SOURCE: Schmid, Marion. “Ideology and Discourse in Proust: The Making of ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre.’” Modern Language Review 94, no. 4 (October 1999): 961-77.

[In the following essay, Schmid discusses real historical events which are referred to in Remembrance of Things Past.]

Marcel Proust has often been described as apolitical.¹ It is true that apart from a well-known involvement in the Dreyfus Affair and a lesser-known intervention against the separation of Church and State in 1904, he generally refrained from expressing his political opinions in public.² Given the highly politicized and ideologically charged milieux he frequented (amongst his friends were some of the leading ideologists and polemicists of his time: Léon Daudet, Maurice Barrès, and Charles Maurras), Proust managed surprisingly well to keep out of political debates. He cunningly manoeuvred between different political camps and happily used political personae to obtain him social honours, but was highly sensitive to rumours of his political protection. In 1920, for instance, he obtained the support of the socialist Léon Blum and the royalist Léon Daudet for his nomination to the Légion d'honneur. Once the decoration was in sight, Proust was eager to mention both of their names to refute allegations that he had been nominated by one politician in particular.³ In a letter to Jacques Boulenger of approximately the same time, concerning an article he had undertaken to thank Léon Daudet for his support in the Goncourt jury, Proust categorically denied any personal political involvement: ‘Je ne m'occupe pas de politique et je ne m'en suis jamais occupé.’⁴ Notwithstanding statements like this, his alleged political and ideological neutrality in public should not be interpreted as demonstrating total indifference to political questions: indeed, if anything, the opposite is in fact the case. Both his letters and his literary writings show that he took a lively interest, if not in politics as such, at least in the effect political or historical events have on people, in particular on their attitudes and mentalities. His interest in history and politics, it has often been said, was largely sociological: he studied historical and political events in their function as catalysts and mirrors of human behaviour.⁵

History provided Proust with two major events that sharpened his sociological view: first, the Dreyfus Affair and, second, the outbreak of the Great War. Both are richly commented upon in his correspondence and both, of course, are dramatized in A la recherche du temps perdu, the first dispersed across A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Le Côté de Guermantes, and Le Temps retrouvé, the second concentrated in the chapter in Le Temps retrouvé entitled ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’ (A la recherche, iv, 301-433).⁶ In both, Proust engaged in current historical and political reality, though under altogether different circumstances. Fragments about the Dreyfus Affair were written some twenty years after the actual event. By the time A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le Côté de Guermantes were published, the Affair had long entered the realm of history. It belonged to pre-war France, and was thus unlikely to stir emotions amongst the war generation. The war chapter, by contrast, necessitated a far more direct involvement with social and political events. Proust implemented experiences and observations he made daily during the war almost instantly into his fiction. The events he described were shared by his readers and would still be fresh in their minds at the publication of Le Temps retrouvé, which was scheduled for immediately after the war. At the time he was drafting the war chapter, he could of course not foresee that the last volume of the Recherche would be published with considerable delay in 1927, by which time the conditions of its reception had changed completely.

The Dreyfus Affair has often been discussed by critics within the wider context of Judaism in the novel.⁷ In the following study, I concern myself with the war chapter, which has received comparatively less attention.⁸ In contrast to earlier critics who have concentrated for the greatest part on the published version of ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’,⁹ I take a genetic, more specifically a socio-genetic¹⁰ approach to this fascinating chapter, one of the most irritating and challenging of the whole novel. I examine the interdiscursive relation between Proust's emerging text and the political and ideological culture that informed it: the way in which the early drafts absorb but, crucially, also transform and reject social discourse, in this particular case, the political and ideological doxa of war-time France.¹¹

Without giving too much away in advance, one can state from the outset that the Proust of the preparatory manuscripts is far more politically conscious than he pretended in public. Like the correspondence of the war years, with which they share the similar status of private documents, his manuscript drafts in the period 1914-18 are surprisingly lucid and outspoken about the political and intellectual climate in France behind the front, in particular about growing signs of nationalism and chauvinism amongst civilians, politicians, and, above all, journalists. Proust was only too aware that in the current chauvinistic climate, too direct an expression of his opinions would expose him to severe criticism from his readers and critics. His critical, not to say irreverent depiction of war-time France would inevitably be weighed against ‘proper’ war literature, which had become a highly celebrated literary genre during and immediately after the war. He suffered such a comparison in 1919 when he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs ahead of Roland Dorgelès's far more popular war novel Les Croix de bois. In 1919, critics dismissed him as a pre-war writer, a ‘talent d'outre-tombe’, a man ‘peu en rapport avec les tendances de la génération nouvelle qui chante la beauté de la lutte’.¹² The reflections about the war contained in the preparatory drafts for ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’ were likely to gain him the reputation of an anti-patriot, or, worse, a traitor.

Proust, it can safely be claimed, sought to avoid confrontation with readers and the public as much as possible. Letters to his publishers in which he either warns them of the ‘indecent’ nature of parts of his book (most famously, passages on homosexuality in Sodome et Gomorrhe), or, on the contrary, reassures them about their ‘political correctness’, as it were (in an important letter to Gallimard, quoted below (p. 964), he maintains that the war episode ‘n'a rien d'anti-militariste’), amply illustrate his fear of causing public outrage.¹³ Proust, as all authors, if perhaps to a higher degree, wrote with an implied readership in mind. His concerns about the novel's reception had a direct formative influence on the genesis of A la recherche. The question, then, is to what extent Proust adjusted, shaped, and censored his writing in anticipation of its potential reception. With respect to the war chapter, which passages from the preparatory drafts did he include, and which were excluded? What kind of transformations were inflicted upon the first sketches in the course of the chapter's genesis? Part of my argument here will be that self-censorship need not necessarily entail radical and definitive cuts to what the author considers unpublishable parts of the text. Rather, self-censorship involves the invention of authorial strategies (narrative, rhetorical, and other) that come to bear on the transition from avant-texte to published text (and, thus from private to public document) and allow the author to elude the anticipated obstacle. In more practical terms, authors may still be able to make their point after a phase of initial self-censorship but they would make it in a more oblique way.

My investigation is based on manuscript drafts published by the new Pléiade Proust. As has been noted by various critics, the Pléiade does not present manuscript material in the order of its composition, and, thus would not be appropriate for a proper study of the episode's genesis (such a study remains to be done).¹⁴ The synchronic and thematic organization adopted by the Pléiade team is, however, perfectly suitable for the kind of socio-genetic investigation I undertake in this article. The corpus of manuscript drafts for the war chapter published by the Pléiade gives a clear idea of the various tensions and constraints that occurred during the chapter's genetic elaboration and of the solutions Proust eventually found. I begin with a short synopsis of the complex genesis and publication history of ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’ that provides the necessary background to my argument. I then examine passages which Proust excluded from his drafts and suggest reasons why he decided to do so. Finally, and most important, I discuss Proust's critique of ideologies in the preparatory drafts and identify a number of strategies he employed to distance himself from his critique.

‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’ was inserted into Le Temps retrouvé retrospectively. At the outbreak of the war, two chapters of the last volume existed in draft: sketches for ‘Le Bal de têtes’ were written as early as spring 1910; sketches for ‘L'Adoration perpétuelle’, which diegetically precedes ‘Le Bal de têtes’, were composed at a slightly later date, sometime during 1910 and 1911. In 1916, in a letter to his publisher Gallimard, Proust explains that he has added a piece of text on the war to his last volume. The reasons for this expansion, he says in the letter, were mainly structural: he wanted to link up passages on military strategy in earlier volumes that were completed before the war with the new end of the novel:

Mais depuis, les conversations stratégiques qui ont si je me rappelle bien paru dans l'extrait que j'ai donné dans la N.R.F. (je n'en suis pas sûr, en tout cas c'est entre Robert de Saint-Loup et ses amis officiers) (tout cela écrit bien entendu quand je ne me doutais pas qu'il y aurait la guerre, aussi bien que les conversations de Françoise sur la guerre dans le premier volume) m'ont amené à faire à la fin du livre un raccord, à introduire non pas la guerre même mais quelques-uns de ses épisodes, et M. de Charlus trouve d'ailleurs son compte dans ce Paris bigarré de militaires comme une ville de Carpaccio. Tout cela ai-je besoin de dire n'a rien d'antimilitariste, tout au contraire. Mais les journaux sont très bêtes (et fort mal traités dans mon livre).

(Corr., [Correspondance,] xv, 132)

Proust's own account of the war chapter's genesis has recently been challenged by Jean-Yves Tadié and Luc Fraisse. Both critics argue that the discussions about military strategy with Saint-Loup were not, as Proust claimed in the above letter, written before the war, but were composed during the war and inserted into the third volume retrospectively.¹⁵ Following on from Tadié and Fraisse, one would need to picture the genesis of ‘M. de Charlus’ in the reverse order: realizing the structural and thematic advantages an episode about the war would have for the novel as a whole, Proust retrospectively composed scenes on warfare for the earlier volumes, which, in turn, were to prepare and anticipate the war chapter. The genetic process thus was not progressive (the earlier volumes did not, as claims Proust, exert a genetic pressure on the last one), but retroactive (the war episode in the last volume necessitated links in the earlier volumes). The same inverted causality may be observed in the relation between the war chapter and the two other chapters of Le Temps retrouvé. Readers who are unfamiliar with details of the complicated genesis of the Recherche must assume that the Great War that provides the backdrop to ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’ is the historical cause for the cataclysmic social changes described in the famous last two chapters. In fact, however, as I have just said, ‘L'Adoration perpetuelle’ and ‘Le Bal de têtes’ were written before and independently of the war. The war chapter après coup, so to speak, motivated the grandiose social Götterdämmerung in Le Temps retrouvé. The invention of the war episode then was all the more fortunate because it gave the novel a new unity. Far from being a digression, as it is sometimes considered by critics (for instance, Bardèche, ii, 306), it is one of the ‘key stones’ that hold the novel together (to use a metaphor exploited by Proust himself in Le Temps retrouvé, iv, 610). Its structural function for the Recherche is comparable to the invention of recurrent characters in Balzac's Comédie humaine and the expansion of ‘Siegfried’ into Wagner's Tetralogy, both of which Proust admired for precisely their retrospective unity.¹⁶

Preparatory sketches and fragments for the war chapter are for the greatest part contained in two notebooks: cahiers 57 and 74.¹⁷Cahier 57 goes back to 1910, when Proust sketched a first version of ‘Le Bal de têtes’. During the war, he added substantially to his earlier drafts, but also composed new independent passages in the margins. Cahier 74, also known under the name ‘cahier Barbouche’, complements Cahier 57. Fragments in the two cahiers that relate specifically to the war chapter were, according to all evidence, written between 1916 and 1917.¹⁸Cahiers 57 and 74 contain no single coherent sketch for the war episode. Instead, there is a large number of fragments on different aspects of the war: descriptions of Parisian ‘war salons’, sketches on individual reactions to the war, a letter by Saint-Loup describing life at the front, notes on Charlus, and, not least, fragments on French chauvinism and nationalism. As later in the published text, scarcely any mention is made of military or political events.¹⁹ Proust concentrates almost exclusively on life behind the front.

As a rule, Proust recycled most of the material he gathered in his cahiers; only occasionally do we find fragments he discarded altogether. Among these self-censored items is a fragment from Cahier 74, which contains a rather outspoken (at least by Proust's standards) criticism of the absurdity of the French war effort and expenditure. He denounces the blatant discrepancy between the deceptively comfortable life soldiers lead in the trenches and the cruel destiny that awaits them on the battle-field:

Quand on pense qu'elle [la guerre] coûtait dix milliards par an pour une armée d'un million d'hommes, on peut dire que c'était comme si la France avait donné à ses enfants les plus malheureux cent mille francs de rente pendant quelques années. C'est en automobile ‹ que › les soldats étaient transportés dans leurs tranchées, celles-ci prestigieuses comme les cavernes d'Ali Baba, étaient éclairées à l'électricité, et dans cette espèce d'exposition d'Edison qu'était la guerre actuelle, les cantonnements avaient en plein champ ce qu'ont peu de châteaux princiers, le téléphone et des aéroplanes. Sans doute quand on voyait les troupes de choc amenées en automobile, nourries avec grand soin par la variété du menu, jouer au ballon, prendre des douches, il y avait un contraste cruel entre tous ces soins prodigués à des êtres qu'on allait envoyer à la mort possible.

(iv, 789-90)

Proust's glamorous view of life at the front in this sketch stands in stark contrast to the inhuman conditions described by other writers such as Henri Barbusse, who obtained the Prix Goncourt for his war novel Le Feu in 1916. Though exaggerated and naively embellished at times, the above quote none the less grasps the cruel perversion of modern war machinery, the systematic organization of death and destruction by the state. Proust may eventually have found his description of life in the trenches too poeticizing, or, given the general enthusiasm and support for the government in the first war years, may have considered his subversion of the sacred image of the ‘patrie’ (which, in his version, does not protect its children, but sends them to death) too risky. It would be highly speculative to establish his actual motivation for cutting this scene. What is certain is that he never used it. He also abandoned a thematically related fragment from the same cahier in which he celebrated the ‘terrifying beauty’ (‘la terrible beauté’) of the German occupation of the northern part of France (which he likens to the Hundred-Years' War), and blames the French for their aesthetic indifference to such a rare event (iv, 790). Such enthusiasm and literary sensibility in view of a truly critical military situation would clearly have outraged contemporary readers, even in retrospect. Proust dropped the fragment, but retained its central idea in the published text: the narrator, on his nocturnal walk across Paris, is suddenly struck by the city's sublime beauty, which at this moment of greatest threat is revealed to him in all its grandeur and fragility (iv, 380).

