Article
Reference
Trials of the Letter in Proust and Joyce
SPURR, David Anton
Abstract
The Alfred Dreyfus affair is the central political event of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, just as the history of Charles Stewart Parnell, including the Special Commission hearings of 1888, haunts the pages of Joyce's work. For both writers, the respective cases serve as a kind of ironic measure by which different persons are defined according to their prises de position. Given the role of forgery in both cases, another consequence for the literary works in question has to do with the ambiguous nature of the letter and its unforeseeable consequences. Both Proust and Joyce produce fictional letters in their works which serve as analogies to the doubtful documents produced in court. Moreover, in these works, the function of the author as an implicit presence retreats progressively in the face of the enigmatic autonomy of the text, as if to acknowledge that the text has taken on a life of its own.
SPURR, David Anton. Trials of the Letter in Proust and Joyce. Journal of Modern Literature, 2019, vol. 42, no. 4, p. 5-19
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Trials of the Letter in Joyce and Proust
The end of the nineteenth century was marked by two judicial proceedings which had profound consequences for the history of two European nations, as well as for modern literature. In 1888 a special commission of the British Parliament opened hearings against Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule movement, for his alleged implication in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, in which Irish nationalists assassinated the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the Permanent Undersecretary, Thomas Henry Burke. Parnell was ultimately vindicated after it was proven that an incriminating letter attributed to him and published in the Times, had been forged by the journalist Richard Piggott. Piggott fled to Madrid, where he killed himself. Parnell died two years later amid a scandal over his adulterous liaison with Catherine O’Shea. As a martyr to the cause of Irish home rule, he figures prominently in every one of Joyce’s works of prose fiction.
The Parnell hearings bear striking similarities to the trial of a French army officer, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, in 1884. Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer in military intelligence headquarters, was accused of offering secret information to the Germans. The accusation was based on a single document, a bordereau recovered by a French spy in the German embassy in Paris. Dreyfus was found guilty of having authored the bordereau, was convicted of treason and sentenced to a solitary prison cell on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. The circumstances of his conviction and imprisonment bitterly divided French society for many years afterward. In 1896, in the effort to prove Dreyfus’ guilt, another intelligence officer, Colonel Hubert Henry, forged a letter over the signature of an Italian diplomat exposing Dreyfus as a German spy. When the forgery was eventually discovered,
Henry slit his own throat. As for the bordereau, it was discovered to have been written by the commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy, who was never convicted. Dreyfus was freed in 1899, but never formally acquitted of treason.
The Dreyfus affair is the central political event of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, just as the history of Parnell haunts the pages of Joyce’s work. Both the Parnell hearings and the Dreyfus affair are based on letters falsely attributed to the accused. In the Dreyfus case there are actually two such letters: the bordereau, an authentic document written by Esterhazy, and the “faux Henry,” the letter forged in order to reinforce the condemnation of Dreyfus. The latter has its parallel in Pickett’s letter forged to incriminate Parnell. In both cases, the forger, once revealed, commits suicide, and the accused remains a troubled figure. The incriminating letters in both affairs are subject to detailed analysis of their handwriting and orthography, and to interpretations subject to the individual temperament and social position of the reader. For Proust and Joyce, the Dreyfus and Parnell cases respectively serve several literary purposes. The first has to do with the formal structure of the novel: each judicial case serves as a kind of ironic measure by which persons are defined according to their varying prises de position. Another has to do with the novel’s relation to historical and personal memory. Throughout Proust’s work the narrator is
haunted by what he calls “la faute inconnue” (II. 661), the unknown error which threatens to destroy the subject, just as, on the historical level, the unacknowledged source of the
Dreyfus case in anti-Semitism threatens to destroy French society. In Joyce, the Parnell case belongs to what Christine Boheemen has called the trauma of history, in which the ever- disappointed hopes for Irish self-determination correspond to the perpetual failures experienced by Joyce’s characters at a deeply personal level.
