THE SUBVERSIVE OBEDIENCE OF PROUST AND FREUD

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 51 number 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © for the Purdue ResearchFoundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

THE SUBVERSIVE OBEDIENCE OF

PROUST AND FREUD

L. Scott Lerner

By his own confession, Sigmund Freud was "ignorant of thelanguage of Holy Writ," "completely estranged from the religion ofhis fathers," and unable "to take a share in nationalist ideals." Heinsisted, however, that he had "never repudiated his people" andthat he was "in his essential nature a Jew . . . [with] no desire toalter that nature." If someone were to ask, "Since you have aban-doned all these common characteristics of your compatriots, what isleft to you that is Jewish?" he would answer, "A very great deal andprobably its very essence" (Preface). As a person for whom "Juda-ism" was thus "terminated" but whose "Jewishness" remained "in-terminable" (Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses 90), Freud had much in com-mon with another great modernist: Marcel Proust. To understand acritical dimension of this commonality, it may not be enough to ex-amine the published works and sources. It is also necessary to con-sult the archives.

Yosef Yerushalmi tells the story of his discovery, in the FreudArchives in Washington DC, of the family Bible that Freud's fatherJakob first inscribed, in Hebrew, on the occasion of Sigmund Freud'scircumcision. Thirty-five years later, the elder Freud had the volumere-bound in leather, and he added a dedication to his son, by handand in Hebrew, composed as a melitzah—a traditional genre in He-brew letters consisting of an arrangement of textual bits drawn fromthe Bible and other Jewish sources. Yerushalmi appears to believe—though he does not insist—that this dedication offers strong evi-

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dence of Freud's ability to read and understand Hebrew, Freud's ownstatements to the contrary notwithstanding (70–74). According toJacques Derrida, Yerushalmi wants to make Freud "confess" this com-petence: "Because Freud . . . must have known, from a young age,how to read the dedication. He ought, in consequence, to have con-fessed belonging, thus making his Hebrew culture public" (38; em-phasis added). From the Latin confiteri, the verb "confess," indeed,can mean not only to admit the commission of a crime or fault, butalso to reveal or disclose, and "to reveal oneself as" (Oxford Latin401). In English, French, and other modern languages, confessionalso of course came to refer to a declaration of belief, a profession offaith—as well, for example, as a particular religion, as in the phraseder jüdischen Konfession. This confession by Freud, however, thisact of self-disclosure and avowal of "Hebrew culture," is nowhere tobe found. If it ever existed as a physical record beyond the realm ofinduction and suggestion, then it is missing. Unless, of course—andthis is precisely Yerushalmi's point—it comes to us, transposed, asMoses and Monotheism.

Yerushalmi calls Freud's writing of Moses an act of "deferredobedience" to a paternal "mandate" (77, 74). The melitzah writtenby Jakob Freud in 1896 directed Sigmund to return to the book andto reengage his Jewish origins. At a distance of thirty-eight years,the son obeyed the father by radically rewriting the history that con-stitutes and preserves the Jews as a people. In Freud's version of theExodus, we will recall, Moses was an Egyptian proponent of an origi-nal, Egyptian monotheism. He led his Hebrew followers out of Egyptwhere they became Jews as a result of this liberation from captivity.During a rebellion, they subsequently murdered him. In the courseof a few generations, Moses's God came to be assimilated to thevolcano god, Yahweh, and to be known by this name. As Cathy Caruthpoints out, the founding events in Jewish history, according to Freud,are thus not the liberation of the Jews, their receipt of Torah, andtheir return to the Promised Land, but rather the cover-up, and re-pression, of their murder of Moses (13–14). How, we might wonder,would his father, the author of the melitzah, have received Mosesand Monotheism in fulfillment of his mandate? Yerushalmi thinks thatJakob Freud "would not have been displeased" (79). One thing seemsclear, however. If Moses and Monotheism may be understood as asatisfactory fulfillment of a mandate to return to Jewish history andorigins, then obedience, in this context, does not preclude subver-sion.

In Proust, remarkably, many of these same elements arepresent. Proust's Charles Swann is a paradigm of assimilation, espe-cially in the French context, where assimilation is best measured by

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the standard of the severest gatekeepers of francité (Frenchness):the high aristocracy. Despite modest bourgeois origins, as the son ofa stockbroker, Swann has managed to achieve an unthinkable as-cent to the heights of high society. Early in Du côté de chez Swann,we learn that he is not only a member of the ultra-elitist JockeyClub; he is also an intimate friend of the Comte de Paris and thePrince of Wales (1: 19).1 And he is "of Jewish extraction" ["d'originejuive"] (1: 125; A la recherche 1: 90). This fact is not so muchannounced as revealed by the narrator, in connection with the visitof Marcel's friend Bloch, whose Jewish identity is proclaimed byMarcel's grandfather through the humming of melodies from operaswith Jewish themes. Subsequently there will be occasional—humor-ous—speculation regarding Swann's Jewish origins by certain mem-bers of high society. Madame de Gallardon, for example, will relatethat he is the son and perhaps grandson of Jewish converts, althoughin her view he is no less a Jew for this, since conversion is a "pre-tence" ["une frime"] (1: 476; A la recherche 1: 329). Swann's friendthe Prince de Guermantes, for his part, invents an extraordinarylegend that would make of Swann not a Jew, but rather the naturalson of the Duke de Berri (4: 92).2 . Lest anyone take this accountseriously, the question of Swann's Jewishness is definitely resolvedin Sodome et Gomorrhe when, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair,the narrator describes him as degrading facially to the point wherehe resembles an "old Hebrew rather than a dilettante Valois" (4:121). Nearing death, Swann returns "to the spiritual fold of his fa-thers" ["au bercail religieux de ses pères"] (3: 797; A la recherche 2:868) and arrives "at the age of the prophet" (4: 122).3

If Swann is thus like Sigmund Freud, a Jew whose Judaism maybe "terminated," but whose Jewishness appears "interminable," heis also strangely like Jakob. For he is the one who implicitly alsoissues the mandate, to his daughter Gilberte: remember your Jewishfather. A mandate like his is a variant, to be sure, of what Yerushalmihas called the "injunction to remember"—regarded "[o]nly in Israeland nowhere else . . . as a religious imperative to an entire people"(Zakhor 9). Does Gilberte fulfill the mandate? Does she carry out anact of "deferred obedience"? Does she make her own confession?The answer to all these questions must be yes: subversively. In thisessay, I will show how Gilberte profanes the memory of the Jewishfather, much as Freud profanes sacred Jewish history, in subversiveobedience to a mandate to acknowledge and engage Jewish origins.Perhaps like Freud, she also makes a confession, which has not sur-vived, though its traces abound, in the archives.


