Proust Class and Nation

Writing in 1927 Julien Benda described France as being afflicted by the twin scourges of narrow class-based politics and rabid nationalism. He nevertheless identified Marcel Proust (who had died in 1922) as a writer who had refused to embrace the ideological narrowness of his age. Edward J.<br>Hughes seeks to assess how Proust and his novel <em>A la recherche du temps perdu</em> might be understood in relation to issues of class and nation. <em>A la recherche</em> was produced in momentous times. As an extended textual construction first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which appeared<br>posthumously almost two decades later it was assembled against a backdrop of major historical events: pre-war tensions in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and the Separation of Church and State (issues on which Proust had campaigned publicly); the First World War and the atmosphere of narrow<br>nationalism and Germanophobia which the conflict generated; and the continuing polarization in class politics in the years after the First World War. These all find echoes in <em>A la recherche</em> and Hughes establishes how the exposure given to questions of class and nation needs to be understood<br>historically. He demonstrates that the frequently entrenched positions of Proust's contemporaries at times square with the language and images of social conservativism to be found in <em>A la recherche</em>. Yet alongside that Hughes unearths evidence that points to Proust as a free-floating often playful <br>iconoclast and radical commentator who as Theodor Adorno observed resisted bourgeois compartmentalization.<br>