Charles Swann and Leopold Bloom

A Frenchman, an Irishman and a Jew

My grandfather, Louis Schulz, was not alone in the summer of 1914 in wondering what would become of the Jews in Europe. On either side of what was about to become the western front, two very different men were in those weeks writing the narratives that would come to define the modern age. In each case, they wished to write about the reality of their contemporary lives, and to capture a sense of the wholeness of life. They both took extraordinary care to put the place of Jews among their first themes.

It would be a number of years before they heard of each other, when they had each already written their major works. They met only once, briefly, and they appear to have taken little interest in what the other had done. Their styles of writing were polar opposites. One was chatty, social, familiar, personal, neurasthenic, speed-written alone on caffeine and pharmaceuticals in the dark of night in a padded cell. The other was tight, formal, filigreed, soaked in symbolism, written in ultra-slow-motion on white wine and tobacco amid the commotion of a family table in the afternoon. Yet their two great Jewish characters are so close in conception that they could swap novels and it might be a while before anyone noticed. Their names, as poetry, are differentiated only at a technical level, in rhyme and scansion. Iconically, as objective correlatives of moral ideals, they are identical. It is as though anyone of exceptional genius who took to writing a book in 1914 would think it obvious to beatify a Jew.

Charles Swann and Leopold Bloom are intelligent and artistic, but not artists, not exceptions. They are decent and kind, but with some vulgar inclinations, as is right for quixotic personalities. They are each the father of an only daughter. Both are married to Gentiles in complicated, somewhat distraught marriages, and in both cases their wives scarcely pretend to be faithful. They are beautiful, but they are damned. They are endlessly involved in the life of their crowded cities, but they end alone. Stephen Dedalus will make Bloom the conscience of his race, but he doesn’t stay the night and is disinclined to return to give Molly piano lessons. Bloom will never again have a father or a son. When Swann dies, Odette quickly uses his money to marry into the mock-aristocracy, and Gilberte adopts the idiotic name of her step-father, de Forechette. Reading a report of Gilberte’s marriage to Robert de Saint Loup, though the newly weds live on his fortune, in his family house at Combray, Marcel and his mother realise there is nothing in the article to suggest that Swann had ever existed. Every trace of him is gone. His death is a vanishing.

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Joyce’s Jewish Upbringing

On the day my father was born, James Joyce, five years younger than my grandfather, had been 10 years in Austria Hungary. Being of the generation that first heard the news that God was dead, both Joyce and my grandfather were apostates. In both cases, because they were provincial and it had come to them young, it hit them hard. They both associated the experience with meat, one with the fat and comfort of roast-lamb, the other with the spicy temptations of pork. Neither at any time felt the slightest doubt at their decision, and if they both remained fascinated with the histories and symbolisms of their respective religions, both remained profoundly atheist and militantly anti-clerical.

When war broke out, James Joyce and my grandfather both had wives and two children, a boy and a girl, and as is right for men in their early thirties, they were both settled into their careers, even if they had not got far with them. Above all, they were both fascinated by the idea of nationality and how it affected European Jews in general, and Hungarian Jews in particular. Where they differed was in the way they imagined the needs and potential that a future of nations appeared to present. My grandfather’s interest was geo-political, while James Joyce examined the subject in the microcosms of personality, family and community.

It was in those same weeks, in the high summer of 1914, that Joyce began in earnest to write Ulysses. The central figure, Leopold Bloom, is a namesake of my uncle. His father, Rudolph Virag, is a Jew from Szombathely. Though it is on the other side of the Danube, it is on the same plain as Trnava, less than a hundred miles south of Bratislava and Vienna, a hundred and fifty miles west of Budapest.

Why was Joyce interested in Jews? The first reason, as a writer, was that Jewishness fell to his need to describe himself – as we would say now, he identified with them. Joyce was nothing if not self-absorbed. Before he came to Austria-Hungary, which is before he met a Jew other than in passing, he had soaked up Matthew Arnold’s proposition of western culture being an alloy of two equal but opposite materials, Greek and Jew. He will have been struck to see the dialectic of his own public school education in Kildare, where his Jesuit masters instructed him in the lives of the patriarchs and the heroes, the dream-telling of Joseph and the story-telling of Odysseus, the interrogations of Socrates and the parables of Jesus.