The final value of these trials for the novel belongs to the realm of theory; it has to do with the ambiguous nature of the letter and its unforeseeable consequences. From a
theoretical point of view, the incriminating letters raise fundamental questions of the signature and of the concept of authorship, whereas the question of who wrote what loses its primary relevance in the face of powerful social and political forces. As if solicited by such questions, both Proust and Joyce produce fictional letters in their works which serve as analogies to the doubtful documents produced in court. Moreover, in the work of both writers, the function of the author as an implicit presence in the work retreats progressively in the face of the enigmatic autonomy of the text, as if to acknowledge that the text has taken on a life of its own.
Let us look briefly at Proust’s treatment of the letters in the Dreyfus affair. In the Faubourg Saint-Germain, by nature an anti-Semite milieu, the letters are the subject of facetious remarks. Mme de Guermantes believes Dreyfus to be innocent but remains nonetheless in the camp opposed to him. Among other complaints against him, she considers him a bad writer:
En tout cas, si ce Dreyfus est innocent, […] il ne le prouve guère. Quelles lettres idiotes, emphatiques, il écrit de son île ! Je ne sais pas si M. Esterhazy vaut mieux que lui, mais il a un autre chic dans la façon de tourner les phrases, une autre couleur (II.
536).
In any case, if this Dreyfus is innocent, he hardly proves it. What idiotic, imbecilic, emphatic letters he writes from his island! I don’t know if M. Esterhazy is any better, but he has a better style in his turn of phrase, a different coloring.1
The prince de Guermantes is the first of this circle to learn that Col. Henry’s letter is a forgery. He reports to Charles Swann a conversation he has had with an officer close to the case, Gen. Beauserfeuil:
[Beauserfeuil] m’avoua que des machinations coupables avaient été ourdies, que le bordereau n’était peut-être pas de Dreyfus, mais que la preuve éclatante de sa culpabilité existait. C’était la pièce Henry. Et quelques jours après, on apprenait que c’était un faux. (III.107)
[Beauserfeuil] acknowledged that underhanded methods had been used, that the bordereau was perhaps not written by Dreyfus, but that the decisive proof of his guilt was the letter produced by Henry. And then, a few days later, this was proved to be a fake.
For the prince the exposure of Henry’s forgery is enough to convince him of a conspiracy against Dreyfus in the military hierarchy. He begins to read l’Aurore, the pro-Dreyfus paper,
when his wife is not looking, unaware that she herself is secretly a pro-Dreyfus sympathizer.
But even such a seemingly decisive fact as the discovery that Col. Henry’s letter is a forgery fails to exculpate Dreyfus. Even the Dreyfusards are divided on the significance of such evidence, some seeing Henry as an accomplice of the spy Esterhazy, others believing that so obvious a forgery was designed not to incriminate Dreyfus but, through its
transparently fraudulent character, to disculpate him. This wild divergence of interpretations recalls those made of the bordereau, which divided the handwriting experts: some saw it as the work of Dreyfus’ hand, others saw no resemblance between his handwriting and that of the bordereau, still others advanced the theory of “self-forgery,” holding that Dreyfus indeed wrote the document, but that he deliberately altered his handwriting in order to disguise his authorship of it.
In Proust, the full spectrum of opinions on the Dreyfus affair serves to delineate the specific nature of each character, especially in his or her relation to the social hierarchy. Thus Mme Swann believes in Dreyfus’ innocence, but sensing the danger of the affair to her precarious social standing, she is afraid that that her husband’s Jewish origins will be used against her, and so she begs him not to defend Dreyfus in public. The baron de Charlus laments that the affair has ruined “good society,” because now members of the minor provincial nobility are admitted to it merely on the basis of their nationalism, “as if a political opinion gave one the right to social standing” (II.290). With characteristic perversity, he proclaims Dreyfus’ innocence on unexpected grounds: since Dreyfus as a Jew is not really French, he cannot be convicted of having betrayed his country: « En tout cas le crime est inexistant, [il] aurait commis un crime contre sa patrie s’il avait trahi la Judée, mais qu’est-ce qu’il a à voir avec la France ? » (II.584): In any case the crime does not exist ; [he] would have committed a crime against his country if he had betrayed Judea, but what does that have to do with France?