The paradigm for profanation in A la recherche du temps perduis presented in Proust's portrait of Mlle Vinteuil, whose lesbianismhastens the death of her moralistic father, whom we later discover tobe a world-renowned composer. When the young Marcel witnessesMlle Vinteuil and her unnamed friend at Montjouvain, in the episodeknown as the scène de sadisme, she is in mourning for her father. Inanticipation of the scene that is about to be staged, she has placedhis portrait in plain sight on the piano. The gesture is laden withmeaning since it is a reprise of her father's own nervous habit, inanticipation of the arrival of his house guests, of placing his compo-sitions on the piano where they were sure to be noticed. Now, theportrait on the piano will serve as a means of forcing the father towitness the lovemaking that may have killed him. And it will enableher to perform under his gaze. Referring to this "picture looking atus" in what the narrator suspects is an often repeated sequence of"ritual profanations [and] liturgical responses," Mlle Vinteuil exclaims,echoing her father's words, "I can't think who can have put it there;I'm sure I've told them a dozen times that it isn't the proper place forit" (1: 228–29). When her lover announces what she wants to do tothat "old horror," Mlle Vinteuil takes her cue and finally closes theshutters "with an air that was at once languid, awkward, bustling,sincere and rather sad" (1: 230). In this peak moment of ritual fore-play, she behaves as one numbed by tremendous and prolongedpain.

An early draft of the scene, from the vast manuscript archivesof A la recherche, makes explicit a central element of Proust's con-ception of filial profanation and sadism: "Profaning a host can bringno pleasure to an unbeliever for whom the host is nothing; profaningrespect for the dead, virtue, love for family members implies thehabitual practice of this respect, worshiping of the dead, religion ofthe family and of virtue" (Cahier 14, qtd. in A la recherche 1: 799;my translation). In the final version of this text in Du côté de chezSwann, Proust eliminated the reference to the profanation of thehost, probably because of its association with antisemitic myths ofJewish crimes, but he maintained and elaborated the distinction be-tween genuine depravity and sadistic fantasy:

A sadist of her kind is an artist in evil, which a whollywicked person could not be, for in that case the evil wouldnot have been external, it would have seemed quite natu-ral to her, and would not even have been distinguishablefrom herself; and as for virtue, respect for the dead, filialaffection, since she would never have practised the cult ofthese things, she would take no sacrilegious pleasure inprofaning them. (1: 231; trans. modified)

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The profanation of the memory of the loved one, inwardly adored, isthe sadist's fiercest arm against the greater pain of loss. Mlle Vinteuilfeels the filial sentiments4 of the adoring daughter filled with "re-morse at having virtually killed her father" (1: 225–26).

The story of Charles and Gilberte Swann initially follows a par-allel track. A victim of "the illusions of paternal love," Swann used totell his daughter: "How comforting it is, my darling, to have a daugh-ter like you; one day when I'm no longer here, if people still mentionyour poor papa, it will be only to you and because of you" (5: 800).After his death, she does indeed penetrate that circle, but her pres-ence at the Guermantes's, ironically, becomes cause for the silenc-ing, rather than the voicing, of her father's name: "No doubt Gilbertedid not always go so far as when she insinuated that she was per-haps the natural daughter of some great personage; but as a ruleshe concealed her origins" (5: 792). After her adoption by the Comtede Forcheville, she "preferred not to be near other people at themoment when they made the discovery that she was by birth a Swann.. . . And as we are near the people whom we picture to ourselves,and we can picture people reading their newspaper, Gilberte pre-ferred that the newspapers call her Mlle de Forcheville." And shesigns her name "G. S. Forcheville":

The real hypocrisy in this signature was made manifest bythe suppression not so much of the other letters of thename "Swann" as of those of the name "Gilberte." For, byreducing the innocent first name to a simple "G," Mlle deForcheville seemed to insinuate to her friends that the sameamputation applied to the name "Swann" was also moti-vated by the desire to abbreviate. Indeed she gave a spe-cial significance to the "S," extending it with a sort of longtail which ran across the "G," but which one felt to be tran-sitory and destined to disappear like the tail which, stilllong in the monkey, has ceased to exist in man. (5: 793;trans. modified)

Particularly damning is the final metaphor, which suggests thatGilberte's attitude toward her father is tantamount to consideringherself as having evolved, through natural selection, from the less-than-human being who was her Jewish father ("the monkey") to thehigh human form of the French aristocrat ("man").

Finally, in addition to his person, Gilberte deforms her father'sname:

Later I learned that one day, a young society girl havingasked her out of tactlessness or malice what the name of


her real, not her adoptive father was, in her confusion andas though to euphemise the name a little, instead of pro-nouncing it "Souann" she said "Svann," a change, as shesoon realised, for the worse, since it made this name ofEnglish origin into a German name. And she had even goneon to say, abasing herself in order to lift herself back up:"All sorts of different stories have been told about my birth,but I'm not supposed to know anything about it." (5: 790–91; trans. modified)

The passage is a tangle of ironies. Gilberte, who so obviously lacksher father's elegance and refinement, thinks she has to hide his iden-tity, because of his Jewish descent, if she is to penetrate the verysocial circle that he had abandoned without regret. Yet in the accom-plishment of this gesture, in the attempted dissimulation of her father'sJewishness, she shows herself to be too gauche to be a natural mem-ber of that circle. The fact that her embarrassment causes her todenature his name is not in itself surprising, yet the result couldhardly be more ironic. Swann's English—or anglicized—name tells astory of its own: of his extraordinary rise in French high society.What could be more French than the noblest French aristocrats, andwhat could be more aristocratic than to show off British airs andespecially British royal connections, like Swann? Yet the rise of theFrench Jew into high society is only half the story. The other half isthe transformation of Alsatian and other German Jews into Frenchcitizens. By Germanizing Swann's name, Gilberte not only denies herfather his high French status; she reduces him to the Jew from Alsaceor Germany that he no doubt is, historically.5 Attempting to hide hisorigins, she uncovers them by reversing the transformation that,symbolically, dissimulated them in the first place.

In the case of the Vinteuils, the scene at Montjouvain does notrepresent the culmination of the father-daughter story. Many yearsafter Vinteuil's death, when he is known only as an obscure pianoteacher from Combray, his identity as perhaps the greatest contem-porary composer becomes known to the narrator, who reflects onhow Vinteuil's masterpiece, a septet, has reached his ears:

[H]ow was it possible that this revelation, the strangestthat I had yet received, of an unknown type of joy, shouldhave come to me from him, since, it was said, when hedied he had left nothing but his sonata, everything elseexisting only as indecipherable scribblings? Indecipherablethey may have been, but they had nevertheless been inthe end deciphered, by dint of patience, intelligence andrespect, by the only person who had been sufficiently close

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to Vinteuil to understand his method of working, to inter-pret his orchestral indications: Mlle Vinteuil's friend. Evenin the lifetime of the great composer, she had acquiredfrom his daughter the veneration that the latter felt for herfather. It was because of this veneration that, in thosemoments in which people run counter to their true inclina-tions, the two girls had been able to take an insane plea-sure in the profanations which have already been narrated.Her adoration of her father was the very condition of hisdaughter's sacrilege. . . . Mlle Vinteuil's friend was some-times tormented by the nagging thought that she mighthave hastened Vinteuil's death. At any rate, by spendingyears unraveling the cryptic scroll left by him, by estab-lishing the correct reading of those illegible hieroglyphs,she had the consolation of ensuring an immortal and com-pensatory glory for the composer over whose last yearsshe had cast such a shadow. (5: 348)

The lesson of the Vinteuil parable is that the veneration of the fatherby the daughter and friend—indeed their worshipping of him—is thecondition for profanation. And profanation, in turn, through the guiltit creates, ensures his immortality in art insofar as it results in thelong, painstaking work of decoding that yields a score for the septet.The story thus contains an initial presentation of a scene of profana-tion and a later indication of the relation of profanation to a kind ofredemption. Unlike Mlle Vinteuil, Gilberte never compensates for hercruelty. Her profanation is made clear, but the subsequent compen-satory activity is absent. Or it seems to be.

