent le privilège de l'approcher fut réservée la déception, ou plutôt la joie, d'entendre une conversation qui donnait l'idée non de Schéhérazade, mais d'un être de génie du genre d'Alfred de Vigny ou de Victor Hugo.

(II, 406)¹

The West's appropriation of a largely imagined, exotic ‘Other’, and the creation of reductive stereotypes of the Orient—here lampooned by Proust—has, of course, been most famously analysed by Edward Said. ‘The Orient’, Said writes,

was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences […] The Orient is the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.²

Indeed, the very term ‘Orientalism’ connotes for Said ‘the high-minded executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European colonialism’.³ Convincing re-evaluations of Said's Orientalism continue to emerge, however, including, in recent years, John MacKenzie's 1995 study Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts.⁴ MacKenzie's study demands recognition of the celebratory handling of the Orient by western culture, the cross-fertilization of East and West as regards intellectual and artistic activity, and the consequent slipperiness of the binary oppositions which are so often established between the two. What is more, even if both French and British writers have, as Said suggests, exploited ‘a kind of free-floating mythology of the Orient’,⁵ they have also sometimes subverted it. For example, according to Said, Flaubert associates the Orient, in all of his novels, with ‘the escapism of sexual fantasy’.⁶ However, whilst Emma Bovary's and Frederic Moreau's daydreams are indeed ‘packed with Oriental clichés’ of harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, and fragrant ointments, the point is precisely that these are their daydreams.⁷ Flaubert harnesses clichés of the East in order to create his own parody of the ‘cliché-babbling lover’.⁸ And so too with Proust, as this brief discussion aims to show with reference to Odette's aesthetic tastes.⁹

Proust did not travel to the East; his knowledge of it is secondhand, gleaned from painting, music, and his literary predecessors. Yet he characteristically grasps plurality and diversity in his encounter with the Orient. Penetrating sham stereotypes, he transcends and, with a certain irony, subverts the conventional image of the Orient as the embodiment of ‘sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, [and] unlimited desire’.¹⁰ In fact, at the very moment when Proust seems to be engaging in the kind of monolithic myth-making on which the Orientalist edifice described by Said is built, subtle anomalies of tone, style or context are quietly deconstructing what may at first sight appear to be wholesale endorsement of the Orientalist myth. For example, the young narrator's fascination with, and idealization of the former cocotte Odette, in Du côté de chez Swann, are inextricably linked to the Chinese and Japanese fashions with which she surrounds herself. To the naive young narrator, she is mysterious, unknowable, seductive, and enjoys an existence other than his own. Her ‘orientalism’ is the emblem of that. Offering the young narrator a treasured insight into her intimate life, for instance, Odette receives him wearing ‘des robes de chambre japonaises’, and makes him more comfortable by propping him up with cushions embroidered with Chinese dragons, as previously, in the earliest stages of their relationship, she had done with Swann:

Elle l'avait fait asseoir près d'elle dans un des nombreux retraits mystérieux qui était ménagés dans les enfoncements du salon, protégés par d'immenses palmiers contenus dans des cachepots de Chine, ou par des paravents auxquels étaient fixés des photographies, de nœuds de ruban et des éventails. Elle lui avait dit ‘Vous n'êtes pas comfortable comme cela, attendez, moi je vais bien vous arranger’, et avec le petit rire vaniteux qu'elle aurait eu pour quelque invention particulière à elle, avait installé derrière la tête de Swann, sous ses pieds, des coussins de soie japonaise qu'elle pétrissait comme si elle avait été prodigue de ces richesses et insoucieuse de leur valeur.

(I, 217)

Luc Fraisse, in his study of Proust et le Japonisme surmises that this Oriental setting may have been inspired by Pierre Loti's Mme Crysanthème, an association which creates a doubtless deliberate link between the ‘personnage inverti’ of Loti's novel, Odette, and later Albertine who also appears ‘en robe de chambre’.¹¹ As such, Proust might appear to be naively subscribing to the stereotype which equates the East with the exotic and the exotic with the erotic. Yet in the case of the narrator's vision of Odette, it is significantly the young narrator for whom she possesses an eastern mystique, the same young narrator who will subsequently turn his admiring gaze to the aristocracy. They, through his transforming optic, will become the gods and goddesses of classical mythology only later to be demythologized in a self-ironizing retrospective on the part of the mature narrator. In other words, Proust is consciously exploiting this ‘free-floating mythology of the East’ in order to underscore the young narrator's naive fascination with Odette. Equally in his evocation of the Orient in the context of Odette's seduction of Swann, Proust is not the unquestioning perpetrator of a hackneyed vision of the East; rather, he is gently satirizing not only Odette's frequently noted bad taste, but also the contemporary fad for all things Oriental, a fad which—as is suggested by the ironic aside in the following quotation—has none the less been comfortably westernized. The inauthentically elaborate entrance to Odette's apartment is described as follows:

Un escalier droit entre des murs peints de couleur sombre et d'où tombaient des étoffes orientales, des fils de chapelet turcs et une grande lanterne japonaise suspendue à une cordelette de soie (mais qui, pour ne pas priver les visiteurs des derniers conforts de la civilisation occidentale, s'éclairait au gaz) montait au salon et au petin salon.

(I, 216)

The sheer excess and eclecticism of the décor provide the perfect illustration of the ‘lois d'imitation’ which, according to the sociologist Tarde, govern collective life: ‘un petit nombre d'inventeurs [sont] bientôt suivis par la foule des copieurs’ writes Fraisse, and the favourite god of the France of the period becomes, as Brichot points out, ‘le dieu chinois Je-Men Fous’.¹²

A transition thus occurs both in Proust's presentation of Odette and in his handling of the Orient. The erotic (because exotic) space which she inhabits and which is visited by the young narrator is transformed into a tawdry lair, whilst the young narrator/protagonist who buys into the fantasized Orientalist stereotype subtly evolves into the mature narrator/writer who playfully contests that stereotype. The East is not therefore appropriated by Proust in the terms proposed by Said. Rather, its appropriation by contemporary fashion (a fashion overdone by Odette) is mocked as a grotesque distortion of what is for Proust a source of genuine beauty.

Notes

1. M. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1987-89).

2. E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, Penguin, 1995), pp. 1-2.

3. Said, p. 2.

4. J. Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, MUP, 1995).

5. Said, p. 53.

6. Said, p. 190.

7. Ibid.

8. D. Roe, Gustave Flaubert (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989), p. 61.

9. I have discussed further aspects of Proust's metaphorical handling of the East elsewhere. See ‘Les Mille et Une Nuits Proustiennes’, in Essays in French Literature, 35-36 (November 1988-99), 113-30, and ‘The Proustian Harem’, in MLR, 97, 2 (2002), 300-11.

10. Said, p. 188.

11. L. Fraisse, Proust et le Japonisme (Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997).

12. Fraisse, p. 33.