As a young man – as a child – Joyce’ poet’s ear must have delighted in the curiosity of Dublin’s rare Jewish names, among which was Bloom, belonging to a dentist and his family. It is easy to imagine that Joyce might have wondered how someone with such a beguiling name would have been, as the Jesuits told him, the Devil’s spawn. Eventually, his defence of the Jews would become complicit in his rejection of the Society of Jesus.

Friedrich Nietzsche, whose books Joyce read in hand-me-down copies brought over by WB Yeats, described the sense of the two cultures in constant conflict. The Greeks are warrior-poets, living in a world of terror, destiny, drunkenness, promiscuity and battle. Life is borne through struggle and the pursuit of creative ecstasy. Virtue is success, reason is understanding, joy is the glade of the play-god Dionysus. The Hebrews, in Nietzsche, are the Greek’s moral and spiritual adversaries. Prophet-visionaries, their world is sober, foreboding, irrational-miraculous, contingent on the moods of an almighty Person-God. Life is borne through placation, which is achieved through incessant, repetitive worship and abject obedience. Virtue and success are conflicted, understanding is forgiveness, joy is purgation.

The weight of Judaic material in Christian culture was balanced by the ambiguity of Jewish status in Christian civility. The Jesuits taught devotion to the Hebrew, contempt of the Jew. The patriarchs and the prophets were the antecedents of Jesus, the Chosen who had foreseen Emmanuel, who had prepared the way for salvation. The Jews, rejecting Christ, turning from their destiny, were punished with dispersal, a people without a place, never belonging. Nietzsche reversed these traditional values. He detested the Hebrews and admired the Jews. The Hebrews were the doom-mongers of ‘slave morality’, the piteous victim mentality that became Christianity, worshipping death and fascinated by apocalypse. The modern Jew, the modern assimilated Jew, was literary, polyglot, inquiring, passionate, outside the banalities of nationalism, the original European. The Nietzschean Jew was where the young James Joyce wanted to awake.

The precarious place of Jews in Gentile Europe was a mirror of the vulnerability of Irish Catholics in Protestant Britain. The Home Rule movement adopted the language of the original Hebrew liberation narrative, seeing themselves as Irish-Israelites under the yoke of the English-Egyptians, with Parnell as Moses. Devotion to Parnell and Home Rule, till long after both were lost, was probably the only dignity that the profligate, drunkard John Joyce, James’s father, could claim. Although Joyce would dally with socialism, and would always be a deeply political writer, Parnellite Home Rule was the only political programme that he ever properly understood, a loyalty both to his father’s better side and to the deeply admirable reason and decency of the movement. Those of us educated by Evangelicals will always wonder what Joyce would have written had he read as a child the story of Jacob and Joseph in the King James Bible.

Later, as a young writer, he is likely to have wanted Stephen Dedalus to be the pinnacle of Irish-ethnic character, which would mean his mentor, for that moment his superior, had to be some kind of stranger, in a similar way to that in which Odysseus is a stranger, in the surface-time of the Odyssey, to his son Telemachus, or as the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen became the artistic father-figure to the younger Joyce.

Casting a Jew as his leading man had novelty value that it is hard to appreciate today. Prior to Joyce and Proust, it is possible to count on the fingers of one hand the major contemporary Jewish characters in western literature. In English, he is the first since Barabas to take a main role, while his personality could not be more different to those unruly, ill-matched twins, Fagin and Shylock. Daniel Deronda …. It was such a new thing that the book’s earliest boosters, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, both native anti-Semites, seem hardly to have noticed, as though it was so far out their literary expectation that they were unable to see it. It was so much overlooked that though Joyce was asked why Bloom is from Hungary, he was never asked why he is a Jew, or if he is a Jew.