Proust's manuscript drafts reveal that Gilberte's profanation ofSwann was conceived at a very early point in the redaction of thenovel, as an integral part of Swann's complete life story. Althoughrelated in a much more concentrated fashion, the principal elementsof that story differ only very slightly between these early versionsand the "finished" work, in which they are dispersed over severalthousand pages. They partially constitute a mininovel within A larecherche, more complete in Swann's case than in that of any othercharacter aside from the narrator. In the original printed version, thegroundwork for Gilberte's profanation is laid in A l'ombre des jeunesfilles en fleurs.

Recounting an episode from his childhood friendship withGilberte, in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator ob-


serves, "it seemed inconceivable to her that her father could be theobject of the slightest criticism." Gilberte herself, in fact, will directlycompare herself to Mlle Vinteuil: "One day, when I had spoken to herof Mlle Vinteuil, she said to me: 'I never want to know her, for a verygood reason, and that is that she was not nice to her father, fromwhat one hears, and made him very unhappy'" (2: 150). Gilbertethus worships her father by marking her distance from Mlle Vinteuil,still known as the daughter who offended her father's sensibility dur-ing his lifetime and continues to desecrate his memory. The irony ofthis comment will of course not be evident to the reader until muchlater, when it becomes known how Mlle Vinteuil and her friend alsobuild a "cult"6 around the father, whereas Gilberte profanes thememory of her father by "forgetting" him.

Gilberte completes her comparison: "You can't understand thatany more than I, can you? I'm sure you could no more live withoutyour papa than I could, which is quite natural after all. How can oneever forget a person one has loved all one's life?" (1: 231). Theselines, which anticipate the subsequent renunciation of the father,must be understood in relation to the definition of the sadist estab-lished in connection to Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain. Like a sadist,Gilberte must build a "cult" around "virtue, respect for the dead, filialaffection" if later she is to take the sadist's "sacrilegious pleasure" inprofaning these very things.

The profanatory side of Gilberte's character becomes manifestlong before Swann's death. The object of her first sacrilege is thecommemoration in her father's house of the anniversary of the deathof her grandfather. The profanatory scene is introduced by thenarrator's account of a day when "she was being particularly lovingwith Swann." Marcel points this out to her, and she responds: "Yes,poor Papa, it's the anniversary of his father's death round aboutnow. You can understand what he must be feeling. You do under-stand, don't you—you and I feel the same about things like that. SoI just try to be a little less naughty than usual." "But he doesn't everthink you're naughty. He thinks you're quite perfect." "Poor Papa,that's because he's far too good" (2: 150). In Proust's own family,the anniversary of the death of a loved parent or grandparent was anoccasion of tremendous importance. Not only did he refer to suchdates in his letters, he dated at least one letter only by writing "an-niversary of Mama's death" ("To Ladislas Landowski"; my transla-tion). Proust also followed his mother's custom of using black-bor-dered mourning stationery in his correspondence for quite some timefollowing the death of a loved one. By commemorating in this waythe anniversary of the death of a parent or close relative, Gilberteand Charles Swann, like Proust and his mother, follow a practice that

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originates in Jewish, rather than Catholic or French, custom. In thechapter on mourning customs in her popular handbook on manners,Baronne Staffe refers only to an initial period of mourning and makesno mention of special observance of the anniversary of a death (299–305). In the Ashkenazi Jewish custom of the family of Proust's mother,Jeanne Weil, in contrast, the yahrzeit—the anniversary of the deathof a loved one—is of course the occasion for special observance.

All too aware of the sacred quality for her father of such obser-vance, Gilberte soon abandons her sensitive demeanor:

It was precisely the day of which she had spoken to me inadvance, on which fell the anniversary of her grandfather'sdeath. We were to go, she and I, with her governess, tohear selections from an opera, and Gilberte had dressedwith a view to attending this performance, wearing the airof indifference with which she was in the habit of treatingwhatever we might be going to do, saying that it might beanything in the world, no matter what, provided that itamused me and had her parents' approval. Before lunch,her mother drew us aside to tell her that her father wasvexed at the thought of our going to a concert on thatparticular day. This seemed to be only natural. Gilberteremained impassive, but grew pale with an anger whichshe was unable to conceal, and uttered not a word. WhenM. Swann joined us his wife took him to the other end ofthe room and said something in his ear. He called Gilberte,and they went together into the next room. We could heartheir raised voices. Yet I could not bring myself to believethat Gilberte, so submissive, so loving, so thoughtful, wouldresist her father's appeal, on such a day and for so triflinga matter. (2: 161–62)

Resisting her father's request that she respect the anniversary of hergrandfather's death—that she participate in his yahrzeit—this goodgirl, "so submissive, so loving, so thoughtful," profanes the sacredday by refusing to remember the grandfather. ForeshadowingGilberte's profanation of her father after his death by "forgetting"her family name, the father-daughter exchange concludes withSwann's portentous lines: "You heard what I said. Now do as youlike" (2: 161–62).

Throughout lunch Gilberte's face remains tight. The scenereaches its climax at two o'clock, when she suddenly announces thatit is time to go to the concert:

"But," I reminded her, "won't your father be crosswith you?"


"Not the least little bit!""Surely he was afraid it would look odd, because of

the anniversary.""What do I care what people think? I think it's per-

fectly absurd to worry about other people in matters ofsentiment. We feel things for ourselves, not for the public.Mademoiselle has very few pleasures, and she's been look-ing forward to going to this concert. I'm not going to de-prive her of it just to satisfy public opinion."

"But, Gilberte," I protested, taking her by the arm,"it's not to satisfy public opinion, it's to please your father."