A short fragment of Cahier 60 addresses the taboo topic of French collaboration and war profiteering during the war:

Pendant la guerre, des Français partaient avec autant de précautions que pour les colonies vers les lignes allemandes, où ils faisaient du trafic avec les Boches prudemment, risquant la mort, caressant des rêves de fortune, comme des Européens qui partent faire avec des sauvages un commerce défendu.

(iv, 790-91)

Proust's comparison of trafficking at the front with the illicit commerce between Europeans and ‘savages’ ironically recycles and echoes the popular notion of the savage German (the ‘Boche-Barbare’), which was coined in reaction to the first war crimes committed by German troops on their way through Belgium.²⁰ Not even an allusion to secret French traffic with the Germans during the war remains in the published text.

It would be wrong to think that Proust discarded only sketches that were critical about France's role in the First World War. He also suppressed passages which, unlike the ones cited above, support the French side. Cahier 74, for instance, contains a curious variant of a well-known scene from ‘Combray’ that dramatizes the grandfather's latent anti-Semitism (i, 90-91). In contrast to the earlier version from ‘Combray’, the draft of Cahier 74 states that in addition to his hostility towards Jews, the grandfather was also suspicious about Germans domiciled in France. Crucially, the narrator confesses that under the present circumstances (that is, in the light of the war with Germany), he finds the grandfather's hostility, which he used to condemn in the past, prudent and, on the whole, more sympathetic (iv, 791). Cahier 74 contains another curiously pro-French sketch that begins with a criticism of the war press (Proust singles out the banalities and false optimism of war journalists) but ends on a clichéd patriotic note:

Mais plus que de relever quotidiennement l'inexactitude des raisonnements et la banalité des formules, c'était le ton allègre des journaux qui désolait. Il tenait à ce que ‘pessimisme’, qui est le nom des morales qui exigent beaucoup de l'homme, devenait au contraire significatif de lachêté. Mais comment, même s'agissant de l'Allemagne, en la voyant toujours invaincue, tenant toujours le même front, à Ostend, à Lamy, à Soissons, et sachant que, malgré cela, inévitablement, dans un temps déterminé, elle serait obligée de reculer sur le Rhin, puis d'accepter les pires conditions, comment un Français réfléchi voyant cela n'aurait il pas eu, à considérer son activité momentanée, sa vigueur inchangée en apparence, la forte impression, mêlée d'effroi et de respect, qu'on a à voir aller et venir, dîner en ville, voyager, une personne atteinte d'un cancer et dont on sait que malgré tout ces signes extérieurs qui ne signifient rien, dans deux ans plus tard elle sera morte?

(iv, 767)

In keeping with his initial criticism of the press, Proust highlights the discrepancy between the actual critical military situation and the optimistic reports in the French papers. Halfway through the paragraph (after ‘Soisson’), he does a volte-face and presages a German retreat and defeat. First presented as an unbending aggressor, Germany suddenly metamorphoses into a diseased nation that inspires pity and respect. In yet another volte-face in the next sentence (iv, 767), Proust conjures up the spectre of a reinvigorated Germany attacking France afresh twenty or thirty years after the end of the present war (a vision that proved sadly prophetic). It would seem that while he was drafting this passage, he suddenly reminded himself of its defeatist content. He did not even allow himself to finish his sentence in a way that would have been consistent with its beginning, but, instead, turned his initial vision of defeat into a vision of victory. The censor within the author seems to have been present at any moment as a regulating instance, even before ideas were allowed to be verbalized fully.

Proust never considered the First World War as a detached political event. From the earliest sketches on, he frequently compared it to other events that have shaped political and social life in France, especially the Dreyfus Affair.²¹ He was particularly interested in the various political and (more specifically) ideological discourses that circulate during periods of crisis. In Cahier 57, he engaged for the first time in a lengthy reflection on ideological manipulation and its consequences. I quote part of this very interesting seminal sketch:

Toutes les idées politiques, sociales, religieuses qui se succèdent dans la cervelle des idéologues […] mènent les nations, font les guerres (ou du moins la prolongation priamesque des guerres) la révolution (af. Dreyfus) écartent les juifs des emplois etc., tout cela se réduisant malgré l'ampleur que leur donne leur réfraction dans des masses à la courte vie de certaines idées dont la nouveauté séduit certains cerveaux peu exigeants en fait de preuves, comme leur vieillissement au bout de qq. ans les fatigue, si bien que tout le monde clame en chœur: la France aux Français, le Christianisme est contre nature. Pas de paix boiteuse, etc., nous n'avons pas voulu la guerre, maintenant il nous faut l'Alsace Lorraine etc. et nous faisant à peu de temps de distance estimer et mépriser François-Joseph auguste et méprisable, le roi de Serbie assassin puis vénérable, etc., et les Japonais monstres pour les Russes puis leurs alliés, les Anglais pour les Boers etc. Mais pour revenir à l'antiwagnérisme etc., comme toutes les idéologies changent mais se succèdent sans interruption, l'homme intelligent qui ne donne pas dans elles a en réalité un perpétuel rocher de Sisyphe à remonter. Il croit avoir fini de l'anticléricalisme, alors l'antisémitisme commence; il a fini de l'antisémitisme, c'est l'antigermanisme, à l'antiwagnerisme des gens qui disaient musique de l'avenir succèdent des gens qui disent musique du passé, musique germanique peut-être lier à cela brumes du Nord, Ibsen si guerre avec la Suède, Tolstoï et ballets russes si guerre avec la Russie, Kipling plus impérialiste que toute la littérature allemande (citer q.q. part Ruskin sur l'Angleterre Sésame et Bible) Annunzio etc. Si on faisait de tout cela en trop [un] beau morceau.

(Matinée, pp. 302-04)

Although confused and nebulous at times, as one may expect of a working manuscript, this sketch shows a Proust surprisingly lucid and outspoken about the dangerous power of ideologists. Ideologists, he says in the first part of the quotation, lead entire nations, they cause war and instigate racial hatred. The masses are easily prey to catching slogans such as the racist ‘La France aux Français’ or the revanchist ‘maintenant il nous faut l'Alsace-Lorraine’. However, at this stage, he was less interested in the rhetoric of ideological propagandists (which, I shall show, he satirized in later sketches), but, from a more global perspective, focused on the variety of ideological movements that swept over France in the fifty years or so before he wrote this sketch. Ideologies, he says, are almost by definition short-lived. They rapidly replace one another in history: anti-clericalism is followed by anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism by anti-Germanism, Wagnerism by anti-Wagnerism, and so forth. Proust sees ideological manipulation as an all-encompassing social phenomenon difficult to escape, even for enlightened minds. He argues that even the cultural life of a nation is ideologically determined: the current rejection of Wagner, for instance, is not aesthetic but, on the contrary, highly political.