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Within the Exile, the Exile Within

Trieste might have had to do for Sunny Jim, but for Stephen Dedalus, following his mythic call, Paris is the location of art, where he will go to forge the conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul. Paris is the life-forming antithesis of paralysed Dublin. It is zingy lemon in the curd of Sandycove milk. The sin of Paris is so gorgeous and warm that the literary forger has to shelter in the library of Saint Genevieve, night by night, equally frightened and fascinated by the obscene photographs sold after dark on the boulevards. Dublin is the nightmare of history, Paris is the prose poems of Mallarmé. Shakespeare’s journey from virgin Stratford to corrupt London will be retold by Stephen’s journey from dear dirty Dublin to Paris the wellpleased pleaser. His strategy to get his smithy-work done is to watch his step, preferably living quietly abroad, or as Joyce put it, after Balzac, through silence, cunning and exile.

When Joyce left for Paris in 1902, it was with visions of Dante being thrust from Florence, expelled by the treacherous and unthankful, forced to wander like a Jew while he wrote the sure verses that would render his enemies the laughing-stocks of the next millennium. Exile shaped Joyce’s mission, took him away from and out of the society he wanted to write about, a necessary condition for a man who wanted his writing to achieve ‘stasis’, who insisted on the primacy of epiphany over story, whose greatest works would cover only a day and a night, as though dipping an entire city into aspic. Exile allowed Dublin to cohere and stand still as a place in his mind.

Joyce daydreamt of Dante, but the writer he wished to emulate, whose message he meant to proselytise, was Henrik Ibsen, who wrote nothing, nothing that is remembered, before he left Norway to live in Rome. Before Hedda Gabler reached London, Joyce was preaching naturalist drama to Dublin with the zeal of a missionary, and other than the inspiration of a note of thanks from Ibsen himself, with the success of a prophet in his own country.

Joyce appears to have taken personally the reserved interest that naturally comes to the aspirations of the young, and his quick resentment at the slightest slight helped to seal his own determination that he too would be a writer who lived at a distance from both his subject and his readers. He would do as Ibsen had dared to do, he would free himself from the dense pettiness that is the bargain of a life engaged in a small home-town. In exile, great truths would spring out of him, and he would write them down for all to read. Ibsen – who like Joyce was married to a woman called Nora – became the core influence on Joyce’s literary imagination, the writer from whom he picked up the fundamental complication of truth, loneliness, art and exile.

Jews are the story of exile, and Joyce seems to have sensed that this would be truer in the coming century than ever in the past. In the autumn of 1902, when the tender, 20-year-old poet arrived in Paris on his artistic pilgrimage, he found a city that could hardly be less interested in Dante and Flaubert, but where the walls of the city were scrawled with racist graffiti, the newspapers boiling with forensic fact, angry invective and, Joyce’s favourite subject, accusations of treason.

It was only three years since the frustrating compromise of Dreyfus’s pardon. Though documents condemning him were known to be fakes, no court had acquitted him and neither guilt nor innocence were absolutely established. Feelings had scarcely cooled, the detail was fresh, the social and family divisions unresolved, pride and honour everywhere. At the Jockey Club, Charles Haas, the original of Charles Swann, was still refusing to speak to General Marquis Gaston de Gallifet, the Chief of Staff and War Minister who had agreed to a re-hearing. A few weeks before Joyce stepped out of the Gare du Nord, Anatole France, speaking at the funeral of Dreyfus’s great defender, Emile Zola, called him ‘a moment in the conscience of mankind’. The wounds were ripped open, outrage on one side, exultation on the other. The poet from faraway, visiting unnoticed, observed the Christian city obsessed with Jews.

Zola’s writing was too workaday to appeal directly to the ultra-high-aesthetic Joyce, but he appreciated that Zola’s struggling, petite-bourgeois characters, his contemporary frame and sexual-emotional honesty put him in the school of Flaubert. Zola’s defence of Dreyfus cast him, for Joyce, into the Ibsenist role of the lonely – though exceedingly famous – writer, hounded and driven to exile for standing for truth. Zola’s prose was sloppy, but he could just squeeze through as a descendent of Dante.

It would be nice to think that Joyce picked up the word ‘forge’ from the Dreyfus Case. Half the jokes in Finnegans Wake are about literature being forgery. What is likely is that the circumstances of the Case confirmed in Joyce a feeling for Jews as the metaphor for exile. Bloom, as a Jew, is an exile in Dublin, in the static city of Joyce’s memory, and therefore he can be Joyce himself, a Dubliner in exile refracted through an exile in Dublin.

