Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (66 page)

Indeed, a few decades later those two seeming antitheses—German and Jew—come to be thoroughly, if ironically melded with each other. Bloch’s daughter, when asked if she were indeed the offspring of a man so named, said that she was “with a German pronunciation, as the Duc de Guermantes would have done, that is to say, she pronounced ch, not like ck, but like the German guttural ch” (II:960).
25
With this simple speech act she seeks to pass in antisemitic culture (she has married a Catholic) by using her family’s for- eignness as a sign of Teutonic distinction, not one of Ashkenazic debase- ment. But, at the very same time, the Duc de Guermantes is passed over for the presidency of the Jockey Club not only because of his wife’s Dreyfusard sentiments but also by the very facts that Bloch seeks to use to trope her Jew- ishness—by his German birth. Indeed, Jewishness is directly conflated with Guermantes’s German birth when we learn that Guermantes was defeated by the widely held view that “too much consideration had been shown of late to certain great international potentates like the Duc of Guermantes, who was half-German” (III:32): the charge of internationalism, of membership in a people that stands outside of the nation, renders Guermantes, surely the least Jewish character in the book, into a parodic version of a Jew. (He re- sponds, to continue the comic cascade of confusion, by violently turning against Dreyfus for the slight that he has suffered.) Similarly, if more ex- tremely, Charlus takes a pro-German line during World War I in no small measure because “his mother had been a Duchess of Bavaria . . . he belonged in consequence, no more to the body France than to the body Germany” (III:798). At precisely the moment when Jews were enthusiastically march- ing off to the trenches, Charlus the arch-antisemite proclaims himself the member of a clan that transcends national boundary and ideology—the very embodiment of the treacherous, internationalist Jew of anti-Dreyfusard polemic.

The presence of Jews in the aristocratic salons and cenacles of the Faubourg Saint Germain, then, has the property of undoing both stable con- structions of Jewish identity and that of an aristocracy bearing the burden of Francité—and not because the presence of those Jews signifies the undoing of a stable order of nobility in the Belle Epoque (although it does) but be- cause their internally rifted heterogeneity, their property of being different from themselves both as Jews and as would-be assimilated gentiles, undoes the stable presuppositions of heredity and race that underwrote reactionary constructions of national identity. While Jews are remade as aristocrats, aris- tocrats are revealed to be members of a hybridized race that owes its alle- giance to no nation because its own identity predates the very existence of the modern nation-state—in other words, as Jews. The result is to call into

question the ideological ligature between birth and patriotism, “blood” and nation, with destabilizing results for all concerned.

Daniel Itzkovitz has defined an analogous property of Jewish assimilation in 1920s America by referring to its effects under the rubric of “Jewish per- formativity.”
26
In Proust’s hands, too, the notion of performativity (rendered in its Sedgwickian embodiment with partial reference to Proust) takes on even more appositeness to the construction of Jewishness because Jewishess achieves not only by the performatives embedded within a text but by the cre- ation of a text that performs (and hence challenges) the arbitrariness of iden- tity itself. In this sense the Jewish performativity one associates with Proust has both ontological aspirations and a tactical sneakiness. It calls into ques- tions stable orders of identity—of what it means to be a being with an iden- tity attached to it, whether “Jew” or “pervert” or “Frenchman”; meanwhile, by that very gesture, it allows people excluded from given social sets or circum- stances to enter the most exalted circles through this act of reconstruction. Considered merely as a piece of literary sociology, the
Recherche
’s invocation of Jewish performativity is one of the means through which Proust broke down the social barriers to people like himself in the circles that he wished to enter. If the great lesson of its final volumes is that the aristocracy no longer exists, it has also to be admitted that one of the means through which its de- mise was accomplished is perceptions very much like those the book records and enhances not only of its obsolescence but also its ontological unviability. It would be possible here to suggest that the theory of performativity it- self as it has entered into literary and theoretical discourse in recent years has served precisely this Proustian function: it is indeed remarkable how many of the most profound revisionary thinkers of the performative—Derrida, Fel- man, Sedgwick, Cavell, Butler—are themselves Jewish-born scholars who have made glittering careers in canonical fields (philosophy, literary criticism, “theory”) by carving out a space for alternative predications of identity, whether philosophical or sexual. And it would seem to have interesting im- plications for the rise of queer theory among many queer Jewish scholars who, until recently (and the current volume is a sign of the shift), have been un- willing or unable to interrogate their own Jewishness with as much conviction as their queerness. But rather than stress this aspect of the drama, I’d like to conclude by pointing to the other side of Proust’s dialectical play with identi- ties via the queer/Jew conjunction, his resistance to the tendency exemplified by contemporary theory toward a certain willful ahistoricism in the name of

