Undecided Proust
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            The first text, Friedländer argues, is so sympathetic to homosexuality that Proust must have known he was coming out by publishing it. (It is also so downbeat that André Gide accused Proust of dramatizing only the depressing aspects of inversion and none of its joys.) That’s why Proust must have been worried that Cities of the Plain would engender a backlash—especially after he won the Prix Goncourt for the second volume of his novel. (In Search of Lost Time was published over a span of years in seven volumes; the fourth was Cities of the Plain.) So Proust put in the description of Charlus’ fat ass to establish his own heterosexual bona fides for his new, larger, and presumably more heterosexual audience. How on earth, one may ask, can one prove something like that? But then that’s the fun of Proustian Uncertainties, a book that, while argued with forensic detail, is necessarily speculative.

     As for Proust’s Jewish identity, Friedländer focuses on three people: one real, two fictional. The real person is Proust’s mother, who came from a Jewish family of rich stockbrokers originally from Alsace. As an extremely literate Parisienne, she had little in common with the provincial in-laws she encountered when Proust’s father took his family every summer to the town in which he’d grown up (Illiers in real life, Combray in Proust’s book). In the novel, both the mother and grandmother come from Combray—which, Friedländer points out, produces contradictions that the novelist makes no attempt to justify, such as the mother’s ability to explain to the Narrator the difference between the German words Empfindung (sensibility) and Empfindelei (mawkish sentimentality), which only someone familiar with colloquial German would know. If this sounds like detective work, it is.

            Next there is Bloch, a character drawn with so heavy a hand that he may be the only one on which Proust loses the cool, detached tone that pervades the novel. Bloch is a clumsy, crude, social-climbing Jew with skin so thick that he doesn’t even register the contempt with which he’s been treated by the aristocrats in the salons. More importantly to Friedländer, he is described by the Narrator as bursting into the room “like a hyena”—a classic trope in anti-Semitic imagery—not once but twice.

            But then, to confuse things, there’s a character who’s the polar opposite of Bloch. Charles Swann was modeled on a real person, Charles Haas, a rich Jew so fashionable as to be a member of the impossibly exclusive Jockey Club. The fictional Swann has everything Bloch does not: sensitivity, manners, elegance, discretion, and taste. “It seems that the Narrator (and author) remained undecided to the end on how to relate to Jewishness,” Friedländer writes, “specifically that of Swann and Bloch.” But: “I would suggest … that the Narrator’s resentment against Jews was neither ideological nor political. It was social. The Narrator cannot bear seeing Jews from a lower social situation than his climbing furiously to the position that he thinks he has achieved.”

            Indeed, Bloch is such a boor that one suspects Proust was purging himself of some sort of self-loathing, because that’s what Proust was, in effect, when he went into the salons: a social-climbing Jew in a deeply anti-Semitic environment. When the Dreyfus Affair appeared, Proust mercilessly exposed the anti-Semitism of the denizens of the salons, and his sympathy clearly lay with the blackmailed Jewish Army captain. At the same time, by the end of the novel, one of the signs of the collapse of Old France (as represented by the aristocrats in the salons) was allowing people like Bloch into their midst.

      Of course one can argue with all of this. One could ask: isn’t it possible that Proust’s decision to make his Narrator heterosexual and gentile was simply a writer’s attempt to appeal to the widest possible readership? A straight gentile narrator could comment on the subjects of Jewishness and homosexuality (which Proust well knew was a loaded subject) from a neutral standpoint. A book by a homosexual or Jewish narrator would necessarily have been tendentious. Friedländer even quotes the critic Harold Bloom to support this idea: “Proust rightly judged that the Narrator would be most effective if he could assume a dispassionate stance. … The Narrator, as a gentile, is more persuasive.” One might add that fiction gave Proust the freedom to explore his own ambivalence—by creating both Bloch and Swann. But Friedländer is not convinced. The Narrator, he argues, “makes any number of contrary statements (intentional or not) that show his uncertainty and his obsession with the Jewish question in general and his own identity in particular.”

            In real life Proust’s mother was Jewish but her sons were raised Catholic, Proust explained to Robert de Montesquiou (the model for Charlus) in an oft-quoted letter he sent the day after he had to listen to one of Montesquiou’s anti-Semitic tirades. Proust was not able to divulge his true feelings about Jews because of his mother, he wrote to the Count. And yet, it seems he did eventually divulge his true feelings, in the way he split his Jewish identity into Bloch and Swann—something only fiction could do.