"You're not going to start scolding me, I hope," shesaid sharply, plucking her arm away. (2: 162–63)

Although the narrator has referred several times to the outing inquestion as a concert, he described it as a "matinée at the theatre"(2: 161) when introducing the incident. The double meaning of thatexpression now becomes clear, in Gilberte's desire not only to go tothe theater, but also to faire du théâtre. Distinguishing between "publicopinion" and "your father," Marcel fails to understand that, on onelevel, father and audience are one and the same for Gilberte, just asthey are for Mlle Vinteuil in front of the photograph. Gilberte provesthat the pleasure of such transgression is much more than sexualand need not be sexual at all. Like these other Proustian characters,she takes pleasure not so much in the act of transgression, or defi-ance, itself, but rather in the fact that it is witnessed by the belovedother. No longer even ostensibly deriving from violation of sexualtaboo, pleasure now comes from profanation of the (Jewish) totem.

Swann, the narrator relates, "was one of those men who, hav-ing lived for a long time amid the illusions of love, have seen theblessings they have brought to numerous women increase the hap-piness of the women without exciting in them any gratitude, anytenderness towards the men." It is thus in their children that suchmen sense that they have finally found "an affection which, beingincarnate in their very name, will enable them to survive after theirdeath" (2: 192; trans. modified). Described here in A l'ombre desjeunes filles en fleurs, such paternal illusion sets the stakes forGilberte's betrayal of her father in La Prisonnière. It is based on twoassumptions: that Gilberte is a "good girl" bound always to show herlove for him, even excessively, and that she will do so in large partby preserving and venerating his name:

When there should no longer be any Charles Swann, therewould still be a Mlle Swann, or a Mme X, née Swann, whowould continue to love the vanished father. Indeed, to love

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him too well perhaps, Swann may have been thinking, forhe acknowledged Gilberte's caress with a "You're a goodgirl," in the tone softened by uneasiness to which, whenwe think of the future, we are prompted by the too pas-sionate affection of a person who is destined to survive us.(2: 192–93)

Gilberte's behavior on the anniversary of her grandfather's deathleads Marcel to question his previous understanding of her characterand to begin to doubt the basis for Swann's conviction of her good-ness (2: 196). If we may rely on a manuscript draft, however, wemay easily conclude that Marcel's judgment is superficial and flawed;Gilberte's inner feelings contradict her bold displays of indifference:"Sadness on holidays and anniversaries on the calendar. Love for M.Swann no more external to Gilberte than herself. All this makes forthe same zone of pain around her" (Cahier 27, qtd. in A la recherche1: 1025; my translation). Patient and careful readers of the pub-lished novel will also find signs of these profound feelings that belieGilberte's surface-level callousness. As he often did, Proust appearsto have begun with a clear and direct description of character, butallowed only dispersed and minimalized signs to survive in the final(or last) versions.

Following the death of her father, Gilberte is adopted by hermother's new husband. The story behind this adoption is complexand revealing:

After Swann's death, Odette, who astonished everyone byher profound, prolonged and sincere grief, found herselfan extremely rich widow. Forcheville married her, aftermaking a long round of country houses and ascertainingthat his family would acknowledge his wife. . . . Shortlyafter this, an uncle of Swann's, in whose hands the suc-cessive demise of innumerable relatives had accumulatedan enormous inheritance, died, leaving the whole of hisfortune to Gilberte who thus became one of the richestheiresses in France. But this was a time when in the after-math of the Dreyfus Affair an anti-Semitic trend had arisenparallel to a growing trend towards the penetration of so-ciety by Jews. The politicians had not been wrong in think-ing that the discovery of the judicial error would be a se-vere blow to anti-Semitism. But, temporarily at least, aform of high-society anti-Semitism was on the contraryenhanced and exacerbated. Forcheville, who, like everypetty nobleman, had derived from conversations in thefamily circle the certainty that his name was more ancient


than that of La Rochefoucauld, considered that, in marry-ing the widow of a Jew, he had performed a similar act ofcharity to that of a millionaire who picks up a prostitute inthe street and rescues her from poverty and squalor. Hewas prepared to extend his bounty to Gilberte, whose pros-pects of marriage would be assisted by all her millions buthindered by that absurd name "Swann." He declared thathe would adopt her. (5: 776; trans. modified)

Whereas the narrator's irony leaves no doubt about the absurdity ofForcheville's self-defined magnanimity, it is no less the case thatGilberte's change of name is motivated by a desire to disguise apaternal name understood to be revelatory of Jewish origins. Withher great wealth, and in light of the high social status of Swann, shewas hardly unmarriageable because of her Jewishness, yet Forchevillewas probably correct in assuming that a Jewish name, at a momentof backlash against increased entrance by Jews into high societycircles in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, would prevent her fromreceiving a truly splendid offer—like the one she would soon receivefrom Robert de Saint Loup.7

The narrator, however, cannot prevent himself from thinkingabout Mlle de Forcheville "with desolation" or feeling the irony of hernewly acquired access to the Guermantes salon: "What? Swann'sdaughter, whom he would have so loved to see at the Guermantes's,whom the latter had refused to give their great friend the pleasure ofinviting—to think that she was now spontaneously sought after bythem" (5: 799). Looking forward to the day, after his death, whenGilberte's presence would cause people to talk about him, Swannhad placed "a timorous and anxious hope of survival in his daugh-ter." Yet her presence would have just the opposite effect:

[I]nstead of being an occasion for people to speak of herfather from time to time, [her presence in a drawing-room]was an obstacle in the way of their seizing the opportuni-ties that might still have remained for them to do so, andthat were becoming more and more rare. Even in connexionwith the things he had said, the presents he had given,people acquired the habit of not mentioning him, and shewho ought to have kept his memory young, if not perpetu-ated it, found herself hastening and completing the workof death and oblivion. (5: 800)

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The final chapter of the story of Charles and Gilberte Swanntakes place in Tansonville, the Swann estate, during a visit by Marcelto Gilberte shortly after her marriage to Saint-Loup. As these oldfriends enjoy a walk in the countryside, Gilberte makes a series ofimportant revelations. First, she casually points out the proximity ofthe Guermantes estate to the place they are walking. For Marcel, forwhom this geography defined the limits of his world view in child-hood, she might as well have said, "'Turn to the left, then bear right,and you will touch the intangible.'" She then indicates the decidedlyless-than-noble source of the Vivonne, which Marcel had imagined"as something as extra-terrestrial as the Gates of Hell, and whichwas merely a sort of rectangular basin in which bubbles rose to thesurface" (6: 3). Finally, she suggests: "If you like, we might after allgo out one afternoon and then we can go to Guermantes, taking theroad by Méséglise, which is the nicest way." For Marcel, this is "asentence which upset all the ideas of my childhood by informing methat the two 'ways' were not as irreconcilable as I had supposed" (6:3–4).