As for the Duc de Guermantes, he is an anti-Dreyfusard not from any conviction of Dreyfus’ guilt, but from simple solidarity with his class. It is on these grounds that he condemns the pro-Dreyfus sympathies of his nephew, which put at risk his nomination to the exclusive Jockey Club : « quand on s’appelle le marquis de Saint-Loup, on n’est pas dreyfusard, que voulez-vous que je vous dise ! » (II. 532): When you are the marquis de Saint-Loup, you can’t defend Dreyfus, what else is there to say! But later, when the duke spends a few days at a spa surrounded by charming women who make fun of his position, he returns to Paris as a defender of Dreyfus. To the astonishment of his friends, he declares,
“Well, he will be re-tried and acquitted; you can’t convict a man who hasn’t done anything wrong” (III. 137). Finally, when his newly acquired sympathies lose him the election to the
presidency of the Jockey Club, he returns to his original position an opponent of Dreyfus, blaming the case for having caused “so many misfortunes” (III.549).
The divergent and changeable views of the Dreyfus case thus take place on two levels. The first is that of textual interpretation, where the experts fail to agree on either the authorship of the bordereau or the meaning of Henry’s forgery. The second, as we have just seen, is the wide range of opinion which the case, which rests solely on these documents, produces in the society frequented by Proust’s narrator. A similar multiplicity of meanings is produced by the figure of Parnell in Joyce’s Dublin. In “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” Joe Hynes’ poem on the death of Parnell evokes a range of responses according to the various sympathies of his listeners. The nuances of these responses have rarely been remarked upon. There is a silence following Hynes’ recitation and then a prolonged applause. “Even Mr Lyons clapped,” we learn, acknowledging Lyons’ opposition to Parnell as a proven adulterer (D 132). O’Connor, who wears an ivy leaf in his lapel in memory of Parnell, is moved by the recital, and has to hide his emotion as he says, “Good man, Joe!” Henchy, whose loyalty to the memory of Parnell has proven to be unreliable, nonetheless seizes the occasion to challenge the conservative Crofton: “What do you think of that, Crofton […] Isn’t that fine ? What?” (D 133). The last word, reported indirectly, is left to Crofton, whose judgment is confined to the literary quality of the poem: “Mr Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing” (D 133). In this manner Joyce shows us the various shades of opinion on the figure of Parnell even on Ivy Day, and even among canvassers for a candidate of Parnell’s party.
A more explosive difference of views occurs during the Christmas dinner scene in Portrait, where the principal actors take extreme versions of the respective positions held in
“Ivy Day.” There, the mourning of Parnell’s death, poetically expressed by Joe Hynes, is given full vent in the speeches of the Fenian Casey. Casey has defended Parnell against the attacks
of the Church by recalling “the language with which the priests and the priests’ pawns broke Parnell’s heart and hounded him into the grave” (P 28). As the quarrel with Mrs Riordan reaches its emotional climax, he breaks down: “Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!”
In “Ivy Day,” Lyons has condemned Parnell’s moral character: “Do you think now after what he did Parnell was a fit man to lead us?” (D 129). In Portrait this position is taken up with a vengeance by Mrs Riordan, who declares of Parnell, “he was no longer fit to lead. He was a public sinner” (P 26). As her own emotions build to a climax, she turns from the door to cry out in rage, “Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!” (P 33). Finally, the tears that O’Connor fought back in « Ivy Day » are freely shed by Simon Dedalus in Portrait:
“Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears” (P 33).
Although the action of Ulysses takes place thirteen years after Parnell’s death, his name is invoked in seven of the eighteen episodes, notably (in Hades and Eumaeus) by persons who believe he will return from the dead, or that he never really died. In general, the memory of Parnell serves as a kind of symbolic anchor for the drifting impulses of Irish Home Rule, keeping alive the idea of Ireland as a nation even if, as Bloom observes, “Ivy Day [is] dying out” (U 6.855). As in the earlier works, however, the various ways in which Parnell is remembered serve to define the social and political position of the rememberer, from Hynes’ mourning, enacted once more at the rude tomb of the Chief in Glasnevin cemetery, to Simon Dedalus’ joke about Parnell’s brother John Howard: “Simon Dedalus said when they put him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the grave and lead him out of the house of commons by the arm” (U 8.517).