a powerful critique of the consequences of that history at its most malign.

For despite the uses to which both Proust and his critics may have put the tactics of Jewish performativity, the invocation of the performative with re-

spect to Proust’s Jews also has the function of reminding us of the opposite of the lesson that invocations of performativity generally enforce, namely, the possibility that we are not free to affirm our identifications as we desire to be. I seem to have been suggesting, and indeed I have been, that Proust’s revela- tion of a destabilized Jewishness at the center of eddying constructions of race, sexuality, and national identity is yet one more instance (as if we needed more) of the general tendency of identity in Proust to melt away in the whirligig of time. Such, as I have been arguing, is the use to which Proust’s play with the Jew/Sodomite conjunction is put by those critics who address this theme: they use it not only to suggest that Proust is himself interested in dissolving firm constructions of identity arranged by sex, gender, religion, or nature, but that it is in the nature of identity itself to be so undone—and that it is in the nature of Jewishness itself to resist that ramifying set of possibili- ties. To a degree, of course, I am guilty of the same sin; not to be tedious about it, but I am in danger of reifying in the very act of suggesting its lack of definitional clarity, its productive and indeed determinitive undecidability. But, as I have been suggesting, within the
Recherche
the inscriptions of Jew- ishness bear another spin that I need to emphasize in conclusion, one signif- icantly different from that given the Sodomite or, for that matter, that of any other form of identity. Jewishness may not be a viable category, but it is an es- sential one—or perhaps it would be better to say it is, in the historical mo- ment of the
Recherche
, an existential one. For all the novels’ Jews—and indeed for the novels’ author—even in the midst of undecidabilities, decisions have to be made. Bloch (like Proust) masters the literary establishment by choos- ing not to be Jewish and so seizes upon the very tactics of performativity to remake himself as a gentile. Swann, who can pass as a gentile, gratuitously chooses to affirm his Jewishness at the moment of his final illness and so sees his own body recast for him as he is triumphantly, or tragically, or both, made into the very figure he had previously disavowed. Similar decisions had to be made extratextually even by the half-closeted figure of Proust himself, who had to calibrate exactly what degree of sympathy he could feel or express with respect to the cause of Dreyfus as a youth and had to feel that his own visage and carefully cultivated neuroticism (Woody Allen
avant la lettre
) construct- ed him as a Jew whether he liked it or not. And, perhaps most powerfully of all, decisions had to be made by those countless Jews facing the efforts of those who, not twenty years after the death of Proust, were to define Jews in an image all their own in the attempt to wipe them off the face of the earth. Proust’s play with his own Jewishness—and the career of Jews in the “West” it so spectacularly embodies not despite but because of his profound ambivalence—has thus this dual salience: it can remind us both of the reasons

we seek to deny the firm bounds of identity our cultures construct for us (as, variously, Kristeva, Sedgwick, and Marks all urge us to do) and why we should be wary about the claims of our abilities to escape those bonds altogether. It suggests that we cannot reimagine ourselves—as we know we can and must do—without reckoning with the ways we have been imagined. It means, to put it simply, that we cannot do without history. And history, as Fredric Jame- son once reminded us, is what hurts.