Joyce understood very well the bleak vulnerability of exile. His life in Trieste with Nora and Giorgio was shockingly precarious, the little family blown from cold room to cold room. He knew the pain of depending on friends, and of being stuck in a single room with an argumentative wife and a balling child. But he admired in Jews the attributes that he felt were influenced by exile, the closeness of family life, a care for peaceableness and decency in treating with others, the importance of memory, the consolations of music. Jewishness embodied the mercurial, the unique and curious metal whose adaptability defies control, the antidote to deadly Dublin. Where there are Jews, as Momsen said, there is life.

But Joyce also relished, in his own fabulated identity as a Jew, the status of the victim. This was an expression, or a fulfilment, in part, of his sexual masochism – he turned to Venus in Furs more often than to Madame Bovary. The spoilt eldest child longed in his forbidden emotions to be a slave, to be punished and persecuted, to feel the whip. But this was not the whole cause. It fitted with other traits in his character, the anger, resentment and self-pity he aroused in himself at thinking how Ireland rejected him, and which nurtured the impulse to compose the sure paragraphs that would fix his betrayers as the laughing-stock of the next millennium.

Joyce’s resentment at Ireland, his sense of being ‘forced’ into exile, are long the object of derision. It helped him to write fascinating books, but it was ridiculously inflated. Still, it was not superficial. It grew from the root of Joyce’s definitive experience, apostasy. Joyce saw betrayal everywhere he looked, because he was himself a traitor. It was in treason, the sin for which Dante had condemned Brutus and Judas to the mouth of Satan, that Joyce found his closest identity with Jews. “Like a beast in its lair his soul had lain down in its own filth… .”

When Joyce returned from Paris, his mother was dying and Father John Creagh, director of the Arch Confraternity of Limerick, was preaching the same hate-filled sermon that Father Arnall had preached to his congregation of children in Portrait of the Artist.

They are the greatest enemies of the Catholic Church, they crucified Our Lord, and murdered the early Christians. They would kidnap and slay Christian children if they dared, said Father Creagh in Limerick.

Yes, they listened but would not hear. He was seized and bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes, crowned with a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the jewish rabble, said Father Arnall in Portrait of the Artist.

Joyce betrayed his mother, refusing her last wish, that he kneel and pray for her. He could do this because he had already betrayed God. Years later, in Trieste, in a discussion about national characteristics and the Deadly Sins, he would tell Oscar Schwarz that the Jews had none other than the supreme sin: they are the Killers of Christ. In this, Joyce and the Jews are identical. When he took a break from his mother’s deathbed to go out and buy a newspaper, he will have read of the Jews of Limerick harassed in their shops and assaulted in the streets. The betrayers betrayed, he would follow them out of religion, out of nation, into exile.

These are emotional-poetical identifications. Joyce did not think for a moment that modern men and women were in any sense responsible for something that may or not have happened in a faraway place two thousand years before, among a people with whom they may or may or not have had some cultural affinity. Joyce himself was not an exile in any material sense. He could have gone home when he liked. He was compelled by the power of the metaphor, which is alive to those with imagination. But he was concerned with the interaction of metaphor with consciousness, and of consciousness with social behaviour. This is to say, he was concerned with the politics of identity. Fathers Creagh and Arnall use metaphor to inspire conviction, and conviction to create identity, and identity to impel action, in the case of Father Creagh, to impel the innocent to attack the innocent, to turn peace into war.

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Is Bloom a Jew?

It is only now, in the past 10 years, that the significance of Bloom as a Jew has begun to be studied in detail. This has shown that Joyce paid immense attention to the theme, so that it can be argued that Ulysses is intended to be a study in identity. It is an argument reinforced by the observation that Bloom is a Jew in only one special sense.