These revelations are followed by a pair of confessions of amuch more personal nature. At one point, Marcel observes, "Youwere speaking the other day of the little footpath. How I loved youthen!" Gilberte responds, "Why didn't you tell me? I had no idea. Iloved you too. Once, in fact, I threw myself at your feet" (6: 4; trans.modified). Hardly able to contain his surprise, he asks to know when."The first time, at Tansonville, you were going for a walk with yourfamily, and I was on my way home. I'd never seen such a pretty littleboy. I was in the habit,' she went on with a vaguely bashful air, 'ofgoing to play with little boys I knew in the ruins of the keep ofRoussainville'" (6: 4). As it turns out, Gilberte's "vaguely bashful air"masked her precocious debauchery:

And you will tell me that I was a very naughty girl, forthere were girls and boys there of all sorts who took ad-vantage of the darkness. The altar-boy from Combraychurch, Théodore, who, I must admit, was very nice in-deed (God, how handsome he was!) . . . used to amusehimself with all the peasant girls of the district. As I wasallowed to go out by myself, whenever I was able to getaway, I used to rush over there. (6: 4–5; trans. modified)

Gilberte's behavior as a child resembles that of the girl of Proust'sshort story, "La Confession d'une jeune fille,"8 and her own tale isbeginning to look more like a confession. As she continues, she ex-plains to Marcel that he had thoroughly misunderstood her gestureon the occasion of their first meeting: "I can't tell you how I longed


for you to come there too; I remember quite well that, as I had onlya moment in which to make you understand what I wanted, at therisk of being seen by your people and mine, I signaled to you sovulgarly that I'm ashamed of it to this day" (6: 5). The shame shefeels in recalling this first incident further gives her story the qualityof a confession. It was followed by another one, she explains: "[It]was years later when I passed you in the doorway of your house, theday before I met you again at my aunt Oriane's. I didn't recogniseyou at first, or rather I did unconsciously recognize you because Ifelt the same attraction as I had felt at Tansonville" (6: 5–6). On thebasis of these revelations—of this confession—the narrator concludes,"I had not been altogether mistaken as to the meaning of her glance,nor as to the sort of woman that she was and confessed to me nowthat she had been." Her gaze and accompanying gesture, then, andthe kind of woman she has confessed to be, are the subject ofGilberte's first confession. Her behavior and the confessional form ofher account, as well as her combination of modesty and debauchery,recall the girl of "La Confession" and Mlle Vinteuil. Her final declara-tion, however, reveals that she has a good deal more to confess: "Allthat is a long time ago. . . . And let me tell you it isn't those childishwhims that I feel most guilty about" (6: 9).

This declaration by Gilberte corresponds to the end of Albertinedisparue in most published versions. At this point, the manuscrit aunet, or final handwritten manuscript version of the end of A la re-cherche, contains this note written in Proust's hand: "Cruauté à lamort de son père (le copier du cahier où c'est écrit)" ("Cruelty at herfather's death [copy it from the notebook in which it is written]") (Ala recherche 4: 272 variant a; my translation). Three and a halfblank pages follow the note—the equivalent of about two printedpages—before the text, corresponding to the beginning of Le Tempsretrouvé, resumes.9 The indication makes clear that the passage inquestion was not merely projected, but had already been written in1917, when the "clean" (au net) manuscript was completed, exceptfor additions made later to its main text. This passage, whose ap-proximate date and theme are thus known, has never been persua-sively identified. On the basis of important clues contained in Proust'smanuscripts, however, we can infer a great deal about the contentsof this text that has never been recovered.

The manuscript note relating Gilberte's "cruelty at her father'sdeath," the first such clue, raises several questions.10 Does the phraserefer to the period of dying, to the moment of death, or to the daysand months following Swann's death? Is the series of encountersthus evoked a pattern of behavior, or a single scene? When Proustuses the same phrase in relation to the attitude of the père Swann to

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his wife's death, it refers to the day of the funeral and, in a moregeneral sense, to the loss suffered by the husband as a result of hiswife's death (1: 15). If the phrase is intended in a similar way here,then it may refer to Gilberte's behavior following the death of herfather—either exclusively in the passages cited above or also in anadditional, missing text. Would it make sense, however, to speak ofa daughter's cruelty in this context? Can one show cruelty to a deadperson? Or does Proust mean an offense to his memory? Would heuse the word "cruelty" if this were the case? If, on the other hand,the object of Gilberte's cruelty is her dying—but not dead—father,then the note necessarily refers to a scene not present in the "clean"manuscript or any other known version. In both early and final ver-sions of the novel, Swann's death is anticipated, then reported, butnever described.

A second manuscript note, appearing in Cahier 55, which con-tains Proust's first version of the scene at Tansonville, may help toanswer some of these questions. The note is preceded by Gilberte'srevelation of her childhood escapades and her desire for Marcel in aform quite similar to that of the version of the "clean" manuscript.Immediately following her last sentence "And even so, you see, it'snot those childish whims that I feel most guilty about," we read,"Confession de l'opération de son père, de son caractère" [Confes-sion of/regarding her father's operation, her/his character] (Cahier55, qtd. in A la recherche 4: 747; my translation). This note too isambiguous. We do not know what kind of confession is meant; nooperation involving Charles Swann appears in A la recherche as wehave it; and it is not absolutely clear whose character is meant, thefather's or the daughter's.

From among the possible meanings of "opération," a surgicalone seems most appropriate to the context, even though no directaccount of such an operation is given in the surviving text. Othertypes of operations—military actions, financial transactions—seemimprobable, particularly when we consider the attention given Swann'spoor health, both in earlier and the last versions. Moreover, A larecherche does contain a curious allusion to a medical operation. Inthe passage relating the hero's reaction in La Prisonnière to news ofSwann's death, the allusion is embedded within an extended meta-phor on the workings of death itself:

Swann's death had deeply distressed me at the time.Swann's death! Swann's, in this phrase, is something morethan a mere genitive. I mean thereby his own particulardeath, the death assigned by destiny to the service ofSwann. For we talk of "Death" for convenience, but thereare almost as many different deaths as there are people.


We do not possess a sense that would enable us to see,moving at full speed in every direction, these deaths, theactive deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that. Of-ten they are deaths that will not be entirely relieved oftheir duties until two or even three years later. They rushto plant a tumor in the side of a Swann, then depart toattend to other tasks, returning only when, the surgeonshaving performed their operations, it is necessary to plantthe tumor there afresh. (5: 260–61; emphasis added)

This deftly constructed metaphor leaves those who may be wonder-ing about Swann's medical history still wondering. On the one hand,the cancer and the operation are merely elements of the metaphor,like the image of "the active deaths aimed by destiny at this personor that." The metaphoric quality is reinforced by the indefinite articlebefore Swann's name: "a Swann." On the other hand, the informa-tion, if it can be considered that, is consistent with what we knowabout Swann's situation near the end of his life and is quite plau-sible. When Swann first mentions his illness to the Duke and Duch-ess de Guermantes on the final pages of Le Côté de Guermantes, hegives no precise information, saying only that it is terribly serious:"According to the doctors I've consulted, by the end of the year thething I've got—which may, for that matter, carry me off at any mo-ment—won't in any case leave me more than three or four months tolive, and even that is a generous estimate" (3: 816). His commenton the following page suggests that he has already known for sometime about his illness—to which, again, he gives no specific name: "Idon't know why I'm telling you this. I've never said a word to youabout my illness before" (3: 817).