It is in Finnegans Wake, however, that Joyce for the first time directly confronts the questions raised by the Special Commission hearings on Parnell in 1888-1889. Let us recall the main elements of the story: the Times series of 1877 on “Parnellism and Crime,” with its
publication of letters linking Parnell to the Phoenix Park assassinations, the formation of the Special Parliamentary Commission, the exposure of Piggott’s forgeries, his flight to Madrid and his suicide. The decisive moment of the hearings came during Sir Charles Russell’s cross- examination of Piggott on the subject of a letter dated 9 January 1882—four months before the assassinations—which had Parnell admonishing his associates for their inaction: “What are these fellows waiting for?...Let there be an end to this hesitency.” In court, Russell asked Piggott to write the word “hesitancy.” Piggott misspelled it, with a second “e,” precisely as it had been misspelled in the letter. Confronted with this evidence, his self-contradictory explanations drew laughter from the gallery. In the Wake, this moment is celebrated in the chapter on Shem the Penman, himself accused of forgery, who brings down the house amid cries of "Bravure, surr Chorles! Letter purfect!” (FW 181.02).
These proceedings are evoked in fragmentary form throughout Finnegans Wake, beginning with the second chapter, which is rife with allusions to the Phoenix Park murders.
Among other things we are told how on the Ides of April (the 13th, i.e. the day of 1883 on which the Phoenix Park assassins were found guilty), a “cad” asks HCE the time of day. For the latter, “Hesitency was to be evitated” (FW 035.20), just as Parnell has admonished his associates in the letter forged by Piggott, and with the same misspelling. Near the end of the chapter the connection between Piggott and Parnell is given a musical flavor. The flute which accompanies the Ballad of Perse O’Reilly is described as “that onecrooned king of inscrewments, Piggott’s purest” (FW 043.32), as if to make Parnell, the “uncrowned king” of Ireland (U 16.1496) the forger’s instrument in a song about the king’s fall.
This is only the first of a series of plays on the word “hesitancy” throughout the Wake. In the “Night Lessons” chapter (II.2), Shaun justifies having just hit his brother in the eye on the grounds of Shem’s literary efforts: “And that salubrated sickenagiaour of yaours
have teaspilled all my hazeydency. Forge away, Sunny Sim!” (FW 305. 03-05): that
celebrated, sickening signature of yours has dispelled all my hesitancy. The line associates the celebrated signature of Joyce, or “Sunny Jim,” with that of Lord Byron, author of The Giaour (1813), Stephen’s literary hero in Portrait. But by means of yet another misspelling of
“hesitancy” it also associates him with the forger Piggott. The distinction between forgery as fraud and forging as creating, as in “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (P 213) begins to break down. When Shaun adds, “I’m only out for celebridging over the guilt of the gap in your hiscitendency” (305.08-09), this time the hesitancy belongs to the writer: it is a sign of the guilty knowledge that celebrity can only bridge over the void at the center of literary creation. There is something fraudulent at the heart of it. Joyce here implicitly calls into question the nature of the signature as signifying the origin and
authorship of the literary work, as if it were no longer his own, as if he had reached a point where he could only stand witness to the spectacle of language shattering and reforming itself into a new universe. Something like this feeling of seeing the work take on a life of its own must have been at the origin of Joyce’s idea that someone else, like James Stephens, could complete it (Crispi, Slote 28).
