The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

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As for the disconcerting mention, on the last page of the “seventy-five folios,” of the Christ in St. Mark’s, Venice, looking “effeminate, Oriental, and bizarre, his gesture transformed into the pretention of some fat, suspect Syriot,” “almost like a foolish Oriental pasha,”256 and the surprising hierarchy of the arts that follows this, in which the narrator shows a preference for “aesthetically certain” signs produced by “those of our blood,” it is best not to jump to the conclusion that Proust was making a concession to the xenophobia of the times and to a sort of misplaced artistic nationalism. True, the narrator of Search will admit a predilection for French Gothic, the opus francigenum, where “what is fine in all equity of judgment, what is admirable to the mind and the heart, [is] first of all attractive to the eyes, pleasingly coloured, consummately chiselled, […] express[ing] as well in substance as in form an inner perfection.” But that doesn’t mean that one should condemn [people with] “oddity or eccentricity of appearance,” often those whose “hair was too long, their noses and eyes […] too big, their gestures abrupt and theatrical”: it would be “puerile to judge them by this.”257 In the “seventy-five folios,” as in this passage from The Guermantes Way, Proust invites us to learn to read signs in a deeper way, to see beyond the first impression, to suspend judgment, particularly when confronted with the appearance often presented, according to the narrator, by “Jews”: “we have first to overcome what repels us and what makes us smile.”258 Unprepossessing appearances do not prevent the presence of invisible virtues, including here “distinction, kindness, courage, simplicity, delicacy, tact, nobility.”259 If it were not a portrait of Christ, it would be tempting to see in this “Oriental” (i.e., Semitic), “effeminate” “pasha” (i.e., one who engages in in the “Turkish vice”), the ironic, provocative, secretly apologetic self-portrait of a Jewish “invert,” Marcel Proust. That, after all, is a striking end.

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