Notes

1. A terminological note: since the subject of sexual otherness was anatomized in pre- cisely Proust’s period, and since it has remained a terminological quagmire ever since, I have tried to adopt a few different terms to suggest different inflections of the same phe- nomenon.
   Queer
   , or
   queerness
   , I use in the sense that Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant give the word, that is with a form of sexual dissidence that contests the terms in which identities are constructed in a culture that takes heterosexuality as the norm.
   Sexually trans- gressive
   I use when dealing with people looking at the same phenomenon from the point of view of social normativity (a stance, at least, that Proust’s narrator disingenuously adopts). And when dealing with Arendt or Kristeva’s sense of the same phenomenon I try to adopt their term
   pervert,
   although always with quotation marks that distance them from that construction.
   

2. See Zundi Al-Fatih,
   The Jews
   (n.p., 1972), p. 36.
   

3. For the specifics of this doleful history, see in particular Richard Plant,
   The Pink Tri- angle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
   (New York: Holt, 1986).
   

4. See Hannah Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Hannah Arendt,
   The Origins of Totalitari- anism
   (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), pp. 117–192.
   

5. Julia Kristeva,
   Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature
   . Trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 141–163.
   

6. Elaine Marks,
   Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
   

7. I quote from the Kilmartin revision of the Moncrieff translation, Marcel Proust,
   Re- membrance of Things Past
   (New York: Random House, 1981), in three volumes, giving vol- ume number in Roman numerals and page number in Arabic numerals.
   

8. Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities (or perhaps villages) on a Palestinian plain tra- versed by Abraham and family, with roughly the same relation to these wandering Jews as, say, Edom. But not only the Hebrew Bible but also the traditions of Talmudic commen- tary that supplemented it make a point of dividing the proto-Hebrews from the laws, cul- ture, and practices of the Sodomites and Gomorrahites. In the Hebrew Bible the problem there seemed to have to do as much with violations of codes of hospitality as much as (or in tandem with) sexuality; Lot offers his daughters to the Sodomites in order to keep them from harming (probably sexually) his guests, who are, unbeknownst to him, emissaries from God. But, as many commentaries suggest, this action seems to taint Lot with much of the same malevolence as that attaching to the Sodomites from whom he is spared. And Lot never becomes a member of the Hebrew people, a fact of which much is made in the Talmudic tradition.
   

   For the most complete reading of this moment, see Robert Alter, “Sodom as Nexus: The Web of Design in Biblical Narrative,” in
   The Book and the Text
   , Regina Schwartz, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 145–160; repr.
   Reclaiming Sodom
   , Jonathan Goldberg, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 28–42. Throughout Goldberg’s volume a connection between Jews and the Sodomites under the sign of transgressive sexuality is suggested, de- spite the clear disinclination to do so among more theologically inclined Jews. “Let Sodom be the symbol of what heterosexism and homophobia do to us,” writes Rocky O’Dono- van, “like [
   sic
   ] the holocaust has become for the Jewish people. It’s an interesting coinci- dence that ‘Sodom’ and ‘holocaust’ are literally synonyms—they both mean ‘burnt’ in He- brew and Greek, respectively.” Goldberg,
   Reclaiming Sodom
   , p. 248.
   

9. For medieval warrants for this belief, see especially Stanley Trachtenberg,
   The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism
   (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), pp. 148, 228; and, most recently, Sander Gilman,
   The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle
   (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), esp. pp. 97–98. Trachtenberg gives a theological warrant for this widespread folk belief, that it was ironic punishment for the cry of the Jews before Pi- late: “His blood be on us and our children” (228). Gilman suggests a fascinating medical etiology: “The irony is that the image of male menstruation among the Jews probably has a pathological origin.” In tropical climates, “for reasons not completely understood, a par- asite,
   Schistosoma haematobium
   , which lives in the veins surrounding the bladder, becomes active during the early teenage years. . . . One can imagine that Jews, infected with schis- tosomiasis, giving the appearance of menstruation, would have reified the sense of differ- ence that northern Europeans, not prone to this snail-borne parasite, would have felt” (256). But it is still a long (and culturally facilitated) step from observing bloody urine to hypothesizing male menses.
   