Both Proust and Joyce produce analogies in their fictions for the forged and
misattributed letters of the Dreyfus and Parnell trials. When Proust’s narrator is at Venice he receives a telegram from his former lover, Albertine, whom he had believed dead. He reads the telegram as follows. « Mon ami, vous me croyez morte, pardonnez-moi, je suis très vivante, je voudrais vous voir, vous parler mariage, quand revenez-vous ? Tendrement, Albertine » (IV.220): My friend, you think I am dead. Forgive me, I am very much alive, I want to see you to speak of marriage. When are you coming back? But the narrator who has so bitterly mourned the loss of his lover now discovers that he no longer wants her, because
since her supposed death he has become someone else. If Albertine has died and come back to life, his former self also has died and been replaced by another self. The telegram thus has the effect of destabilizing his sense of self as a continuous being, and this instability applies to the other persons of the narrative as well. On the train back to Paris, he receives a letter from Gilberte Swann telling him that she has sent him a telegram. This causes him to look again at the telegram from Albertine, studying it as closely as the experts studied the bordereau in the Dreyfus case, but with a different conclusion. Supposing now that the telegram was copied from a note written by Gilberte, he now detects several errors of misreading on the part of the telegraph employee due to the peculiar nature of Gilberte’s handwriting. In particular, her “G” looks like a gothic “A,” and the rest of her signature could easily be misread as Albertine (III.234). The telegram is from Gilberte, not Albertine, who does not want to marry the narrator but rather to talk to him about her plans to marry Robert de Saint-Loup. In the Dreyfus case, the discovery that the bordereau had been
unjustly misattributed changed nothing for the accused: the judges refused to habilitate him.
In Proust, a document is similarly misattributed, with the narrator’s judgement that even if Albertine is alive, she is already dead for him. Moreover, this passage recalls an episode in the first volume of the Recherche, where the narrator receives a letter from Gilberte, whose signature is misread by Françoise, the narrator’s housekeeper, as a name that could be
“Albertine,” precisely because the unusual form of the G looks like an A, and the final syllable is indefinitely prolonged (I. 493). Such correspondences prove to be part of the system of echoes in the Recherche, where every important incident is preceded, perhaps by hundreds of pages, by another incident apparently without importance.2
It is often thought that Albertine is a figure for Proust’s lover Alfred Agostinelli, but there is also reason to consider her a fictional spinoff of Alfred Dreyfus. Like Dreyfus, she is a
prisoner, confined to the narrator’s apartment for her supposed betrayal in having female lovers. Even after her death she continues to be suspected of this “vice,” and, like Dreyfus, to be the object of incriminating letters of doubtful veracity designed to establish her guilt.
In a perverse form of mourning, the narrator becomes obsessed with knowing whether Albertine indulged in homosexual relations while she was alive. He sends his servant Aimé to investigate, first by interviewing a female bath attendant at Balbec, and later a laundry woman in Nice. In both cases the testimony of these women, as reported in letters from Aimé, is damning. But the evidence remains inconclusive. The narrator remembers his grandmother having said of the bath attendant that « C’est une femme qui doit avoir la maladie du mensonge » (IV.101): the woman is a pathological liar. Of Aimé’s letter concerning the laundry woman, the narrator suspects that « qu’Aimé n’était pas très véridique et que voulant paraître avoir bien gagné l’argent que je lui avais donné, il n’avait pas voulu revenir bredouille et avait fait dire ce qu’il avait voulu à la blanchisseuse »
(IV.110) : Aimé was not very truthful, and wishing to be seen to have well earned the money I gave him, he hadn’t wanted to come back empty-handed and had made the laundry woman say what he wanted her to say. This would make the status of Aimé’s letters similar to that of the “faux Henry” insofar as they are written to produce false evidence against the accused. As in the Dreyfus case, however, the letters fail to establish definitively either guilt or innocence.
