Proust before Fascism

Abstract This article analyzes readings of Proust from the 1930s to the 1950s, a period when his work was supposedly forgotten. The first section examines passages by Céline, Kurt Wais, and Curzio Malaparte, for whom Proust’s fiction was symptomatic of the dissipation of the dominant classes. The second part of the essay turns to Benjamin, Bataille, and Blanchot, for whom his novel altered conventional notions of justice, desire, figural language, and the structure of time through the experience of writing. Across the political spectrum, readings of Proust pit the rhetoric of decadence against experience and experiment. The essay concludes that although the Recherche records political, social, and historical events—from the Dreyfus affair and a morphing class structure to the onset of the war—none of these readers saw it as an announcement of disasters to come.