The account of Swann's death and the obituary (closely resem-bling that of Proust's model for Swann, Charles Haas) are late addi-tions to the text of La Prisonnière (see Raczymow 51–53). They donot appear in the "clean" manuscript and were instead copied di-rectly onto the typescript from another notebook from 1921–22. Theobituary indicates that Swann "passed away yesterday at his resi-dence in Paris" (5: 261). This fact does not, of course, preclude thepossibility of an earlier operation.

The note from Cahier 55 suggests, then, that the "confession"has to do with something that occurred during an operation, perhapscancer-related, that took place shortly before Swann's death. We donot know whether such a text had already been written at the timethe note was made (1915); it would seem that it had not been. Ifsuch a text were included at the end of Albertine disparue, it wouldconstitute a coherent addition to the information concerning Swann'sillness and death already introduced into the novel at three well-

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spaced points: the end of Le Côté de Guermantes, the beginning ofSodome et Gomorrhe II, and midway through La Prisonnière. Theaddition would retrospectively provide details concerning Swann'soperation, in the context of a confession by his daughter.

The word "confession" no doubt refers to a statement Gilbertemakes about her own conduct at the time of her father's operation.It also serves to help resolve the problem of the ambiguous pronoun"son." Considered out of context, the pronoun might seem to refer toSwann: the second prepositional phrase, "de son caractère," appearsto stand in apposition to the first prepositional phrase, "de l'opérationde son père," encouraging us to understand "his operation" and "hischaracter." When we consider that both phrases depend on the sub-stantive "confession," however, the second alternative becomes byfar the more probable, for it is hard to conceive how Gilberte couldmake a confession about her father's character. (Proust surely wouldhave described a statement by Gilberte about Swann's character asa "revelation.") Moreover, the manuscript note immediately followsa revelation, which can also be considered a confession, on the basisof which the narrator concludes: "More completely even than I hadsupposed, Gilberte had been in those days truly part of the Méségliseway" (6: 9). Formally and thematically, a second personal confes-sion could easily be joined to the first, introduced by Gilberte's dec-laration: "[I]t's not those childish whims that I feel most guilty about."Finally, this is not the first time that Gilberte's character has beenthe subject of reflection. On several occasions, it has been studiedfor traits inherited from one or the other of her parents, and at onepoint it is the object of direct reference: "I had begun to wonderwhether Gilberte's character was not other than I had supposed" (2:196). For these reasons, there can be little doubt that her characteris intended.

Finally, on the basis of the note from Cahier 55 alone, we can-not be sure whether the missing text had already been drafted orwas simply projected. Proust's two notes considered together, how-ever, leave little room for doubt: by 1917, when the main text of themanuscrit au net, which includes the second note ("Cruelty at herfather's death"), was completed, a second "confession" was alreadywritten and needed only to be recopied. The text of this importantsecond confession existed but has not been recovered.

"Composing is no trouble for me," Proust wrote his publisher inOctober 1921, a year before his death. "But I haven't the strength toknock things back into shape or to splice them together. I'm quite


certain that for some time now I've been letting go of my best work"("To Gaston Gallimard" 500; my translation). The "clean" manuscriptof Albertine disparue was particularly susceptible to such loss. It isfilled with additions made in the margins, pages inserted from ear-lier notebooks (including Cahiers 55 and 56), fragments from earlierdrafts recopied by a secretary or included upon dictation by Proust(Chevalier 1020). In Le Temps retrouvé, Proust's narrator this timeremarks on the perils of just such an editorial method:

These "paperies," as Françoise called the pages of my writ-ing, it was my habit to stick together with paste, and some-times in this process they became torn. . . . [Françoise]would say to me, pointing to my note-books as thoughthey were worm-eaten wood or a piece of cloth which themoth had got into: "Look, it's all eaten away, isn't thatdreadful! There's nothing left of this bit of page, it's nomore than a piece of lace," and examining it with a tailor'seye she would go on: "I don't think I shall be able to mendthis one, it's finished and done for. A pity, perhaps it hasyour best ideas. You know what they say at Combray: thereisn't a furrier who knows as much about furs as the moth,they always get into the best ones." (6: 510)

In the case of Gilberte's missing confession, the moths hit their mark,consuming a crucial piece of the fabric of A la recherche du tempsperdu. Had it not been lost, it would mark the transition between thetwo principal movements of the work in most published editions: itstwo pages would provide the last words one reads of Le Temps perdubefore entering Le Temps retrouvé. This location, at the most criticaljuncture of A la recherche, alerts us to the considerable thematicand structural importance of the missing text.

Effects that build structural and thematic unity, balance, andsymmetry are characteristic of A la recherche in general and areparticularly concentrated at the end of Albertine disparue and in LeTemps retrouvé. The early notebooks, in fact, contain additional epi-sodes not retained in the "clean" manuscript that provide furtherevidence of the author's desire to reinforce the thematic unity of thework. Together with the excursion to Padua, the episode of MmePutbus's chambermaid, for example, was to form "an arch joiningthe great pillars of A la recherche du temps perdu" (Chevalier 1002;my translation). Additions to the manuscripts, moreover, tend toheighten dramatic effect and pick up again themes introduced inearlier books. According to Alison Winton, many of Proust's additions"make so important a contribution to central contrasts in the novel,and to the clarity of outline of individual characters, that it is difficult

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to believe that they were not always included in the plan." Oftenadditions consist of "concretely dramatic dialogues or confrontations,"and the most striking post-1914 effects "belong quite as much to thedramatically imaginative as to the psychologically generalising"(Winton 73, 74). Proust himself spoke of wishing to render his re-vised volume of Albertine disparue "bref et d'action dramatique"(Mauriac 17); the short Mauriac and Wolff version conforms to thisdesire. An initial assumption I will make, then, is that the missingpassage participates in the larger sweep of the novel, particularly ofthe last books, in which strands and themes are tied together, paral-lels established, and surprising revelations made.11

A heightened dramatic effect would also be consistent with theendings of the immediately preceding volumes. Sodome et GomorrheII concludes with a dramatic turning point that announces the princi-pal theme of the succeeding volume: "I absolutely must marryAlbertine" (4: 724). La Prisonnière, in turn, culminates with a mo-ment of similarly high drama, the sudden departure of Albertine. Theintended location of the missing passage would seem to preclude thepossibility of a major turning point in the plot; the last chapter ofAlbertine disparue and the beginning of Le Temps retrouvé wouldnot support such a hypothesis. It appears likely, though, that theending of Albertine disparue contains, if not a dramatic turning point,a dramatic revelation of comparable significance.