Bloom is martrilineally Gentile, he is uncircumcised, he has never lived among Jews and he is uncertain and superficial in relation to Jewish culture. He speaks scarcely a few words of either Yiddish or Hebrew, he is uninterested in kashrut and is generally ignorant of both Jewish texts and spiritual observation. He was baptised as a Protestant as a young adolescent, by a father who was also a baptised Protestant, and who had long since given up all Jewish language, custom and behaviour. As a young man Bloom became a Catholic, and in the novel he neither practices nor has faith in any religion. He is an unmilitant, sceptical atheist. His behaviour, his manners, his interests, his employment and dress are indistinguishable from the Gentile community among whom he has lived his entire life. And it is from them, not the Jews, that he constructs his primary identity. His nation, he says, fairly and honestly, when asked, is Ireland. Joyce has carefully, parsimoniously removed every single attribute that could involve Bloom in being Jewish. All but one – which is race, or as we would say now, ethnicity.

There has always been reluctance in Christianity to accept the possibility of sincere Jewish conversion, usually illustrated by the refusal of Loyola to admit conversos to the Jesuits. But the emphasis on ethnicity makes Bloom a modern Jew. This is partly an understanding on Joyce’s part that race, rather than religion, was the issue of the coming age, and partly a reflection on what was already true of west European Jewry at the beginning of the 20th century. Jews were apostatising and assimilating, changes reflected in soaring rates of exogamy. In Dublin at the turn of the century, where the community was small and relatively isolated, nearly half of marriages involving Jews were to Gentiles. In Berlin the figure was about 25%. Those that married out did not always convert, and for those that did it was usually unmeaningful, and either way they dropped religion. They became Isaac Deutscher’s non-Jewish Jews. They became Charles Swann and Leopold Bloom.

The importance of limiting Bloom’s Jewish identity to ethnicity is that unlike any other ‘identifying characteristics’ it has not a single ‘objective identifier’. A linguistic community speaks a language, a religious confession adheres to this or that observance, a territorial community has geographic limits. But ethnicity has no certain and defining signifier of any kind. Race is relative. It is in the mind.

Bloom looks foreign – he is like my father, dark, Oriental – but not in a way that is obviously Jewish. He is a Jew because we think he is. It is an idea, derived from what has been told and heard. Not one character in Ulysses, including Bloom, has ever had direct contact with any act or artefact that would identify him as a Jew in any objective way. Bloom knows he is a Jew because he was told by his father. Others know because they too were told, by others. It is a narrative, a story. It exists only as memory. The reality is the perception. I remember therefore you are.

Bloom’s Jewishness could not be less. But its strength is extraordinary. Bloom is universally accepted as a Jew, by himself and by every character in the book, by Joyce and his model, Ettore Schmitz, by anyone who has the read the story with the slightest enlightenment, the least enjoyment. Britannica introduces Bloom as a ‘Jewish canvasser’, making it his first characteristic. David Ben Gurion felt it necessary to let it be known that – “The rabbis might not say that Bloom is a Jew, but I do.”

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Was Proust a Gentile?

Leopold Bloom is everywhere considered a Jew, though he is not one. Marcel Proust is accepted at his own word, that he was a Jew, though he most certainly was one. The two are even, in a curious way, connected. Ettore Schmitz, the model for Bloom-as-a-Jew, was from Schwabia, in Württemberg, which is where the Weils are from, Proust’s mother’s family. They had become French citizens when it was offered to Jews in Alsace by the National Assembly in 1793, the first time Jews had come to be included in numbers in France since the fourteenth century.

Though his father was Catholic-Gentile, Proust grew up in an atmosphere not far from that of my own father and grandfather. The Weils, like the Schulzes, invested in the compact of assimilation. They were French because that is where they were settled, and where lay their primary political and cultural loyalties. They were Jews where they adhered to religious tradition, in the same way, as they saw it, as Catholics and Protestants.

Proust’s father’s family were relatively few, and socially and economically modest. Adrien’s father died when he was a student, and his ‘inelegant’ mother was so awed by the prospect of Paris that she demurred even from her son’s wedding. As Adrien Proust pursued his exceptionally successful career, the Prousts lived largely in the folds of his wife’s family, mainly in Auteuil, the suburb of Paris where the Weils had come to live. Other than summers in Illiers, spent among Adrien’s family, their daily life was embedded in the intimacy of Jeanne Weil’s sprawling Jewish kinship. The Weils had ceased speaking Yiddish, but they sprinkled their conversation with Yiddish vocabulary. They had dropped meaningful, halachic observation, but they went to synagogue at Pesach and Yom Kippur. They adored their Parisian life, they loved being Jews.