10. For these arguments, see Gilman,
    The Case of Sigmund Freud
    ; for Charcot, see Jan Goldstein, “The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de- Siècle France,”
    Journal of Contemporary History
    20 (October 1985): 521–52; and Pierre Birnbaum,
    Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France
    , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), pp. 106–109. As Birnbaum ob- serves, Charcot’s conclusion that “neurosis is the malady of a primitive Semitic race” was rapidly adopted by Drumont to buttress his antisemitic rantings.
    

11. Gilles Deleuze,
    Proust and Signs
    , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), p. 76.
    

12. Proust’s biographer, Jean-Yves Tadié, suggests both of the standard positions: that an advocacy of Dreyfus by the “son of Jeanne Weil” has little to do with his own recogni- tion of his “Jewish roots” (Tadié invokes no less authoritative a figure that Léon Blum to oppose this “facile and wooly explanation” of Proust’s Dreyfusism) for “it was in spite of his background that a Jewish intellectual took the side of Dreyfus” and hence Proust’s Dreyfusard tendencies demonstrate conclusively that he did not think of himself as a Jew. On the other, he shows that Proust “became a Dreyfusard unhesitatingly, as soon as he learned about the case, emotionally and rationally, but also out of an awakening sense of solidarity with a community brought together by what amounted to mental persecution at the very least.” Jean-Yves Tadié,
    Marcel Proust: A Life
    , trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 300–2.
    

    Tadié’s syntax, no less torturous in the French than the English, suggests his lack of comfort with the entire matter of Proust’s relation to his Jewishness, one that mimics, I
    

    think, that of his subject with unerring accuracy. But it is still a far step from this to the blanket claim of Edmund White that “Tadié rejects the vulgar notion that Proust defend- ed Dreyfus because he was half-Jewish himself and argues that Proust did not think of him- self as a Jew”: obviously, both of these claims are partially what Tadié (and Proust) would assert, but only partially. Edmund White, “The Past Recaptured,”
    Los Angeles Times Book Review
    , August 6, 2000, p. 1.
    

13. All of these quotations are taken from Jean Recanati,
    Profils Juifs de Marcel Proust
    

    (Paris: Buchet/Chaste, 1979), p. 68.
    

14. For a history of the “Jewish” nose (a.k.a., with different associations, the Levantine, or Roman, nose), see Sander Gilman,
    The Jew’s Body
    (New York: Routledge, 1991). The “Jewish” nose in Proust’s text (which emerges, as we shall see, most explicitly in the context of Swann’s cancer-ravaged face, about which more below; but throughout the
    Recherche
    it serves as a signifier of corruption, one that often metonymically Jewifies people for whom his feelings are less than positive. When he is suspicious of Albertine, for example, he no- tices “a certain aspect of her face (so sweet and so beautiful from in front) which I could not endure, hook-nosed as in one of Leonardo’s caricatures, seeming to betray the malice, the greed for gain, the deceitfulness of a spy whose presence in my house would have filled me with horror and whom that profile seemed to unmask” (III:74): it’s unnecessary to dwell on the collection of antisemitic commonplaces present in this sentence, but, given Proust’s re- sponse to the Dreyfus affair, the recycling of the discourse of a subversive spy worming her way into hearth and home seems particularly overdetermined. The narrator’s antisemitic snobbery, in other words, seems to be linked to his psychosexual possessiveness—a particu- larly fraught conjunction, given his sexual experiences with “Rachel-when-from-the-Lord.” Jewishness, sexual desire, mastery, and the failure of women to fit into the narrator’s sexual desire path (what he is jealous of, of course, is Albertine’s desire for women), all get con- flated with Jewishness, especially the Jew’s putative ability to transcend cultural and sexual categories.
    

15. To be accurate about my argument: these new ideologies of race often took the form of a pre-Enlightenment language of “blood.” According to Foucault, the transition from the one to the other was made at precisely this period, and in the very discourse sys- tems that constructed the image of the homosexual—the discourses of criminal anthro- pology and psychoanalysis in particular. These, according to Foucault, were the prime vec- tor by which the middle-classes replaced traditional aristocratic forms of social power with their own, relying on a racialized language of “sexuality,” and hence (ultimately) popula- tion control, eugenics, and (implicitly) genocide. Proust’s text occupies the liminal zone between these two dispensations; the language of “blood” characteristic of the aristocratic dispensation is used throughout the
    Recherche
    to gloss, and critique, the discourse on race. Indeed, we might say that Proust’s play with the language of race and that of sexuality in the conjunctions I am writing about here has not only the function of undoing the hege- mony of aristocratic ideologies but also of critiquing the emergent new discursive regime.
    