            Proust’s relationship with his mother was, Friedländer claims, his only experience of enduring love—although, in another curiosity, he points out that neither the Narrator’s mother nor his father is named, or even described physically. In fact, both are dropped about halfway through the book. And they never die, though surely it was the death of Madame Proust in real life that spurred her son to finally see his way to writing his novel.

     One reason that critics like Friedländer have been drawn in droves to In Search of Lost Time is that it seems so self-revealing that biographers from George Painter on have tried to find the origins in real life for everything it contains. However, it is not, as Proust himself insisted, an autobiography. Proust wrote to a friend that he was against the literature of “strict notation,” i.e., sticking to just facts. And Friedländer calls the Narrator “a staunch enemy of realism.” Proust scrambled the material he took from his life . But we can’t know why. It may have been wish fulfillment to make his Narrator gentile, heterosexual, and adored by the hostesses of salons, where in fact Proust suffered many humiliations (particularly from Elisabeth Greffuhle, one of the chief models for the Duchess of Guermantes, as we learn in Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess). Or it may have been the artistic choice that Bloom posits. As Friedländer himself puts it: “[Proust] may have surmised that an openly homosexual novel, without any disclaimer, would have repelled many readers.” It is to his credit that in the end Friedländer concludes: “I do not know.”

            In making his arguments, Friedländer employs not only his own reading but previous insights from critics who run the gamut from Walter Benjamin to Leo Bersani. There’s been so much written about Proust that his text at this point is a bit like the Talmud. This is a short but very intelligent book for people who cannot get enough of the endless points at which Proust’s novel and his life touched one another. In addition to the questions of Jewish and homosexual identity, there are chapters on how Proust thought about Time and Death and Memory; his use of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon and The One Thousand and One Nights as models for his book; whether or not involuntary memory was real or a literary device (the latter, Friedländer concludes); the fact that the entire novel is really just a series of conversations; the way Proust uses the Narrator as both an autobiographical voice and as a separate character; and, finally, the question that Friedländer asks in a sort of postscript: “Is In Search a modern novel?”

            At first Friedländer seems to say No, because: “There is no attempt … to experiment with new forms of narration or of style.” It also lacks two subjects that in Friedländer’s view are hallmarks of modernity: evil and ugliness (“except for snippets of ugliness as a foil for the vastly dominant beauty”). In Search of Lost Time, Friedländer concludes, really belongs to the classic French novel in which beauty of expression is paramount, and also to the German tradition of the bildungsroman, the novel of education, though nowhere in the book is there an account of Proust’s schooldays, his classmate crushes, the duel he fought with Jean Lorrain, or his mother’s death. (The latter is described via the character of the grandmother.) But then Friedländer reverses course arguing that the treatment of homosexuality, and the psychological analysis that led one critic to assume Proust had read Freud (when he had not), do make it “modern.”

            Of course, it is both. Proust wrote in the cultural equivalent of a strange no-man’s land in which one century was giving way to another, something that did not faze him at all. He seems to have enjoyed incorporating the automobile, the “aeroplane” (though that led so the death of Alfred Agostinelli in a crash off the coast of France), and the telephone, which he hated in real life. Consider other writers of the period. The last great novels of Henry James appeared from 1902 to 1904. A year after The Golden Bowl, Gertrude Stein published Three Lives (1905/6). Swann’s Way was published in 1913, James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, The Great Gatsby in 1925, the same year that The Fugitive was published. (Proust died in 1922 and lived long enough to correct only the first three volumes of his novel before publication.)

     These years from the 1900s to the 1920s seem to have been like that moment on a bicycle before the gear you’ve switched to catches. The break with the traditional novel did not occur on a single date. Friedländer is right to argue that In Search of Lost Time comes out of a long list of classic French novels—and that it also belongs to the venerable tradition of the bildungsroman. It is also the sort of book that the 19th century did so well but that no one in our time seems able to do: a portrait of an entire society. Yet it is indisputably modern. It remains, even for those making their way from the 20th to the 21st centuries, a lens through which to see the world, a guide for the perplexed.