Chief among them was the marvellously rich and fun-loving Louis Weil, probably the most significant older male in Proust’s childhood and youth. He had married wealth, and was widowed young, spending his life and his money much as do Swann and Charlus, living in a rather artistic splendour, a dandy, a gourmand, a collector of china, forever at the theatre, alive among the actresses. His favourite, perhaps a real love, was Laure Hayman, as fast and famous as the days were long. Louis is at his most avuncularly relaxed, with his silk skull-cap and hookah, as Marcel’s Uncle in Combray, who sleeps as the others walk. He makes a famous cameo appearance, in his gorgeous Paris drawing room, as the introducer of one of Hayman’s reflections, Odette.

Through Proust’s school life, his little clan was made up exclusively of boys like himself, intellectual, artistic, rich and Jewish – Robert Dreyfus, Fernand Gregh, Daniel Halévy, and Proust’s own first ‘inverted’ love, Jacques Bizet. At the edge of the little circle were Léon Blum and Horace Finaly, who would become respectively prime minister and director of Banque Paribas. It was not until Proust was in his twenties that he ventured out of this close, familiar network. Even then, among his lovers were Reynaldo Hahn and Robert de Flers. It was in the company of these same young men that Proust worked on La Banquet and La Revue blanche, miniscule art magazines in which the eager litterateurs published their first stories, and their first polemics against the ‘occult power’ of anti-Semitism.

The same Jewish circle saturates Remembrance of Things Past, not only in the personalities of Swann and Bloch, but as the source material for any number of characters. Uncle Louis, the Weils, the little circle from the Ecole, populate Combray and Balbec, and everywhere in Paris, turning up even as the duchesse de Guermantes. Among the Prousts, Adrien and aunt Elisabeth, who does a comic turn as the bedridden, hypochondriacal Eulalie, are all that get into the book.

Marcel is introduced into French aristocratic society through the chance of a single passing acquaintance between his grandmother, Bathilde, and Mme de Villeparisis, cousin of Palymede de Charlus and great aunt of Robert de Saint Loup. These are already friends of Swann, who is warm and welcoming, though he would never in the first place have thought to introduce his provincial neighbour to this grand Parisian crowd. Saint Loup has many sources, one of whom is surely Jacques Bizet, whose mother was the Jerry Hall of the age, Geneviève Halévy. Her father and her first husband both died young, and both left a classic of French opera, respectively La Juive and Carmen. She eventually married a banker, who provided the money for a salon which she peopled with A-list celebrities. She was Proust’s own Mme de Villeparisis, introducing him to Charles Haas, Robert de Montesquiou, Laure de Sade, Madelaine Lemaire and the comtesse Greffuhle. It is a peculiarity of literary history that this pretty, unhappy, sickly Jewish girl should have been the model for Carmen, the original working class hero, and that later she should have stood for the most powerful hostess in the Faubourg Saint Germain, Oriane de Geurmantes.

Bathilde is widely held to be the moral core of Remembrance. She has the virtue Proust admired above all others, she is sauvage. Marcel’s father obsessively checks the barometer, but his grandmother goes for crazy running-walks in the garden, her head bared, face out to catch the wind and rain. Her love for Marcel is true enough that she is pained to see his parents indulge him. She is utterly acute, impassioned and strong, yet she is a character built on quietness, a woman of humility and self-sacrifice. She is intelligence. She sees the simplest way, but she knows few will follow it, and understands the limits of reason, the importance of love. and is at a loss why no one will follow. Her devotion to Madame de Sévigné is exemplary of the consolation of literature, as she herself is exemplary of cultivated French muliebrity. But insofar as Marcel’s grandmother is modelled on Adèle Weil, her first language is Yiddish.

