Thibaudet, Bell, Proust -- Anti-Semitism

So: I’ve been working towards a paper on Clive Bell’s Proust book. Clive Bell, especially later in his life, was objectionable elitist. Proust has, especially at the beginning, a light tone of genteel anti-Semitism. Marcel Proust is, for instance, an “exquisitely civilized Jew,” no doubt praise, but still we wince to read it today. These qualities, and the likelihood that Bell read Thibaudet, make the two treatments of Proust interesting to compare.

I’ve been reading the Nouvelle Revue Française memorial issue on Proust (Tome XX, 1923, no 1.). It is, taken as a whole text, fascinating, and deserves some study in its own right. Possibly I’ll write something about it here when I’m done. I have just now finished Albert Thibaudet’s contribution, which is called “Marcel Proust et la tradition française.” Bell must have read this little essay. First of all, Thibaudet claims that there are corners—“ces jardins secrets”—of every national literature into which foreigners simply cannot penetrate. Of course there are also very cosmopolitan gardens as well, into which greenhouse he puts Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. Bell mentions this book as well, echoing Thibaudet’s vocabulary, in the opening pages of Proust. He mentions it as part of a list of other books, possibly as great as the Recherche, “even Jean Christophe—which the French have put in the corner quite as much because it was written by a Protestant and a pacifist [note, in passing, that Clive Bell is himself both those things] as because it is written in a woefully undistinguished manner” (7-8). (As I copy out that quote, I notice the was/is written tense shift—because authorship is past, but the writing itself is always in the present).

For Thibaudet, though, the Recherche is clearly especially French, somehow unavailable to foreigners. Bell’s name (along with a clutch of other Bloomsberries) appears later in the volume appended to an awkwardly written “Hommage d’un groupe d’écrivains anglais” (248-9), which itself strongly suggests some of the themes Bell will later work on his own. Probably in reference to this, or at least this sort of activity, Thibaudet says, “de consiencieux Anglais ont fondé pour l’étudier une société Marcel Proust. Que le ‘monde’ français ait pu se faire aimer et admirer d’un Marcel Proust, cela doit bien étonner un romancier anglais. Cela ‘étonnera moins s’il cherche le fil qui relie Proust à une tradition authentique” (133).

This authentic ‘tradition française’ in terms of which Thibaudet wants to situate Proust is, first, Saint-Simon, the diarist of the court of Louis XIV, and then, Montaigne. Again, Bell will follow Thibaudet. The comparison with Saint-Simon is instructive, “Proust comme Saint-Simon est de ces écrivains qui, ne voyant et ne sentant pas simple [qui n’a rien à voir avec la simplicité], ser refuseraient comme à une trahison à écrire simple. Il faut que chaque phrase conserve la complesité, l’épaisseur, l’intensité émotionnelle ou la joie descriptive, qui étaient au principe des pensées et des images” (135). Compare that to Bell’s “Proust wanted to speak his mind, and his was a mind not easily spoken” (21). Bell’s idea, that style is, or should be, radically determined by process of thought even to the point of rupturing the surface of ‘good writing’ (characteristic, I think, of Bloomsbury), is also Thibaudet’s, who says, describing Proust’s writing: “Un tel style est vraiment consubstantiel à la chose pensante et vivante. Trop consubstantiel pour être clair et correct, dira-t-on. Et le fait est qu’il tient plutôt à la main et au corps de l’écrivain, qu’à la pointe délié de la plume” (136).

The conclusion, the ‘punt,’ of Thibaudet’s little contribution is fascinating. It is, I think, probably an example of some of the best that liberalism had to offer in the 1920s. Thibaudet has been describing Proust’s affinities to Montaigne, an interesting comparison because Proust writes very much about and from his own memory, while Montaigne is famously bad at remembering, and confined entirely to the present of his own writing. Thibaudet, having just called established the dynamism, the process-orientation, of this writing, pauses, and says, “On aura reconnu dans ces dernières ligns des expressions bergsoniennes, et elles nous amènent à des vues suggestives que j’introduis avec quelque réserve” (138). Before quoting, at length, the next paragraph, I wanted to pause and note the hesitance, almost trepidation, which marks Thibaudet’s plunge out of pure stylistic analysis, and into blood.

