I didn’t have the chance, as a child and teenager, to go to theaters regularly. As a result, I fondly remember every rare theatrical evening, the thrill of the opening curtain, the solemnity of the three knocks. Later, thanks to journalist friends and other actors, I was able to perfect my wobbly culture of dramatic art which bears the marks of a fascination tinged with admiration for what is rare. Today, I rediscover a childlike reflex when I hold my ticket in hand before entering a theatre, moreover the Comédie-Française, where I hope to find the magic of the new, the beauty of snapshot and voices that carry a language that has never ceased to amaze me. Perhaps that is why my theatrical disappointments are so Homeric.
The Side of Guermantes had everything to excite my desire. French, Proust, a language, a promise. And hell! No curtain that preserves the mystery of what will be seen, but a minimalist decor, already offered, deflowered, without grace and goodbye to the three knocks! As if it was too brutal, as if it sounded too dominating-colonizing-white country, as if the martial sound could surprise or offend some sensitive spectators. The result is disconcerting: because the ceremonial three knocks is no more, it takes time for the audience to collect themselves, stop the chatter and enter the room. Time to get out of the hubbub to the sound of an electric guitar and an actor who interprets Cat Stevens – sorry Yusuf since the singer sided with the Islamists -, and why not? Du Yusuf to introduce Proust, you have to adapt well to modernity. And then…and then nothing. Yes. A massacre in order. We have to finish off Proust.
What is fascinating about this new trend in French culture, which consists of holding its nose to the great works of the past, is that it imagines itself to have innovated. I don’t know if the director Christophe Honoré wanted to pay homage to the contempt of Annie Ernaux who avenges his race from the PMU bar of his childhood by spitting on Proust, among other things, but if he thinks he has revolutionized Proust by angrily limiting it to wealthy idle snobs, it would be well to remind him that his predecessors have already played the game of slaughter.
After Aragon and Zhdanov
As soon as the Goncourt prize was awarded to Proust, Aragon went wild: “M. Marcel Proust is a young man full of talent and as he has worked well, we gave him a prize. Come on, that’s going to raise the draw. great deal for NRF. One would never have believed that a hard-working snob would be such a fruitful report. Good luck, M. Marcel Proust is worth his weight in paper.” Aragon, fellow traveler of the Communist Party who would have betrayed many friends, will no longer call Proust anything but the “worthy copy pisser” and will reduce his work to nothing. “janitor chatter”. The Side of Guermantes by Christophe Honoré does nothing else, exclusively highlighting this aspect and only this aspect. It would be necessary to meditate more often on Dali’s good word on Aragon before putting the leftist friends of the first in those, communists, of the second: “So much and so much ambition for so little arrival”… The cold war will try to to bury Proust a little more in perfect opposition to the socialist realism of Zhdanov, collaborator of Stalin, who castigates the beautiful, the free, the romantic. He prefers those flat militant tracts which would discourage any just literary mind from saving the widow and the orphan in a novel.
Proust is the Belle Epoque that ended up as butchers in the trenches, so it seems impossible to resuscitate him. Error of bounded militant! The misfortune of ideologues is that they too often forget that they only have one time, the time of a fashion. On the other hand, a work can be reborn, even if “a book is a large cemetery where, on most tombs, one can no longer read the erased names”, as Proust reminds us. Because a work speaks to us about human nature, dissects emotions, demonstrates the universality of feelings and reminds us that talking behind others’ backs is undeniably part of life, yesterday as today. Proust will always win in the end, despite vain attempts to bury him.
Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity