What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk by Michael Lucey (review)

French modernism does not exist. To be sure, the period anglophone criticism calls modernism is marked deeply by literature in French from Baudelaire to Beckett, while the history of post-revolutionary France becomes an allegory of modernity, with its cycles of revolt and repression, and its antinomies of universality and particularity. Yet the absence of modernism as a heuristic category in French literary criticism, until quite recently, has meant that critics need to bring other contexts to bear on the period stretching from the Commune and the Belle Époque to World War I, the Front Populaire, and Vichy. Michael Lucey’s work has done so consistently by locating the “social forms of sexuality” and their modes of enunciation in French narrative from Balzac to Gide and Colette, all the way to Hervé Guibert. What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk—the latest and perhaps most capacious version of this conjunction between the study of literary form and sexuality—casts Proust as a linguistic anthropologist particularly sensitive to the work done by non-semantic forms of talk. The chatter of the salons, often considered a space of wasted time by much Proust criticism, is unfurled here as a teeming, lively world of micro-distinctions. “Language-in-use” indexes the quest for difference in a time of equality, normality, and standardization, not to say domination. Proust’s novel thus constitutes a form of research that pivots between what is otherwise called realism and the experimental postwar novel. Beyond Proust, Lucey’s book takes forays (or “interludes,” as he calls them) into Balzac, George Eliot, and Woolf, on the one hand, and Nathalie Sarraute and Rachel Cusk, on the other. Shifting focus from Saussure and Jakobson back to Michel Bréal, Antoine Meillet, Jules Gilliéron, and Charles Sanders Peirce, Lucey draws on fin-de-siècle interest in semantics and pragmatics reconceived as social indexicality, which becomes the object of metapragmatic research undertaken both by linguists and novelists. In plainer words, this means attending not just to the meaning of words and shifts in how they are used, but to how ways of meaning situate speakers on a slippery scale of relations and identities, from social class to sexuality. Proust was particularly sensitive to such verbal jousting as a triple outsider who delves into yet also distances himself from the world of the snob, the homosexual, and Jews, not to mention the nobility, the middle class, and the intelligentsia. Lucey’s most sustained theoretical resources are the late Michael Silverstein, a pioneer in linguistic anthropology and its theories of “language-in-use,” Erving Goffman’s participation framework, as well as Bourdieu’s conflicting notion of habitus and bodily hexis. The necessity of delimiting a context to read a corpus of writing that is not presided over by a concept like modernism means that criticism of French literature is perennially looking for alternative descriptive categories and periodizations, from the style classique moderne prized by the NRF to the arrièregarde and les antimodernes theorized by William Marx and Antoine Compagnon respectively. Lucey calls this process “entextualization,” borrowing a notion from linguistic anthropology, that is, showing how novels enact an enunciatory situation in order to renew the way we understand its performative capacities. Such strong contextualism renews the elocutionary performance of a text by expanding, narrowing or otherwise focusing its scale of reference beyond ordinary language. Readers of What Proust Heard will not only learn many fine-grained, incisive ways of speaking about speaking—social indexicality, meta-pragmatics, register shibboleths, footing— but stand to reconceive what it means to speak—“the work that talk does”—both in novels and in the world. In an era when the massive harvesting of metadata and algorithmic curation threaten to further capture and commodify how we speak, write, and think, Lucey’s remarkable transposition of linguistic anthropology and novel theory makes one almost grateful that so few people talk about French modernism in the first place. ZAKIR PAUL New York University