16. Since I discuss it in the text, here is the original French: “Je n’ai pas repondu hier à ce que vous m’avez demandé des Juifs. C’est pour cette raison trés simple: ci je suis catholique comme mon père et mon frère, par contre, ma mère est juive. Vous comprenez que c’est une raison absolutement forte pour que je m’abstiennne de ce genre de discus- sions. J’ai pensé qu’il était plus respectueux de vous l’ecrire que de vous rèpondre de vive voix devant un second interlocuteur. Mais je suis bien heureux de cette occasion qui me permet de vous dire ceci que je n’aurais peut-être jamais songé à vous dire. Car si nos idées
    

    diffèrent, ou plutôt si je n’ai pas indépendance pour avoir là-dessus celles que j’aurais peut- être, vous auriez pu me blesser involuntairement dans une discussion. Je ne parle pas bien entendu pour celles qui pourraient avoir lieu entre nous deux et où je serai toujours si in- tèressé par vos idées de politique sociale, si vous me les exposez, même si une raison de suprème convenance m’empêche d’y adherer.” The letter was written in May 1896. The translation is by Ralph Mannheim, from Philip Kolb, ed.,
    Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, 1880–1903
    (London: Collins, 1983), p. 121.
    

17. Mac Pigman has suggested to me that the passage works carefully to distinguish be- tween religious and racial vectors of identity: I am a Catholic, Proust seems to be saying, because I was raised a Catholic, attend Mass, subscribe to Catholic beliefs, and so on, and this is a valid way of classifying me despite the Jewish birth of my mother, her continuing subscription to Jewish religious practices, and the visual evidence of my own face. The util- ity of this definition in a racializing climate such as that of late nineenth- /early twentieth- century France goes without saying. What might be added to it is the ways that it can only work in writing—the fact that Proust’s own Jewish appearance implicated him in a conti- nuity with his mother’s Jewishness as a matter of race or heredity, in either the older lan- guage of “blood” or the newer one of genes then beginning to emerge.
    

18. Tellingly, when Proust used the same tactic in conversation, his effort was a dismal failure. According to George Painter, at a dinner party “Proust took the opportunity to clear himself with his anti-Dreyfusard friend Maurice Barrès with regard to an anti-Semitic article in
    La Libre Parole,
    in which his name was maliciously included in ‘a list of young Jews who abominate Barrès.’ ‘As I couldn’t contradict it publicly without saying I wasn’t a Jew, which although true would have upset my mother, I thought it useless to say any- thing,’ he explained; but it was clear from the expression on Barrès’s face that he felt it would have been far from useless.” George Painter,
    Proust: The Later Years
    (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), p. 21.
    

19. Eugen Weber,
    France: Fin de Siècle
    (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 36–40.
    

20. For the context of European antisemitism at large, see George Mosse,
    Nationalisms and Sexualities: Respectability and Abnormal Sexualities in Modern Europe
    (New York: Fer- tig, 1985); for French antisemitism, see Pierre Birnbaum,
    Anti-Semitism in France: A Po- litical History from Léon Blum to the Present
    (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and
    Jewish Destinies
    . Birnbaum’s emphasis on the relation between antisemitism and the state has influenced the account I give here.
    

21. My account here is drawn from a number of sources. Most helpful have been the two volumes by Birnbaum,
    Anti-Semitism in France
    and
    Jewish Destinies
    ; Eugen Weber,
    The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914
    (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); and Theodore Zeldin,
    France, 1848–1945
    (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). For a fascinating account of an analogous phenomenon—Durkheim’s reformula- tion of sociological thought under the pressure of new forms of nationalism shaped by an insurgent antisemitism—see Ivan Strenski,
    Durkheim and the Jews of France
    (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1997).