Having been a prisoner in the narrator’s apartment during her last months, Albertine remains a prisoner in the narrator’s mind after her death; at Venice he feels that
« l’Albertine d’autrefois, invisible à moi-même, était pourtant enfermée au fond de moi comme aux « plombs » d’une Venise intérieure » (IV.218): the Albertine of old, though invisible to me, was nonetheless confined deep inside me as if in the leaded prison [i piombi]
of an interior Venice. In this figurative manner, a communication from Albertine is like a letter from Dreyfus in his faraway island prison. Moreover, if with Lacan we consider
exclusive heterosexuality to be the law of the Father, then Albertine’s lesbianism would be a form of treason against the sexual fatherland. In any case, despite a truly hysterical series of interrogations and stratagems on the part of the narrator, he has no more success in proving Albertine’s betrayal than Dreyfus’ prosecutors had in proving his.3
The motif of the forged or misattributed letter is raised humorously in Ulysses, in the case of Bloom’s clandestine correspondence with Martha Clifford, which he carries out under the assumed name of “Henry Flower.” Reading her letter in the Lotus-Eaters episode, Bloom is struck by her errors of either spelling or grammar, as when she writes, “So now you know what I will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote” (U 5.252-53). “Wonder did she wrote it herself” (U 5.268-69) he asks himself. If the name “Martha Clifford” has the same status as “Henry Flower,” it is not the real name of the writer. But, alerted by an error, Bloom asks the further question as to whether the person signing herself (himself?) as Martha Clifford is in fact the author of the letter. Just as in Proust, a seemingly trivial incident in Joyce can be reproduced much later in another form and with greater
consequences. The error in Martha’s letter is thus echoed, as we have seen, by Piggott’s fatal spelling error in the Parnell hearings, as retold in Finnegans Wake.
In the Wake, the misattributed letter also has its counterpart in the letter of ALP, which seems inspired by all letters of uncertain authorship and destination that are subject to multiple and contradictory readings. The bordereau in the Dreyfus case was retrieved from a wastebasket by Marie Bastian, a spy working as a cleaning lady in the German Embassy. In similar manner, ALP’s letter is uncovered by a hen in a midden heap. Both documents are of uncertain authorship. In Finnegans Wake the letter is introduced as ALP’s
“mamafesta memorializing the Mosthighest” (FW 104.04), but it is later referred to as a
“Letter, carried of Shaun, son of Hek, written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun” (FW 420.17-19), in a passage where it proves undeliverable to numerous Dublin addresses formerly occupied by James Joyce. Like the bordereau and the telegram thought to be from Albertine, the letter of ALP is closely examined as a visual and material object. This includes the handwriting, where “The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture” (FW 107.07), as if it were written in barely decipherable ancient runes. This observation is followed by an allusion to the bordereau in the Dreyfus case:
Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along (FW 107.23-27).
The passage goes on to say that “under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contraries eliminated, in one stable somebody” in a manner similar to the way “our social something bowls along bumpily” down the line of generations (FW 107. 27-35). As Proust does so implicitly, Joyce here explicitly raises the question of the relation between the signature on one hand, understood in the larger sense as the principle which guarantees the authorship of “one stable somebody,” and the form of society, our
“social something,” which is both ill-defined and subject to shocks like that of the Dreyfus case. What is the status of the writing subject where that subject is a changeable entity in a world where language itself is always in some sense borrowed or cited?
By raising such questions, both Proust and Joyce imply their respective predicaments in relation to their work. In the closing pages of the Recherche, Proust’s narrator reflects on
the work he is writing, presumably that which will become the work we are reading. This work is subject to many of the same conditions that apply to the documents produced in the trials of Parnell and Dreyfus. There is for example the possibility of misattribution, which bothers not so much the narrator as his maidservant Françoise. She warns him against exposing his ideas to his friend Bloch, because every time he does so, Bloch claims to have had the same idea himself, and goes home to write it down that evening. Like the bordereau and the letter of ALP, the narrator’s manuscripts are treated as visual and material objects.
When Françoise finds that insects have attacked them, she says, “It’s all moth-eaten, look, here’s the edge of a page that is nothing more than a piece of lace.” Examining it like a tailor, she says, “I don’t think I can mend it, it’s lost. Too bad, those might have been some of your best ideas” (IV.611).
At this point in Proust’s work, the Dreyfus case survives principally as that which the narrator no longer wants to write about. The Dreyfus affair had coincided with a so-called
“realist” movement in literature that urged the writer to “come down from the ivory tower”
and write about the worker’s movement, or about heroes and noble intellectuals (IV.460).
