Short-Form Proust

Abstract

Short-Form Proust Marta Figlerowicz IN AUGUST 1899, THE DREYFUS AFFAIR was at its height. France's Court of Cassation had overturned Alfred Dreyfus's original judgment as guilty, and the case had been referred to a military court in Rennes. The retrial began on August 7; on August 14, Dreyfus's defense lawyer, Fernand Labori, was shot en route to the courthouse. Proust, who was twenty-eight at the time, and a still-little-known writer, was not Labori's acquaintance. All the same, he was moved to send Dreyfus's lawyer a telegram. The telegram reached Labori on August 18, by which point Labori's condition was improving, and he was soon to resume his place on Dreyfus's defense. Preserved in Harvard's Houghton Library amid files related to the Dreyfus affair, it reads as follows (Figure 1): Hommage au beau géant invincible à qui cette consécration sanglante manquait seule pour que ce ne fut pas au figuré qu'on parlât pour lui de combat & de victoire & qui n'a même plus à envier à la gloire militaire le privilège magnifique des soldats donner son sang—Marcel Proust 9 Boulevard Malesherbes Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Marcel Proust, telegram to Fernand Labori. bMS Judaica 1.3 (140), Houghton Library, Harvard University. [End Page 25] Sending this telegram to Labori as someone unknown to him personally or by popular reputation, amid a presumed flurry of supportive gestures, Proust was performing, in some respects, merely another symbolic action. And indeed, this telegram may seem like a throwaway document that adds little to what we know about Proust. Among the few critics who mention it at all, Benjamin Taylor describes it, in passing, as "presumptuous."1 All the same, I would like to linger with this telegram as a suggestion of something more profound, a formal game with greater consequence for our understanding of Proust as a writer than may appear. Proust's message translates to "homage to the good, invincible giant who needed only this bloody consecration to be described, not merely figuratively, as engaged in combats and victories; and who now need not envy military glory, the soldiers' magnificent privilege of shedding their blood." This message is presumptuous, to be sure; it is also a florid, intentional attempt on Proust's part to play with the formal and generic limits of the telegram. Telegrams are proverbial for their brevity, a brevity predicated by their cost as well as by the speed at which the message is thus supposed to travel. "Nother [sic] dying come home father," reads the misspelled "blue French telegram, curiosity to show," about which Stephen Dedalus bitterly reminisces in Ulysses; it mirrors the analogous telegram Joyce himself had received about his mother, while studying in Paris, in April 1903.2 The Joyces were much worse off than the Prousts; but throughout In Search of Lost Time, amid the upper classes among whom Marcel circulates, telegrams also tend to be curt, to the point of being cryptic. When Marcel receives a telegram informing him of Albertine's death, for example, he cannot decipher its meaning because he misreads one of its crucial few words. One might think of Proust's telegram to Labori as a form of costly signaling, a conspicuous expense meant to signal the depth of his appreciation; but if that were his intention, flowers would have been much more conventional and showier, especially as sent to a (very busy) convalescent; from Proust's letters, we know that he liked to send flowers to his bedridden friends. Had he wanted to engage Labori in conversation, he could have sent him a letter, but he did not appear to have done or wanted that, either. Instead, this telegram is most striking because, while baroquely exceeding the conventions of its medium—not least with its overabundance of metaphors and adjectives—it also shows a winking awareness of the conventional form that a telegram ought to take. Grammatically speaking, though it goes on for many lines, beyond the borders of the standard blue sheet onto which these lines are pasted as well as beyond a telegram's standard word limit, the...