It is reasonable to assume that whatever its contents, the miss-ing text would be coherently integrated in the novel and especiallywithin the story of Charles and Gilberte Swann. It is also probablethat it introduces a scene that completes the Swann story in the waythat the scène de sadisme, followed by the description of the originsof the Septet, elaborate and conclude the Vinteuil story. The manu-script notes suggest that the missing passage recounts the full ex-tent of Gilberte's cruelty toward her father—her equivalent of thescène de sadisme. This hypothesis is consistent with Gilberte's be-latedly kindled desire, indicated in the manuscript, to learn "thingsabout Papa and the people he knew long ago" (Cahier 55, qtd. inChevalier 1017; my translation). In light of the prominence ofprofanatory child-parent relationships throughout Proust's work, ofthe Vinteuil parable in particular, and of Gilberte's bastardization anddissimulation of her father's name, it is reasonable to assume thatthe missing text concludes the story of the profanation by Gilberte ofSwann's memory.

It might appear that the types of profanation by Mlle Vinteuiland Gilberte are significantly different, in that Mlle Vinteuil proceedsby unveiling her identity—by flaunting her homosexuality—whileGilberte profanes through concealment of identity. The spectacle of


Mlle Vinteuil's lesbianism, however, is not staged for any audiencebeyond the actors themselves and the effigy of the father. Gilberte infact provides the greater public show, for her indiscreet dissimula-tion and deformation of the name Swann are not lost on her societyaudience, and the performance is repeated before different groupsof spectators. More important is what the daughters have in com-mon. On the basis of what we know of the missing text, in combina-tion with its placement in the manuscript—immediately following herdeclaration, "[I]t's not those childish whims that I feel most guiltyabout"—it seems clear that Gilberte feels remorse for her "cruelty ather father's death" and for betraying his memory. Just as Mlle Vinteuil'strue nature as a "good" daughter belies the sadism she feigns,Gilberte's apparent remorse thus belies her cruelty. In each case,the profanation of the father's memory serves paradoxically as ameans of reaffirming his identity, as artist or Jew. As Mlle Vinteuiland her friend compensate for their cruelty by deciphering thecomposer's manuscripts, might Gilberte compensate for hers by car-rying on her father's Jewishness? If Gilberte is like Proust's otherchild-profaners, then the cruelty she confesses is sadomasochistic,driven by an unconscious need to preserve the very identity shefeigns to have forgotten. In one fell swoop, she renounced father,the name of the father, and Jewishness. The fact of her confessionsuggests that all three, willfully forgotten, or so it seemed, haveproved unforgettable and inseparable from her self.

Yerushalmi concludes Freud's Moses by returning to the storyof Freud's daughter who, in 1977, upon the creation of the SigmundFreud Professorship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was in-vited to give the inaugural lecture. Unable to attend the event inperson, Anna Freud sent a text that was delivered on her behalf.12 Atthe end of her lecture, she wrote: "[psychoanalysis] has been criti-cized for its methods being imprecise, its findings not open to proofby experiment, for being unscientific, even for being a 'Jewish sci-ence.' However the other derogatory comments may be evaluated,it is, I believe, the last-mentioned connotation which, under presentcircumstances, can serve as a title of honor" (148). For Yerushalmi,the burning question, which he would most like to have answered bySigmund Freud, is whether, with these words, his daughter spoke inhis name (100). For Derrida, in contrast, who credits Freud withhaving analyzed and deconstructed the "paternal and patriarchic"principle better than anyone, the question, rather, is whether thefounding father's daughter, or any of the "sons" of Freudian psycho-

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analysis, can speak "in their own name" (95; emphasis added). AreYerushalmi's and Derrida's questions so different? Does not the childwho speaks both in her father's name and in her own express aparticularly modern form of obedience to tradition—subversive obe-dience? If this may be so for the (generally) obedient child, AnnaFreud, then how much more might it be so with Sigmund and JakobFreud, with Gilberte and Charles Swann?

Of course we cannot know with certainty, despite the archivaltraces, whether Gilberte compensates for her cruelty by re-utteringher father's name. Proust clearly had his ghosts just as Freud hadhis,13 and obeyed them and occasionally confesses as much—and healso had his secrets. Around secret accounts, observers Derrida, one"can always dream or speculate":

Speculation begins there—and belief. But of the secret it-self there can be no archive, by definition. . . . Beyondevery possible and necessary inquiry, we will always won-der what Freud (for example), what every "careful con-cealer" may have wanted to keep secret. We will wonderwhat he may have kept of his unconditional right to se-crecy, while at the same time burning with the desire toknow, to make known, and to archive the very thing heconcealed forever. What was concealed? What did he con-ceal even beyond the intention to conceal, to lie or to per-jure? (100–01)

Despite the richness of the archives, we cannot know with certaintythe secrets of the careful concealers. We can nonetheless specu-late—and with speculation begins belief—on Gilberte's paradox offorgetting.

There is a forgetting that relies on the "psychic archive" which,as Derrida points out, Freud also made possible ("the idea of anarchive properly speaking . . . which cannot be reduced to memory:neither to memory as conscious reserve, nor to memory asrememoration, as act of recalling" [Derrida 91]). Gilberte's confes-sion is thus not just an act of memory, but also a kind of return, fromthe archive—from the manuscript archive and the archive of her un-conscious desire—from the departure, the exile, of willed forgetting.Is Gilberte's forgetting of the Jewish father and her confession-re-turn like Freud's story of trauma and return in Moses and Monothe-ism? The author of "Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide" created, as weknow, a series of would-be parricidal characters—the girl of "La Con-fession," Mlle Vinteuil, and Gilberte, who shows "cruelty at the deathof her father," who effaces him and confesses. There is no doubt thather crime creates its own trauma; the fact of her confession sug-


gests that, like such traumas in Freud, she experiences a returnafter a period of latency.

According to Cathy Caruth, the experience of trauma may infact consist not in the forgetting but precisely in this "inherent la-tency within the experience itself." Caruth does not therefore locatethe "historical power" of the trauma in the repetition of the experi-ence after its forgetting, but rather finds that "it is only in and throughits inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all" (17). In rela-tion to Moses and Monotheism, with implications beyond this work,she stresses,

[T]his inherent latency of the event . . . paradoxically ex-plains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, ofthe Jews' historical experience: since the murder is notexperienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connec-tion with another place, and in another time. If return isdisplaced by trauma, then, this is significant insofar as itsleaving—the space of unconsciousness—is, paradoxically,precisely what preserves the event in its literality. (17–18)

I do not wish to suggest that these same phenomena pertain toGilberte, but it does appear that Freud and Proust are operating inparallel ways insofar as they engage the Jewish injunction to re-member with its inverse, the transgression of forgetting, and beginto explore the ways in which such—traumatic—forgetting, and thelatency it introduces, paradoxically serves to ensure survival.