The immediate context to Proust's criticism here, as may be known, was a sustained press campaign against Wagner, initially launched by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns in a series of articles in L'Echo de Paris between September and November 1914.²² Saint-Saëns, Frédéric Masson, and other nationalists stigmatized Wagner as the epitome of modern aggressive and militant Germany. They warned about the dangerous corrupting influence of Wagner on the French public. Saint-Saëns claimed amongst other things that ‘le wagnérisme, sous couleur d'art, fut une machine merveilleusement outillée pour ronger le patriotisme en France’ (Germanophilie, p. 23). Masson declared that ‘le wagnérisme étant l'expression complète de la culture allemande, les Français atteints de wagnérite se livrent volontairement à l'Allemagne’ (L'Echo de Paris, 12 October 1914). Finally, the chauvinist Joséphin Péladan requested ‘plus d'allemand sur les lèvres, sur la scène, plus de langue allemande en terre de France […] n'est-il pas démontré que nous ne pouvons parler avec eux que par le fer?’ (Le Figaro, 28 September 1914). Proust himself summarized the French war campaign against Wagner very well in another sketch of Cahier 57, where he says that ‘l'antigermanisme […] considérait Wagner comme une dangereuse pénétration de l'Allemagne, comme une invasion secrète d'avant-guerre’ (iv, 854).

Proust's correspondence during the war years shows that he was truly concerned about the growing chauvinism and Germanophobia exhibited in the French press.²³ In both his letters and his early drafts he was extremely lucid about the political motives behind the press crusade against Wagner. In the sketch from Cahier 57 cited above, he warns that Wagner is only a pawn in the current conflict. The same ideologists who at present bedevil him will target Ibsen in the case of a war with Sweden, Tolstoi and the Russian ballets in the case of a war with Russia, and so forth. Although he has not yet formulated his ideas in theoretical terms, he argues in short that chauvinism (and he takes cultural chauvinism as his prime example) is never concerned with contents or essences. German literature and music are demonized not because they are truly imperialistic in content (as ideologists want to make believe) but because Germany is imperialistic, and by extension everything that represents Germany metonymically is stigmatized as imperialistic as well.

Proust's criticism of ideologies was developed in two sketches, one in Cahier 74, and the second further down in Cahier 57. In the sketch of Cahier 74, he refined his earlier point about cultural chauvinism. He now argues that the hostilities against ‘foreign’ (especially German) art are part of a wider campaign against modern art (independent of whether it is national or foreign, by allies or by enemies) in general;²⁴ attacking German art becomes a welcome pretext for attacking all avant-garde art in the same breath:

Malheureusement ces spectacles contre lesquels fulminait le critique, c'était des spectacles russes *(ce pourrait être Legrandin en son temps, et recommence pendant la guerre, d'où ennuis dans le faubourg)*, des romans annunziesques, la sculpture de Rodin, les drames norvégiens, tous les Alliés. Il s'en tire en disant ‹ du mal › des chefs d'orchestre allemands, des opéras de Strauss, des décors munichois, des meubles tarabiscotés où on ne pouvait pas s'asseoir, pour attaquer nos cosmopolites et invertis berlinois.

(iv, 793)²⁵

On a sheet of paper in Cahier 57 glued onto the verso of folio 56 (a so-called ‘paperolle’) and also taking up the earlier sketch, Proust investigates the major political and historical events in France from the late nineteenth century to the Great War and the effect they had on society (iv, 763-64). He regards each new political event as a catalyst dividing society into a number of affinity groups. Before the Dreyfus Affair, he says, society was divided into conservatives and republicans. At the outbreak of the Affair, this division was abolished in favour of a new scission between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. Conservatives and republicans henceforth joined forces in either the pro-Dreyfus or the anti-Dreyfus camp. Finally, the Great War produced yet another social turnaround in uniting former Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards against the new enemy: Germany. It created a new social and ideological division between pacifists and militarists, if, as Proust says in another sketch, this last opposition did not collapse altogether under the pressure of the uniformly nationalistic press (p. 780). Here, Proust with much greater clarity, denounces the dangerous relativism of political positions, the sheer absence of any philosophical rationale or ideal behind a chosen political stance. The problem, he says in another sketch in Cahier 57, is that most people fail to question the philosophical investments they make in adopting one position rather than another, and therefore they are not even aware of blatant inconsistencies in their beliefs. The masses miss the fact that apparently different ideological positions are as a matter of fact only different facets of the same phenomenon:

Si on invoque aux yeux du dreyfusard son propre dreyfusisme pour qu'il ne soit pas Hte Cour, anticongréganiste, antigermanique il répondra[:] ‘l'enseignement congréganiste est contre nature, fait des monstres, l'affaire Dreyfus était entre Français, la race allemande veut l'anéantissement de la France de tt temps etc. Ce n'est pas la même chose.’ Car personne ne comprend que même quand c'est la même chose […] que la réalisation ne peut être la même.

(Matinée, p. 411)

In the published text of the war chapter, little of the theoretical reflections on the inconsistency of ideologies remains. Rather than engaging in a philosophical and social criticism, Proust preferred to show political and ideological inconsistencies through the example of his characters: Bontemps, a former Dreyfusard is shown to have turned Nationalist and xenophobe (iv, 305); similarly, the Verdurin salon, formerly a stronghold of revisionists, has become the meeting-place for the most violent Nationalists (pp. 307-08); finally, Brichot, a former militarist attacks the glorification of the army in Germany (p. 357; see also Sprinker, p. 161). The theoretical reflections from cahiers 57 and 74 were eventually embedded into the Matinée amidst a wider meditation on the primacy of spiritual over material reality. In the published version, the narrator confesses that if Charlus's Germanophilia did not cure him of his own Germanophobia, at least it made him aware of the phobia's biased nature. Germanophobia, like other feelings, he argues, is subjective. The problem is that people fail to understand that the qualities they project onto an object, which create feelings of love or hatred, are not in the object itself: they exist solely in the mind of the projector. The success of ideological propaganda lies precisely in this discrepancy between subjective perception and objective reality:

J'avais déjà vu dans mon pays des haines successives qui avaient fait apparaître, par exemple, comme des traîtres—mille fois pire que les Allemands auxquels ils livraient la France—des dreyfusards comme Reinach avec lequel collaboraient aujourd'hui les patriotes contre un pays dont chaque membre était forcément un menteur, une bête féroce, un imbécile, exception faite des Allemands qui avaient embrassé la cause française comme le roi de Roumanie, le roi des Belges ou l'impératrice de Russie. Il est vrai que les antidreyfusards m'eussent répondu: ‘Ce n'est pas la même chose’. Mais en effet ce n'est jamais la même chose, pas plus que ce n'est la même personne: sans cela, devant le même phénomène, celui qui en est la dupe ne pourrait accuser que son état subjectif et ne pourrait croire que les qualités ou les défauts sont dans l'objet. L'intelligence n'a point de peine alors à baser sur cette différence une théorie (enseignement contre nature des congréganistes selon les radicaux, impossibilité de la race juive à se nationaliser, haine perpétuelle de la race allemande contre la race latine, la race jaune étant momentanément réhabilitée). Ce côté subjectif se marquait d'ailleurs dans les conversations avec des neutres, où les germanophiles, par example, avaient la faculté de cesser un instant de comprendre et même d'écouter quand on leur parlait des atrocités allemandes en Belgique. (Et pourtant, elles étaient réelles: ce que je remarquais de subjectif dans la haine comme dans la vue elle-même n'empêchait pas que l'objet pût posséder des qualités ou des défauts réels et ne faisait nullement s'évanouir la réalité en un pur relativisme).