But for the narrator such calls to duty merely provide an excuse for not writing about what matters most. His “research” now involves a work of deciphering much more difficult than that of reading a spy’s bordereau or a garbled telegram. He wants to decipher the signs, given to him through impressions of the material world, which would bring together the various selves that over the years have been dispersed through time in such a manner that the person he is today no longer recognizes who he was before. The document he must now interpret he calls “le livre intérieur des signes inconnus » (IV.458), the interior book of unknown signs at the depth of his being, a book which has remained intact despite his own transformations in time. “[I]l fallait tâcher d’interpréter les sensations comme les signes
d’autant de lois et d’idées, en essayant de penser, c’est-à-dire de faire sortir de la pénombre ce que j’avais senti, de le convertir en un équivalent spirituel. Or, ce moyen qui me paraissait le seul, qu’était-ce autre chose que faire une œuvre d’art ?” (IV.458): I wanted to interpret my sensations as the signs of laws and ideas, while trying to think, that is to bring out from the shadows what I had felt, in order to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. It seemed to me that the means of doing this was none other than by creating a work of art.
When Proust speaks of converting sensation into its spiritual equivalent, we run the risk of confusing his esthetic with that of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait, “a priest of the imagination” in his ambition of “transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life” in the form of art (P 186). But as used by Proust, the meaning of
“spirituel” is closer to the English “intelligible,” that which is apprehended in the mind, because his aim is not to sublimate sensation but rather to recreate and unite the various manifestations of sensory experience in the substance of language. In this respect Proust approaches the resolute materialism of Finnegans Wake, where Joyce is committed to unravelling the traditional distinction between body and spirit. This has consequences for Joyce’s treatment of such privileged concepts as the author and the signature. The
examination of the letter in I.5 involves an attempt to determine the identity of the writer based on the accretions of terricious matter and the teastains it has acquired “whilst loitering in the past” (FW 114.29). These material signs of the letter’s origin render the absence of the signature irrelevant. “So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?” (FW 115.06-08). This was of course the logic applied to the bordereau in the Dreyfus case, with disastrous consequences.
It did not matter that Dreyfus had not signed the bordereau; everything else pointed to his authorship of it. Nor in the present case does this reasoning identify the author of the letter.
But there is nonetheless something here that resonates with the writing of the Wake as a whole. It has the effect of emptying the signature of its spiritual or symbolic value as the privileged sign of an author, as, for example, in the case of the bibliophile’s fetish for a copy of Finnegans Wake signed by Joyce. Instead, the signature is reduced to a material trace like any other to be found on the page, including those that are there by accident. The reduction of the letter to its status as material trace, which is part of the history of the Parnell and Dreyfus trials, turns out to be the characteristic mode of Finnegans Wake, where symbolic meaning is consistently subordinated to the bodily sound of language as spoken, and its visual form as writing.
David Spurr
Université de Genève
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_____. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London : Random House, 1986.
Murakami, Yuji. « Gomorrhe 1913-1915 : Survivance de l’affaire Dreyfus dans le cahier 54. » Genesis 36 : 13 (2013). 79-89
Proust, Marcel. A la recherché du temps perdu. 4 vols. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Paris : Gallimard, 1989.
1 The translations from Proust are my own.
2 I thank Audrey Cerfon for calling this correspondence to my attention, as well as the passage in volume IV on Aimé’s letters concerning Albertine.
3 The thesis that Albertine is a figure for Dreyfus is supported by Proust’s unpublished manuscripts. Yuji Murakami finds the following passage in cahier 54, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: “Après que tant de preuves si fortes, si précises, si nouvelles […] m’avait laissé incrédule, c’est à ces petits soupçons anciens et qui m’avaient paru alors si peu probant que je n’en étais pas resté inquiété, que je revenais, comme les adversaires de Dreyfus après tant de preuves, revenaient au vieux Bordereau […]. Et ces preuves anciennes d’une culpabilité possible d’Albertine me faisaient d’autant plus de mal qu’il y avait longtemps que je n’avais pensé à elles, et qu’elles avaient repris une sorte de nouveauté, comme les modes anciennes qu’on reprend.
(Emphasis mine).