“Ces analogies entre Proust et Montaigne, leur singulier mobilisme à tous deux, ne seraient-elles pas en liaison avec un autre genre de parenté? Il est certain que la mère de Montaigne, une Lopez, était juive. Montaigne, voilà le seul de nos grands écrivains chez qui soit présent le sang juif. On connaît l’hérédité analogue de Marcel Proust. Et telle est également l’hérédité mixte de grand philosophe que je viens de nommer...[mentions other examples]...Je songe à cette mobilité, à cette inquiétude d’Israël, à ces tentes dont Bossuet, dans le Serment sur l’Unité de l’Eglise, fait le symbole du peuple de Dieu...l’Odyssée, a cristallisé, lui-même, comme l’a montré Bérard, autour de doublets gréco-sémitiques. Un Montaigne, un Proust, un Bergson, installent dans notre complexe et riche univers littéraire ce qu’on pourrait appeler le doublet frano-sémitique, comme il y a des doublets littéraires franco-anglais, franco-allemand, franco-italian, comme la France elle-même est un doublet du Nord et du Midi. Mais ne prenons cela que de biais, et, nous aussi, en une mobilité qui n’appuie pas. La tradition française à laquelle nous devons rattacher un Marcel Proust, c’est une tradition vivante, imprévisible, singulière, une tradition en mouvement irréguliere, en ligne serpentine, en tours et en retours, qui, comme une phrase même, comme une page de Proust, dépasse toujours sa matière précise par son élasticité intérieure et par la profusion de son débordement” (138-139).

So this little chunk of text, which I’ve edited down a bit, first postulates a link between heredity and style—but as is typical of humanist racial discourse, there is a great deal of ambiguity about the exact mechanism of transmission of these stylistic traits. Clearly, style is here an expression of the functioning of the writer’s mind, we might now say personality, or perhaps character. Style of writing is closely linked to style of thought. (But also, in the quote from pg 136, it is close to the writer’s body). This style of thought is linked to blood, which is a way of saying what, exactly? Historical experience is tied up in this (the tents of Israel—simple metaphor, or is this the content of the claim? To what register, we might ask, does this image belong?)

Thibaudet then mentions the Odyssey, which everyone agrees is a foundation of ‘our’ civilization, and which, according to the French hellenist (Victor?) Bérard, is a greco-semitic ‘doublet.’ From this point on, we have a theory of hybridization circa 1920. (We might notice that, as generous as he is with his doublets, they all start ‘franco-...’). This hybridization takes place strictly between national-linguistic groups, which makes it sound, I think, more obsolete than it is. This vision of mixing blood (understood to mean national, in the mystic sense, tradition) is profoundly progressive. The French tradition is living and vibrant, elastic and always overflowing its boundaries—this is a result of all the mixing, especially the Jewish blood.

This sort of talk is reprehensible for what seem to me obvious reasons. The Nazis (or even, Thibaudet’s contemporary and the object of one of his studies, Charles Maurras) have only to say exactly the same thing as Thibaudet—and they are able to use it to justify doctrines of racial purity. The logic is, I think, exactly the same as in the argument about the Jews as a modernizing force in the economy of Europe. ‘Progressive’ historians, a number of them Jewish, re-wrote the history of European capitalism with Jewish bankers in the staring role, from the middle ages on. Everyone loves capitalism, right? But as politics radicalize, especially, I think it must be said, with the rise of radical socialist ‘scientific’ re-valuation of bourgeois society and its capitalist/industrialist underpinnings, the very narrative which had been understood to praise ‘the Jews’ (I introduce quotes now, because the category becomes problematic) is widely available to damn them. All this is what was discussed at Julie Mell’s IHS session, but grows out of many sources. I don’t think Arendt puts it quite this way, but it is in her spirit.

So Thibaudet is, in literature, doing the same kind of thing that liberal, philosemitic historians did. His discourse is inside the same frame as Maurras’s, even as they disagree. Where does Bell stand in relation to this? Probably not far off.