(iv, 491-92)

A comparison between the earlier sketches and the final version shows how Proust gradually depoliticized his criticism of ideologies. Whilst in the early drafts he attacked the dominant ideologies of his time (anti-Semitism, Germanophobia, anti-Wagnerism, and so on) directly, in the final version he subordinated his opinions to a wider philosophical reflection that is at the centre of the Matinée. At the same time, he attenuated and counterbalanced his criticism: the narrator first declares himself Germanophobic, in contrast to the Germanophilic Charlus; more important, he considerably twists his own theory. Although he first argued that Germanophobia during the war is a subjective feeling (and, thus, within his wider theory of subjective relativism has nothing to do with the qualities or flaws of Germany), he amends his statement in the parenthesis quoted above: in this particular case, the subjective perception coincides with the real situation: that Germans are as bad as the French think. Proust, thus, makes sure he positions his narrator on the correct patriotic, Germanophobic side. The narrator engages in a cunning game of closure and disclosure.

The abstract critique of ideologies in the first drafts eventually led Proust to a more concrete examination of forms of ideological propaganda, especially in the war press. We know from Proust's own correspondence that he carefully studied war-time newspapers (in a letter to Lucien Daudet he claims that he read seven papers simultaneously and, inevitably, got confused about the events). Whilst he found most articles stupid and banal, he enjoyed the military reports by Henri Bidou in the Journal des Débats and those by Colonel Feyer in the Journal de Genève.²⁶ Interestingly, he also subscribed to L'Action française, the newspaper published by the nationalistic and anti-Semitic group of the same name directed by Maurice Barrès.²⁷ Proust's daily press review gave him ample material and food for thought for his criticism of war journalism, which, as he himself pointed out in the letter to Gallimard, is central to the war chapter as a whole. Most of the passages relating to the French press are contained in Cahier 74. Some are embedded in longer fragments, others are relatively self-contained. In these sketches, he attacked and ridiculed all the various features of the press that had irritated him since the outbreak of the war: the false optimism of the military commentators and their failure to assess the situation realistically (iv, 767), their bias in favour of the French cause (p. 780), the uniformity of war propaganda on both the French and the German sides (p. 785), and, in particular, the inflated, trite, and ultimately nonsensical rhetoric of war journalists (pp. 783-84). His criticism either was couched in impersonal objective terms (see, for instance, p. 780) or, more often, was expressed by the narrator-hero. There were two problems with this initial form of presentation: first and foremost, given the quasi-autobiographical form of the Recherche, readers were likely to interpret all opinions expressed as Proust's own (which indeed, in this case, they were), and criticize the author for his unpatriotic attitude. Second, as is well known, he considered any form of political involvement by an author (and his criticism of ideological manipulation was also political in its own right) to be unbecoming in a literary text (in Cahier 57, he is even worried about seeming to ‘faire du Romain Rolland’, of appearing to write pacifist literature: see Matinée, p. 307). Too overt an expression of his opinions would have clashed with his literary ideal and his anti-intellectual, anti-dogmatic stance.²⁸ His task, then, was to decide in what way he could convey his criticism without being dogmatic and without revealing too much of his own world-view.

Proust's own notes de régie in his drafts show two major strategies he employed to ensure a sufficient distance between Marcel Proust the author and the point he was making in his text. First, instead of having the narrator denounce the banality of the war press, he decided to let stupidity speak for itself. Thus, on folio 65^v of Cahier 74, he resolved to have these commonplaces uttered by his characters, instead of quoting them from war journals:

Quand je cite les mots (le passage est écrit et peut-être plusieurs fois),‘chiffon de papier’, ‘Kultur’ etc., je ferais mieux au lieu des journaux de le faire dire par des gens, par example: ‘chiffon de papier’ avec émotion par Norpois, ‘Kultur’, trois minutes en retard par [illegible word], et M. de Cambremer dira: ‘Ah oui, la fameuse kultur qui fait fusiller les prêtres et les enfants. Dame, on est kolossal ou on ne l'est pas.’

(iv, 779)

This note de régie is symptomatic of a wider process in the manuscripts that in narratological terms can be described as a move from telling (presenting his ideas in a detached way through his narrator) to showing (ceding the floor to his characters), or, from diegesis to mimesis. Proust eventually preferred a mimetic representation of war journalism that held up a mirror to his contemporary readers to an objective criticism of ideological manipulation uttered by the narrator.

At first, Proust had in mind four characters to represent war journalism: first and foremost Brichot, Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne, and Norpois, the retired Ambassador, but also, to a lesser degree, Bergotte, the writer-turned-journalist, and Legrandin, who adopts journalism as a means to gain access to high society. The margins of Cahier 74 are littered with commonplace expressions and proverbs that Proust used mainly for short sketches on the trite war rhetoric of Norpois and Brichot. Though quoted and commented upon by the author-narrator, the expressions attributed to the characters verge on pastiche, which, as is well known, is used at various occasions in the Recherche. Each character has his own style, syntax, and set of expressions, and each, in turn, stands for a particular aspect of war propaganda: through Brichot, Proust ridicules the Germanophobia of French patriots, especially their bathetic rhetoric, reflected in sentences such as ‘Depuis Louvain, il n'y a pas un seul Allemand […] qui à la promenade puisse regarder en face la statue de Goethe’ (iv, 783). Norpois, by contrast, is made to epitomize the pompous empty discourse of diplomacy. His splendid rhetoric and apparent eloquence are unmasked as a set of clichéd metaphors and proverbs:

Ce n'est pas d'ailleurs que M. de Norpois fît de l'histoire un drame tout abstrait. Il avait une assez riche provision d'images, un magasin d'accessoires parmi lesquels servaient à diverses fins un ‘roue de la Fortune’, qui était toujours ‘prête à tourner’, des ‘dés’ qui allaient ‘être jetés’. On voyait briller fort longtemps d'avance ‘l'aube de la victoire’. Les peuples dont il racontait les guerres étaient souvent placés devant un ‘fleuve’, ce qui est considéré par les historiens militaires comme une bonne défense. Mais ce n'était pas dans un but stratégique, ni même par une précision géographique, qu'il en usait. Car ce fleuve, loin de s'abriter derrière lui, il fallait le ‘passer’, et quel que fût le pays où il coulait, il s'appelait ‘le Rubicon’. Enfin M. de Norpois ne craignait pas d'invoquer, non pas Dieu, mais les dieux, et quelquefois un seul en disant: ‘Mais où donc, par Jupiter!’, ou bien, ‘Mais où donc, justes dieux!’