In Freud's version, one of the lessons of Jewish monotheism isjust this: that "the belated experience of trauma" suggests that "his-tory is not only the passing on of a crisis, but also the passing on ofa survival." This survival, moreover, "can only be possessed within ahistory larger than any single individual or any single generation"(Caruth 71). Indeed, it is through "the peculiar and paradoxical com-plexity of survival," according to Caruth, "that the theory of indi-vidual trauma contains within it the core of the trauma of a largerhistory" (71). In Proust, sacrilege and profanation operate first onthe level of the individual and the Jewish family, rather than on Jew-ish history and the sacred texts. Gilberte's story, however, may notbe understood in wholly private terms. Her traumatic forgetting—her trauma of forgetting—is very much the experience of modernJews in the West who teeter on the brink of "radical assimilation"(Endelman 196) only to return, like Swann, to the "fold of [their]fathers" (3: 797). Such stories are partially told in the texts andpartially await us in the archives, and they partially remain con-cealed behind the traces that inspire speculation. Is it nonethelesshere, in this elusive space of subversive obedience to tradition, thatthe tellers—Proust, Freud—may rightly be called Jewish modernists?

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Notes

1. In this essay, all quotations in French are taken from the 1987–89Tadié edition of Proust's A la recherche published by Gallimard(Pléiade). This edition contains, in addition to the most authoritativetext of Proust's novel, an ample selection of manuscript material andan extensive critical apparatus. There presently exist two completeEnglish translations of A la recherche: the Moncrieff translation, com-pleted and revised by Kilmartin, Mayor, and Enright; and a new col-laborative translation published recently under the general editorshipof Prendergast. Although the latter is superb in several areas, refer-ences here (by volume and page number) are to the revised Moncrieffedition, which is more uniform and more available in the United States(not all volumes of the Prendergast edition have been issued in theUS). I note instances when I have modified this translation and alsowhen I have provided my own translation of manuscript or criticalmaterial from the Tadié edition, which has not yet appeared in apublished English translation, or of Proust's correspondence.

A word on titles: English-language readers may be familiar withthe original Moncrieff titles for the work as a whole and for its indi-vidual volumes: Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche dutemps perdu), Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann), Within aBudding Grove (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs), The GuermantesWay (Le Côté de Guermantes), Cities of the Plain (Sodome etGomorrhe), The Captive (La Prisonnière), The Sweet Cheat Gone(Albertine disparue [La Fugitive]), The Past Recaptured (Le Tempsretrouvé). In recent years, there has been a preference for moreliteral translation of these titles. Both the revised Moncrieff and thePrendergast editions have adopted In Search of Lost Time as thegeneral title; the Prendergast edition also renders individual volumetitles more literally: The Way by Swann's (in the US: Swann's Way),In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way, Sodomand Gomorrah, The Prisoner, The Fugitive, Finding Time Again.

2. For a discussion of these incidents in relation to the representationof Charles Swann as Jewish, see Lerner, "Genesis" 345–46, 359–62.

3. On this transformation as a reawakening of Jewish identity in Swann,and on his aesthetic blindness resulting from Dreyfusard ideology,see Lerner, "Rallying" 183–88.

4. See Proust's article, "Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide."

5. It seems likely that the Rothschild family served as a model for sucha Jewish migration from Germany to England.

6. The French term "culte," which Proust uses here, is more neutralthan the English "cult." Its meaning is halfway between "cult" and"religion."

7. The narrator and his mother comment on the marriage in this way:

"Just imagine, poor Swann who so longed for Gilberteto be received by the Guermantes, how happy he would be ifhe could see his daughter become a Guermantes!"


"Under another name than his, led to the altar as Mllede Forcheville—do you think he would be so happy after all?"

"Ah, that's true, I hadn't thought of it.""That's what makes it impossible for me to be happy for

her sake, the thought that the little beast could have had theheart to give up her father's name, when he was so good toher."

"Yes, you're right; all things considered, it's perhapsjust as well that he never knew." (5: 917)

The names and family origins of both Gilberte and Robert are putinto question by the friends of the narrator's mother.

8. This story is included in Proust's Jean Santeuil (85–96).

9. The number and length of the pages left blank by Proust in themanuscript are given by Milly in his 1992 edition of Albertine disparue(359, n. 224).

10. The note has been cited in the first Pléiade edition (1954), the Garnier-Flammarion edition (1986) and the second Pléiade edition (1987–1989) of A la recherche, and the Champion edition of Albertinedisparue (1992). The first edition of Albertine disparue (1925), ed-ited by Robert Proust, Jacques Rivière and Jean Paulhan, GabrielMarcel and Benjamin Crémieux, contains no notes whatsoever. The"short" published version of Albertine disparue (1987), edited byNathalie Mauriac and Etienne Wolff, does not contain the page inquestion. The Bouquins edition of A la recherche (1987) contains nonotes.

André Ferré and Pierre Clarac include the note in the first Pléiadeedition of A la recherche (1954), but make no mention of the blankpages (3: 697, n. 1). In his 1986 edition of A la Recherche, JeanMilly includes the note and in his introduction provides a detaileddescription of the blank pages. Both this version and the Championedition of Albertine disparue (1992), also edited by Milly, report thenote as "Cruauté à l'égard de son père" (emphasis added). Directconsultation of the manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,however, confirms that it reads: "à la mort de son père" and not "àl'égard de son père."

Only Anne Chevalier, the editor of Albertine disparue in the sec-ond Pléiade edition of A la recherche, has reflected on the matter.She states her view, based on these notes, that Proust intendedanother ending for Albertine disparue (4: 272, n.1). Chevalier raisesthe possibility that the "cruelty" passage referred to in the manu-script note corresponds to the scenes in the published versions inwhich Gilberte conceals her origins and signs her name "Forcheville."It is unlikely that this is the passage Proust had in mind. As Cheva-lier also points out, the manuscript note in Cahier 55, referring toSwann's operation, provides a different lead. Proust's note ("le copier"[copy it]), moreover, implies that the text in question had been writ-ten either as a separate piece, not yet incorporated into the novel, orthat, formally, it could easily be adapted to the new narrative con-

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text. Neither of these proves the case for the scene in which Gilberteconceals her name. The latter scene, finally, would prove quite diffi-cult to integrate into the novel at this later point.

11. On techniques of transition and suspense in Proust, see Terdiman112–75.

12. The significance of this episode is discussed at length in A GodlessJew by Peter Gay (18–22), who, in this work and in Freud: A Life forOur Time, has laid the essential groundwork for any study of Freudand Jewishness.

13. "Freud had his ghosts, he confesses it on occasion. He lets us par-take in his truth. He had his, and he obeyed them (Jacob Shelomoh,Moses, and a few others), as does Yerushalmi (Jakob Shelomoh,Sigmund Shelomoh, his Moses, and a few others), and I myself (Jakob,Hayim, my grandfathers Moses and Abraham, and a few others)"(Derrida 89).

Works Cited

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

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Documents

THE SUBVERSIVE OBEDIENCE OF PROUST AND FREUD