Flowers, Houses, People: Unfolding Proust's Japonismes

Abstract

JAPONISME WAS A SIGNIFICANT ELEMENT of Proust’s social life. This included passing connections with several prominent japoniste figures (such as Pierre Loti, whom Proust knew socially, as well as various impressionist and postimpressionist painters influenced by Japanese art), and many of his friends were passionate japonistes, notably Marie Nordlinger (who worked in Siegfried Bing’s studio) and “le Japonais de Passy,” Robert de Montesquiou.1 As this brief list suggests, japoniste social spaces were often gendered feminine and/or queer; even at the height of its popularity, japonisme was in certain respects identified with social marginality, subject to sexist and homophobic as well as anti-Asian attacks, which, especially around the time of the Russo-Japanese War, were often linked to anti-Semitism.2 While japonisme is less prominent in the narrator’s life in the Recherche, it does appear throughout the novel, as a number of scholars have thoroughly documented in recent years—from Albertine’s kimonos to the narrator’s bonsai metaphors to the paintings of Elstir’s japoniste period.3 Yet nearly all these critical accounts hold at least certain aspects of japonisme at arm’s length, the most common example being the décor of Odette’s apartment, with its “Oriental draperies, strings of Turkish beads, and huge Japanese lantern suspended by a silken cord (which, in order not to deprive her visitors of the latest comforts of Western civilization, was lit by gas).”4 Even critics who have approached the novel’s japonisme sympathetically and in depth have hastened to point out the vulgarity of Odette’s japonisme and to distance it from a more serious japonisme that might be attributed to the author or at least the narrator. And to be fair, many of the memorable appearances of japonisme in the novel do seem to be examples of other people’s questionable taste (the “Japanese salad” served at the Verdurins, for example). Accordingly, it has become a critical commonplace to distinguish between two japonismes in the novel: one a part of Belle Époque social history, the other informing the novel’s own more modernist aesthetics. The former is associated with objects and fashion, the latter with the author’s own literary and aesthetic sensibilities—to be found, respectively, in “Marcel’s story and the narrator’s japoniste discourse,” as Jan Hokenson has summarized (Hokenson 31).5