(pp. 783-84)

Incidentally, the Brichot and Norpois sketches have a triple function in the novel. First, in ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’, as already indicated, they illustrate the commonplace rhetoric of the French war press. Second, throughout the Recherche, they represent a specific sociolect or ideolect: that of the Sorbonne professor and the diplomat.²⁹ Third, they link up passages from A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le Côté de Guermantes, where Norpois and Brichot have greatest prominence, with Le Temps retrouvé, and thus help to consolidate the complex structure of the novel.

However, it was not enough simply to let the characters speak for themselves. Some evaluating voice was needed to report on ideological propaganda and to criticize it. Proust's second and more important strategy was to transfer criticism initially made by the narrator to Charlus, who holds centre stage in the war chapter. On folio 102^r of Cahier 74, he decided:

Toutes les critiques de la presse pendant la guerre seront mises dans la bouche de M. de Charlus qui me dira à voix basse à la fois comme s'il n'osait pas employer tout haut une expression si vulgaire ou hasarder publiquement un si terrible pronostic: ‘C'est très heureux que nous n'ayons pas encore fait la paix, sans cela nous serions tous boches.’ Malgré cela il l'était lui-même un peu.

(iv, 1379)

Consequently, most fragments about the war press were focalized through Charlus: the passage about the manipulative power of the media, which was sketched for the first time in Cahier 57, the comment on the uniformity of war rhetoric in France and Germany from Cahier 74 (iv, 784), a sketch on the glorification of the present war in comparison with earlier conflicts (pp. 778-79), as well as a sustained condemnation of the triteness of war journalism, were all inserted into the long conversation between the narrator and Charlus on their nocturnal walk across Paris. Whilst in the early drafts, the critique of ideologies was mainly intradiegetic (the hero-narrator quotes and comments upon the rhetoric of, say, Brichot and Norpois), thanks to Proust's decision in Cahier 74, it became metadiegetic (the narrator directly or indirectly renders the thought of Charlus, who, in turn, quotes Norpois).³⁰ The narration to the second degree created a sufficient distance between the narrator (who was likely to be identified with the author) and the point of the narrative, Proust's poor opinion of the press.

The same retrospective attribution³¹ of utterances to Charlus was applied to passages with a pro-German content, which, in the context of the war, were far more of a problem than simple criticism of the French press: ‘Tous les arguments en faveur de l'Allemagne qu'il y a dans le chapitre de la guerre, au lieu d'être présentés objectivement, devront plutôt être présentés par M. de Charlus, type du “pessimiste” et en causant avec moi’ (p. 782).

The transfer of statements from the narrator to Charlus enabled Proust to convey his criticism in an oblique way. Charlus proved the ideal vehicle for opinions the author wanted to express, but for which he did not want to assume responsibility.³² The effect of the character focalization employed by Proust can in many ways be compared to that of style indirect libre, which is a more common and better-known device of authorial detachment. Both narrative devices assist in creating a distance between the author and the ‘message’ or point of the text, with the difference that with style indirect libre it is impossible for the reader to identify any stable narrative instance at all, whilst in the type of character-focalization used by Proust in the war chapter, the reader identifies the immediate source of the utterance: Charlus. Style indirect libre sabotages readers' attempts at identifying the source of a given utterance, which would help them evaluate its meaning. Character focalization, by contrast, leaves readers to evaluate the meaning of an utterance on the basis of what they know about its origin, about the character who pronounces it. It is of course entirely in the hands of the author, who directs the readerly evaluation, whether he or she presents the character-focalizer in a positive or negative light. The dialogue between Charlus and the narrator in ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’ is a very interesting case in point of what Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan calls the ‘ideological facet’ of focalization (in Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 81). In order to achieve optimal distance from the criticism he was making, Proust manipulated both discourse and story. In addition to establishing Charlus as a character-focalizer, and thus to creating distance, he presented Charlus as an unsympathetic defeatist and Germanophile in order to counterbalance the bite of his diatribe.

In the published text, it will be remembered, Charlus is both a victim of current ideologies during the war (most important, Germanophobia and homophobia) and one of the few remaining enlightened spirits who protest against ideological propaganda (or, at least, denounce its stupidity). Rumours of his sympathies for Germany and of his defeatism in the war chapter are first spread by the Verdurin circle. The viperous Mme Verdurin, vexed about Charlus's infidelity to her salon, insinuates that the Baron, whom she claims is of Prussian descent, is a German spy (iv, 345). Morel fuels the sleaze campaign against his former lover in a series of anonymous articles that publicize Charlus's anti-patriotism and his hitherto concealed homosexuality. Morel's libels bear such revealing titles as ‘Une Allemande’ or ‘Oncle d'Amérique et tante de Francfort’ and refer to Charlus as ‘Frau Bosch’ or ‘Frau van den Bosch’ (pp. 346-47). The narrator at first seems to deplore and condemn these defamatory attacks, but gradually corroborates the very accusations he initially denounced. At various occasions, we find him insisting on Charlus's Germanophilia (pp. 368, 381, 387), which he explains partly by the fact that Charlus is the son of a Bavarian duchess (p. 353), partly by his sexual preferences (pp. 354-56), and, above all, by his complete lack of patriotism (p. 353). Comparing Charlus's attitude during the war to that of his enemy Mme Verdurin, the narrator shows less sympathy for the former:

Quant à M. de Charlus, son cas était un peu différent, mais pire encore, car il allait plus loin que ne pas souhaiter passionément la victoire de la France, il souhaitait plutôt, sans se l'avouer, que l'Allemagne sinon triomphât, du moins ne fût pas écrasée comme tout le monde le souhaitait.

(p. 352)

Even physically, Charlus metamorphoses into a comic German stereotype in the course of his promenade across Paris with the narrator: ‘Un instant encore, il me serra la main à me la broyer, ce qui est une particularité allemande chez des gens qui sentent comme le baron’ (p. 388). In the final analysis, the narrator seems to obey two conflicting tendencies: he simultaneously denounces and reinforces the campaign against Charlus. He uses Charlus as a spokesperson, but at the same time undermines his criticism of war-time France.

