Chapter 2 - Proxemics (Proust)

Summary

Chapter 2 looks at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Belle Époque as an age characterised by the disintegration of existing hierarchies, norms, and conventions. I start out by considering the novel’s long-lost earliest drafts, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, to then focus on close readings of a series of encounters between Marcel, Charlus, Albertine, and Andrée. Tact, Proust’s novel suggests, can be interpreted as an egalitarian force, indicating an equilibrium between the people involved. At the same time, it can also be seen as a creator of power imbalance, and a marker of social distinction. This conflict gives rise to a number of questions: Is tact a moral or an amoral category? Where do we draw the line between tact, hypocrisy, and lying? How do we deal with the uncertainty of interpretation as it begins to turn into one of the narrator’s most tantalizing concerns? Drawing on a variety of different theorists of tact (incl. Kant, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Sartre, Gadamer, Hall, Bourdieu, Goffman, Luhmann), I describe Proust’s tact as a paradoxical category that oscillates between autonomy and control, classification and declassification.