Remembrance is not a book about Jews any more than it is a book about homosexuals. Most of the Jews are reconstructed into Gentile-Catholics, and it is not obvious that there is more than specialist value in deconstructing them back into Jews. Those that are Jewish, Swann and Bloch, loom large in the story, as do the two archtypes of homosexuality, Charlus and Saint Loup. Neither theme takes over the book, which never loses sight of its course, the circumnavigation of French society, but they are emphasised to such an extent that they stand out as subjects on which Proust wished to write, subjects on which he found himself with a great deal worth saying. It can be no coincidence that the two main characteristics of Proust the writer that were not given to Marcel the narrator are Jewishness and homosexuality.

Proust wrote about Jews because he was one, just as he wrote about snobbery and homosexuality because he was a bitchy queen, and just as Joyce wrote about Dublin because that is where he came from. They did it because that is what good writers do, but they did it as the two leading lights of an age when the philosophy of individualism was at it most exciting. They did it because they believed in the metaphysical truth of the autobiographical, first person narrative.

Georg Brandes, who promoted Ibsen, Joyce’s idol, with his lonely-hero ideals, also promoted Soren Kierkegaard, the original iconographer of the concept of the individual as the only possible conduit of life. Brandes, who Joyce also admired, a Dane, a Jew, a philosopher teaching in Berlin, could have been the model of Nietzsche’s new European, and insofar as he was incorporated into Leopold Bloom, that is precisely what he was. Joyce took Nietzsche at his word and recreated himself as a self-born demigod. Jesus had no worldly father, Bloom has no mother.

For both Joyce and Proust, autobiography is the connection with life outside literature. In a relative world, the self is the only authority, perception is truth. Observation and induction are the first principles of science, and Remembrance and Ulysses are both observational and inductive. Had Proust and Joyce not insisted on the integrity, the urgency, of writing about themselves, they would have been unimaginably different writers. Bloom is not Joyce, Marcel is not Proust, but Ulysses and Remembrance are distinct in being conscious attempts to universalise the personalities of their authors.

Proust could say he was not a Jew, and in our sensitive age we would accept his right to self-identity. We do this because we are post-lapsarian. We know, now that scores of millions are dead, that identity is in the imagination, that it has whatever objective correlatives we choose to give it. Swann and Bloom are prelapsarian. Proust understood his rights, but they were the rights of the Great Revolution, the rights of the Rights of Man. It is a view deriving from Mendelsohn, where Judaism, a religion, is a choice, a denomination.

The ‘determinists’ would have thought such rights absurd. Leon Daudet, Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, that is to say, the founders of fascism, who Proust would meet at the parties of Mme Arman de Cast****, would no more have thought being Jewish a matter of individual decision than that a tree could see itself as a stream, and therefore be entitled to be seen as a stream by others. Proust could see himself however he liked, but just as the Citizen sees a Jew and not an Irishman, so there was always a backstream of guests at Parisian parties who saw Proust as a Jew.

In many ways they are right. We are free to imagine our identity, and most of the ‘characteristics’ commonly accepted as deriving from identity may be no more meaningful than those deriving from horoscopes, but we are born into social and ethno-linguistic categories as much as into a sign of the zodiac, some of them, such as language and pigment, just as ineluctable. Proust could consider himself not Jewish because, as it happened, language and pigment allowed him to do so. An African-American might be less connected to being African-American, to the gene-pool, to the community’s history, politics and culture, as Proust was to being Franco-Jewish. But if someone has only a small fraction of African pigmentation we require that they consider themselves ‘black’, and that is the only way we allow ourselves to see them. When Michael Jackson was thought to be whiting up, not necessarily for any deep or traumatic reason, but to see what life was like imagining himself as something other, the response was revulsion and ridicule.

Proust was not in denial and neither was he deluded. He knew a great deal of what it was to be Marcel Proust and he knew that Jewishness and homosexuality were of the essence – the ludicrous number of characters in Remembrance who turn out Jewish or gay has been described as narrative ‘vindication’. With Mme Verdurin’s apotheosis as the princesse de Geurmantes, and the birth of Swann’s granddaughter, daughter of the queer Saint Loup, French society becomes Marcel Proust - a queer Yid.