Proust employed a similar strategy of conflicting (and, indeed, contradicting) discourses with regard to Saint-Loup, who, together with Charlus, inherited some of Proust's own opinions in the war chapter. Saint-Loup is the very opposite of Charlus, at least politically (they do, however, converge on one point: their homosexuality). He is carefully established as a true patriot (especially in contrast to the chauvinist Bloch) and war hero, and as such is allowed to make remarks that, again, would not have been acceptable in the mouth of the narrator.³³ Like his uncle Charlus, Saint-Loup criticizes French chauvinism during the war and, more important, is shown to remain unaffected by the growing hostility to German culture himself: he continues to quote Nietzsche in the trenches and preserves his admiration for Schumann and Wagner. As with Charlus, Proust both establishes and undermines the position of his hero, here by subtle allusions to Saint-Loup's homosexuality interspersed in avant-texte and text. In Cahier 74, Proust insinuates that Saint-Loup's heroism is motivated not least by his homosexual ideal of virility: ‘Mais tant de sources se confondent à l'héroïsme, que le vice nouveau qui s'était déclaré en lui, et aussi la médiocrité intellectuelle qu'il n'avait pu dépasser y avaient leur part aussi. En prenant les goûts de M. de Charlus, Robert s'était trouvé prendre aussi, sous une forme d'ailleurs fort différente, son idéal de virilité’ (iv, 770).³⁴ In the published text, these allusions remain, if in a slightly attenuated form (pp. 323, 368). We also learn en passant that Saint-Loup, though unjustly, was accused of being involved in a German espionage affair (p. 389). All these details help to tarnish Saint-Loup's reputation as a war hero.

To highlight this point again: Proust used Saint-Loup and Charlus as mouthpieces for arguments he felt should not be presented objectively by the narrator. Saint-Loup as a war hero was allowed to make certain observations about French chauvinism that would otherwise have been unacceptable. Charlus, the exact opposite, could voice his criticism in his capacity of a defeatist and Germanophilic. Proust achieved a second degree of detachment from the statements made by Saint-Loup and Charlus by undermining the heroic status of the former and by corroborating the anti-patriotic nature of the latter. The main text is interwoven with a subtle subtext that creates sufficient ambiguity and thus welcome distance.

My study of the manuscript drafts for the war-episode shows that Proust was far more involved in political questions than he wanted to allow his public to realize. The early uncensored manuscripts from the period 1916 to 1917 contain a biting criticism of French chauvinism and ideological manipulation during the First World War. Through a close examination of French social and political life from the Dreyfus Affair to the Great War, he demonstrates that the dominant ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (anti-Semitism, anti-Germanism, anti-Wagnerism), however different and inconsistent they may seem at first sight, are all facets of one ‘super’-ideology: nationalism. Nationalism is an all encompassing phenomenon that determines the social, political, and even cultural life of a nation. However, the masses are not aware of this universal ideological over-determination. They embrace each new ideology as if it were for a new cause, where in fact, it has only found a new target. Proust illustrates this discrepancy between objective reality and subjective perception, on which all ideological manipulation is based, with the example of Wagner, who became a main target of French nationalists during the war. Proust's sketches, in their attempt to formulate a theory behind ideological change, curiously anticipate the Marxist critique of ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s as it was formulated by Althusser in his seminal essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.³⁵ But Proust decided not to pursue these theoretical reflections. He was, after all, not an intellectual historian, nor did he have great sympathies for socialism or Marxism. Too theoretical a criticism of French chauvinism and ideological propaganda would have conflicted with his anti-intellectual, anti-dogmatic aesthetic stance and, perhaps more important, would have been unpublishable in the immediate post-war, as he knew all too well. As I have attempted to show, he was very conscious of the boundaries between private and public. As soon as his writing moved from the private to the public domain, when Le Temps retrouvé was approaching publication, he decided to temper his criticism by a number of narrative (or more precisely) discursive transformations. He gradually moved from telling to showing, from diegesis to mimesis, thus leaving the floor to his characters rather than having the narrator comment on problematic political positions. In the same vein, and much to the same purpose, he replaced intradiegetic by metadiegetic narration and focalized comments that would have been unacceptable in the mouth of the narrator-hero through elected mouthpieces such as Charlus and Saint-Loup. The detachment achieved by the introduction of a narrative meta-level and by character focalization was further enhanced by a cunning game of conflicting narratives through which the narrator both establishes and undermines his focal characters. Together with all these crucial transformations there was an important change of tone. Whilst in the early drafts, Proust presented his criticism with the seriousness and outrage it no doubt deserved, in the course of the chapter's genesis, he adopted a more ironic stance, making broader use of comic dialogue and pastiche. Irony had a further distancing and ultimately protecting effect for author and text. It made ‘M. de Charlus pendant la guerre’ more ambiguous, giving it the characteristic mixture of comic and tragic, which makes it truly Shakespearean in tone.³⁶ Proust's representation of the Great War in the drafts for Le Temps retrouvé moved from moral drama to chilling social comedy.

Notes

1. Most recently by Luc Fraisse, Proust au miroir de sa correspondance (Paris: SEDES, 1996), especially in the section ‘Proust totalement apolitique’ (pp. 315-17).

2. Proust signed petitions and collected signatures for the revision of the Dreyfus case in 1896 and 1897; in 1904, he wrote an article against the separation of Church and State for the Figaro.

3. See letter to Paul Souday, 27 September 1920, in Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. by Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970-93), xix, p. 485 (hereafter Corr.).

4. Corr., xx, 530. The article was to celebrate the publication of the fifth volume of Daudet's Souvenirs, Au Temps de Judas (1920). Proust's dilemma in writing this piece is that he did not want to comment on Daudet's political and polemical writings, but, given the notoriety of Daudet the polemicist, could not drop this aspect altogether. The result is an uncomfortable mixture of blind eulogy and attempts at attenuating Daudet's dangerous political activities (‘Un Esprit et un Génie innombrables: Léon Daudet’, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 601-04).

5. See Anne Henry, Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981), especially pp. 344-65.

6. All reference, unless otherwise stated, is to Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-89).

7. See, for instance, Hannah Arendt's classic study in The Origins of Totalitarianism, revised edn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), in particular Chapter 3, and, more recently, Albert Sonnenfeld, ‘Marcel Proust Antisémite? i and ii’, French Review, 62 (1988), 25-40, 275-82, and Jeanne Bem, in Le Texte traversé (Paris: Champion, 1991), pp. 167-80.

8. Maurice Bardèche has given a superb reading in Marcel Proust romancier, 2 vols (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1971), ii, 292-306; J. Canavaggia has included a chapter on ‘1914’ in Proust et la politique (Paris: Nizet, 1986) but rarely gets beyond plot summaries and comments. The best reading to date comes from Michael Sprinker in his recent Marxist study History and Ideology in Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 160-68. Further studies that deserve to be mentioned are Maurice Rieuneau, Guerre et révolution dans le roman français de 1919 à 1939 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), Chapter 7, ‘La Guerre dans Le Temps retrouvé’, and Colin Nettelbeck, ‘History, Art and Madame Verdurin's Croissants: The War Episode in Le Temps retrouvé’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 19 (1982), 288-94.

