Proust du côté juif par Antoine Compagnon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Proust du côté juif par Antoine Compagnon James P. Gilroy Compagnon, Antoine. Proust du côté juif. Gallimard, 2022. ISBN 978-2-07-295907-3. Pp. 424. Compagnon studies the analyses of Jewish themes in Proust's novels made in the 1920s and 30s by mostly Jewish literary critics. Compagnon also provides a large amount of documentary information about the lives and careers of these critics, as well as of Proust's Jewish classmates, friends, and correspondents. He also provides facts and dates about Proust's Jewish forebears and relatives, including his great uncle Godchaux Weil, who was a prominent author in the nineteenth century. The reader also learns much about Jewish journalistic publications in France between the two World Wars. In his explorations of the articles and books written about Proust in the period following the publication of his novel, Compagnon shows how opinions as to the influence of the novelist's maternal Judaic background fell into two groups. Some critics found in Proust's work a glorification of his Jewish heritage, especially in his characterization of Swann. They pointed out the latter's courage and perseverance during the Dreyfus Affair and his final illness as outstandingly Jewish traits lauded by his creator. Several critics discerned a parallel in the thought and writing styles of Proust and Montaigne, both of whom had Jewish mothers. The run-on prose of both, with their long, complex sentence structures, parentheses, digressions, and qualifications were thought to reveal the influence of the Talmudic commentaries on Scripture. Some critics likened Proust and Montaigne to Bergson for their mobility of spirit. Yet others thought that the Kabbalistic tradition recorded in the Book of Zohar, with its doctrine of the transmigration of souls from male to female bodies and back, influenced Proust's concept of homosexuality. Such interpretations were found in journals that were organs of the Zionist movement. The more official publications of the French Jewish Consistory played down the Jewish influence on Proust and tended to dismiss him as an example of the assimilated Jews in France who had forgotten their ancestral heritage. Although Compagnon does not include more recent studies of Jewish themes in Proust within the purview of his book, he refers intermittently to Proustian scholars who consider his work anti-Semitic. These critics find Proust's portrayal of Bloch, Rachel, and Gilberte Swann to be critical and condemnatory. They are also offended by Proust's comparison of Jews and homosexuals as outcasts who are forced by society to disguise their true selves. Much discussion is devoted by Compagnon to a statement made by Proust in a letter of condolence to a Jewish friend. In it, Proust reminisces about accompanying his maternal grandfather to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise where the family tomb of the Weil's was located. The grandfather would make an annual pilgrimage to place a stone on the monument to his ancestors, but Proust suggests that his grandfather had long since forgotten the significance of this gesture. Compagnon did extensive literary detective work to trace the actual source of this much quoted passage, and he analyzes all the possible pro- or anti-Jewish implications of Proust's remark. [End Page 271] James P. Gilroy University of Denver (CO) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French