Albert Thibaudet

Albert Thibaudet came to my attention first when I was writing about Charles Maurras. Thibaudet’s book from the 1920s on Maurras remains, I think, the best discussion of his ideas, ideology, and style (if you don’t mind keeping such things separate). I’ve been flipping through an English translation of Thibaudet’s history of French literature, subtitled “from 1795 to our era.” It was put together after his death by Léon Bopp and Jean Paulhan from, apparently, a nearly-complete manuscript. Originally published in 1938, the translation is from 1967. It is very much ‘light’ history, 130 years of literature in about 500 pages. Thibaudet is not, I gather, a profound thinker, but in my experience—bourn out by this book—he is a sensitive reader and critic; his opinions are always worth hearing. A few sections into the book, I became very sorry to be reading in English and not French—it has the feel of a quick translation, though this is perhaps because it is unfinished.

I like the positional and evaluative aims of the book. What is meant by positional? Thibaudet has arranged things by generations (1789, 1820, 1850, 1885, 1914). The meaning of each writer, each text, each school, comes in part from its position within the generation and between generations. Thus, the generation of 1789 is dominated by the revolution as event, which is itself ‘processed’ (my word, Thibaudet wouldn’t be so mechanical) by three dominant personalities, Napoleon, Chateaubriand, and Mme De Staël. The 1820 generation, for instance, takes Napoleon as a problem or model: Balzac is said to have regarded himself as the Napoleon of the novel, thus positioning himself vis-à-vis his predecessors, dominating the novel of his own period, and then becoming himself an aspiration for the next generation.

I hope that I find, rather than read into this, a model essentially similar to the one infinitely more rigorously applied by Randall Collins. Thibaudet, quite in opposition to Collins, is perfectly comfortable assigning these values retrospectively. I do not think this is a fundamental difference.

Thibaudet can be assign retrospective positional value because he his evaluative. Which third of Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme is still living? What, really, is praise- or blameworthy in Salammbô? Such are questions he is willing to answer. He is supple enough, though to distinguish between books important in their time but dead now, books popular in their time but dead now, lost classics, ‘revivals,’ this sort of thing. He constantly snipes at Brunetière (who excluded the letters of Mme de Sevigny from his manual of literature because they were not published until long after being composed, and therefore could not figure in the organic growth of genre).

Some books are simply, today, ‘unreadable.’ This is not a category of contemporary academic criticism. One may, possibly, say that a book is boring or useless, but this is not at all the same thing. I suppose ‘relevance’ is still a category, but this also is different. To say that something is readable or not is to make a judgment based on a certain kind of reader, who exists in a certain reasonably well-defined context and tradition. I get the sense, and I want to be more careful about generalizations than I sometimes am, that academic criticism functions in a basically ‘scientistic’ paradigm. That is, it tries to establish what is so, what isn’t so, what ‘operates’ and what does not. It still wants to find things. Thibaudet is, on the other hand, evaluative, which is to say normative, and explicitly so. Academic criticism, I think, accomplishes the same sort of normative evaluation, but at what could be called a meta-level. That is, rather than an individual academic taking it as their task to say what is and isn’t intrinsically worth reading, disciplines as a whole, the social-intellectual structures of academic life, make these decisions. There’s lots of fuzziness in that formulation, and I’m concerned that it’s re-inventing the wheel somehow. I don’t want to make what sounds to me now to be a banal foucauldian point about social production of truth.

At any rate, here is an example of Thibaudet’s style, slightly glossed, that I wish I had in French. He is speaking of the generation of 1914, by which he means those who were about 20 in that year.

“This venturesome young generation that spoke languages, that had turned to sports, that had left home for pleasure and for the conquest of the planet abruptly found itself blockaded by the war. When fish are taken from great depths, they come to the surface with organs that have burst because of decompression. It was in this state of inner revolution that this generation entered on its third decade. The first generation whose adolescence had been deprived of traditional humanism [by the school reforms of 1902] was further deprived, by its youth, of traditional humanity.”