9. Bardèche, who bases the rest of his study on Proust's preparatory manuscripts, makes little reference to them in his discussion of the war episode. More recently, Sprinker quotes from the manuscripts, but discusses them synchronically with the published text, rather than tracing a diachronic development from manuscripts to published text.

10. Almuth Grésillon perhaps best describes what is involved in a socio-genetic approach: ‘[L'approche sociogénétique] consiste à s'interroger sur le tissage intertextuel et discursif que l'avant-texte exhibe entre, d'une part, le texte d'auteur en train de se faire et, d'autre part, les choses lues, sues, vues et entendues d'une culture d'époque: doxa littéraire, savoirs engrangés, idées reçues, code de représentations, souvenirs, rencontres, impressions de lecture—bref l'air du temps’ (Eléments de critique génétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), p. 172).

11. I endorse an argument by Henri Mitterand, one of the most distinguished promoters of la socio-génétique in France, who maintains that ‘tout avant-texte condense, transforme, et accomode du discours social, dans des conditions telles qu'il est possible de reconstituer (hypothétiquement) les bases et le procès sociocritique du travail de préécriture’ (‘Programme et préconstruit génétiques: le dossier de L'Assommoir’, in Essais de critique génétique, ed. by Louis Hay (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), pp. 193-226 (p. 214)).

12. The quotations are taken from an article by Jean de Pierrefeu in Les Débats, quoted by Jean-Yves Tadié in Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 829.

13. In a famous letter to Alfred Vallette he writes: ‘Je termine un livre qui malgré son titre provisoire: Contre Sainte-Beuve, Souvenir d'une Matinée est un véritable roman et un roman extrêmement impudique en certaines parties. Un des principaux personnages est un homosexuel’ (Corr., ix, 155). In a letter to his brother, he worries that Sodome et Gomorrhe might be a hindrance to his nomination to the Légion d'honneur (NRF, 1 May 1970, pp. 748-50). After his nomination, in a letter to Paul Souday of 15 November 1920, he complains, still in the context of Sodome et Gomorrhe: ‘On ne m'a pas encore retiré ma croix de chevalier (mais cela viendra peut-être)’ (Corr., xix, 594); the letter to Gallimard mentioned above was written shortly before 30 May 1916 (Corr., xv, 131-32).

14. For an account of the Pléiade's treatment of manuscript material, see for instance Anne Herschberg-Pierrot, ‘Editer Proust’, Cahiers de textologie, 2, ‘Problèmes de l'édition critique’ (Paris: Minard, 1988), pp. 121-31, and my own ‘Teleology and Textual Misrepresentation: The New Pléiade Proust’, French Studies Bulletin, 56 (1995), 15-17.

15. See Tadié, Marcel Proust, p. 751, and Fraisse, p. 378.

16. On Proust's endorsement of the Wagnerian and Balzacian models, see Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust et le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 243.

17. Further brief sketches are contained in cahiers 55 and 60.

18. See Matinée chez la Princesse Guermantes, ed. by Henri Bonnet and Bernard Brun (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 274, hereafter Matinée.

19. In the published text the only events to appear, dispersed over the chapter, are the battle of Verdun, dramatized as the battle of Méséglise, described in a letter by Gilberte (iv, 335), the sinking of the Lusitania, about which Mme Verdurin reads in the papers while enjoying her war-time croissant (p. 352), the formation of a new government (p. 432), and, finally, a highly disturbing unfinished paragraph about the victims of the Russian Revolution, which brings the chapter to a close (p. 433).

20. Outrage against German barbarism reappears in the episode in Jupien's bordello, where one of the soldiers declares: ‘Et ce qu'ils ont fait à Louvain, et couper des poignets de petits enfants! Non, je ne sais pas moi, je ne suis pas meilleur qu'un autre, mais je me laisserais envoyer des pruneaux dans la gueule plutôt que d'obéir à des barbares comme ça; car c'est pas des hommes, c'est des vrais barbares, tu ne me diras pas le contraire’ (iv, 400).

21. For more detail on these comparisons in the published text, see Sprinker, p. 161. It is interesting to note in this context that in 1914, that is shortly before he drafted the war chapter, Proust reread the sixth volume of Joseph Reinach's Histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus entitled ‘La Révision’, together with Reinach's articles on the war published in the Figaro (Fraisse, pp. 372-73).

22. The articles were later regrouped in a pamphlet entitled Germanophilie (Paris: Dorbon-Aimé, 1916).

23. See in particular the following letters: to Lucien Daudet and to Joseph Reinach, November 1914, Corr., xiii, 333-37, 350-51; to Paul Souday, April 1915, and to Robert de Montesquiou, July 1915, xiv, 99-100, 167; to Walter Berry, July 1917, xvi, 189, and to Madame Schiff, August 1919, xviii, 364.

24. Modern art historians have confirmed Proust's observation: see, for instance, Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World-War, 1914-25 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

25. See also a related sketch (iv, 785-86), which was later abandoned.

26. See letter to Mme Catusse, written shortly after 5 June 1915, Corr., xiv, 151. See also xv, 65.

27. Proust describes his reading of L'Action française, a paper so very opposed to his own beliefs, as a painful almost masochistic experience: ‘La pensée de ce qu'un homme pouvait souffrir m'ayant jadis rendu dreyfusard, on peut imaginer que la lecture d'une “feuille” infiniment plus cruelle que Le Figaro et les Débats, desquels je me contentais jadis, me donne souvent comme les premières atteintes d'une maladie de cœur’ (‘Un Esprit et un Génie innombrables’, p. 603).

28. See his famous ‘Une œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix’ (iv, 461).

29. See Gérard Genette, ‘Proust et le langage indirect’, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 223-94, and Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 201-02. See also Anne Henry, Proust Romancier: Le Tombeau égyptien (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), Chapter 1: ‘Comment fabriquer un ambassadeur?’

30. In Genette's terminology, an ‘intradiegetic’ narration is a narration to the first degree, whilst a ‘metadiegetic’ narration is to the second degree (Figures III, 238-39).

31. Michael Toolan defines the concept of attribution in narratology as ‘situating most appropriately the point of origin of the narrative vision presented’ (Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Application (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 75).

32. On this point I disagree with Genette, who claims that ‘Proust […] ne s'est donné, hors Marcel aucun “porte-parole”. Un Swann, un Saint-Loup, un Charlus, malgré toute leur intelligence, sont des objets d'observation, non des organes de vérité’ (Figures III, p. 264).

33. For narrative transfer involving Saint-Loup, see for instance an interesting passage in cahier 74, where Proust decides to transpose comments about war literature into a letter by Saint-Loup from the front (iv, 771-72, 1377).

34. See also the more implicit version in the published text, iv, 324-25.

35. In Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). See also Sprinker's Marxist reading of A la recherche, which makes frequent reference to Althusser.

36. It is interesting to note in this context that Proust described the war in letters to his friends in the period 1916 to 1918 as a Shakespearean drama (Corr., xv, 185, and xvii, 453, and Fraisse, p. 375).