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COPYRIGHT 2002 Modern Humanities Research Association
En me disant adieu il me serra la main a me la broyer [...] et en continuant pendant quelques instants a me la malaxer [...]. Chez certains aveugles le toucher supplee dans une certaine mesure a la vue. Je ne sais trop de quel sens il prenait la place ici. Il croyait peut-etre seulement me serrer la main, comme il crut sans doute ne faire que voir un Senegalais qui passait dans l'ombre et ne daigna pas s'apercevoir qu'il etait admire. Mais dans ces deux cas le baron [de Charlus] se trompait, il pechait par excas de contact et de regards. 'Est-ce que tout l'Orient de Decamps, de Fromentin, d'Ingres, de Delacroix n'est pas la-dedans?' me ditil, encore immobilise par le passage du Senegalais. 'Vous savez, moi je ne m'intaresse jamais aux choses et aux etres qu'en peintre, en philosophe. D'ailleurs je suis trop vieux. Mais quel malheur, pour complater le tableau, que l'un de nous deux ne soit pas une odalisque!' (Le Temps retrouve, A la recherche du temps perdu, IV, 388). (1)
Charlus's wistful evocation, in Le Temps retrouve, of nineteenth-century Orientalist painting transforms the streets of wartime Paris into a forbidden harem interior. The term 'harem' is itself derived from the Arabic word for forbidden and sacred, and just as the Orientalist painters of the harem paradoxically made visible what is, by definition, unseen, so too do Charlus's words and actions make visible a sexual identity that is intended to be hidden, namely his homosexuality. (2) I have discussed elsewhere how this particular passage is both shot through with, and framed by, suggestions of an 'exotic' and, according to contemporary mores, deviant form of sexuality, suggestions that betray the true nature of Charlus's interest in the 'Senegalais'. (3) These suggestions, which are intensified by the comically revealing non-sequitur of 'D'ailleurs je suis trop vieux', do not, however, mean that Charlus is not interested in the object of his gaze 'en peintre'. On a number of occasions in the novel, the boundaries between sexual and aesthetic appreciation (unwittingly?) blur for Charlus, as becomes apparent in this particular instance if we consider possible pictorial sources for his words. (4) Proust may not, of course, have had a specific painting featuring both a black man and an odalisque in mind, but a consideration of those few well-known paintings by the artists mentioned that do feature both of these figures yields some highly suggestive parallels. Ingres's L'Odalisque a l'esclave depicts an Orient which is 'essentially feminine, incarnated by unclothed and languishing female beauties' and as with all of Ingres's Oriental compositions, is imbued with a 'profound voluptuousness'. (5) As such, this possible source would serve to underline the sexual connotations both of the passage from Le Temps retrouve and of its wider context. (6) Crucially, too, the black slave who appears in the background of Ingres's painting has his eyes averted from the odalisque, just as the Senegalese in the passage from the novel affects a nonchalant disregard for the would-be odalisque, Charlus. Moreover, if the trio in the scene in A la recherche du temps perdu does mirror that depicted in the Ingres painting, then the only role left for the narrator is that of the mandolin player. Arguably no more than a joking aside to the reader alert to the implicit presence of this pictorial source, it may also be a fanciful allusion on the part of the narrator-writer to the narrator-protagonist's as yet unrealized status as artist. (7) Whatever the significance of the narrator's role, however, Proust characteristically preserves the outlines of the painting but subversively reworks it, depicting a male odalisque and a homosexual drama, yet one that does not diminish the fact that this is also genuine aesthetic appreciation on Charlus's part.
However, if the dynamic between odalisque, slave, and musician in Ingres's languorous vision is a fitting embodiment of the scene enacted by Charlus, the Senegalese, and the narrator, the blend of furious, unbridled sensuality and violence that characterizes Delacroix's La Mort de Sardanapale, another celebrated painting featuring both odalisque and black slave, offers a more accurate reflection of what we are soon to discover about Charlus's masochistic sexual tastes. (8) In fact, it is only six pages later that the narrator witnesses Charlus being whipped in Jupien's 'Temple de l'Impudeur', an establishment that, extending this metaphorical paradigm, is itself referred to as a harem. (9) In an evaluation that echoes Charlus's masochistic pleasures, Christine Peltre describes the violent eroticism of Delacroix's vision as follows:
All fantasies become possible in this spatio-temporal never-never land. The besieged prince, reclining on a couch atop a pyre, has ordered the destruction of all the objects of his pleasure, and the spectator becomes a voyeuristic witness to an orgy of flesh, gold, and blood. The Orient shown here is not that of the anodyne 'blue sickness' that Gautier later ascribed to those nostalgic for Levantine azures; it manifests itself in a red torrent that traverses the scene on a diagonal and is echoed throughout by the artist, who kindles other cracklings on the necks and costumes. The passion already simmering in the 'massacres' of the Turks and the Greeks, in the sensuality of odalisques, here flares up in sudden conflagration. It is still easy to understand why the work gripped its original public, for few paintings achieve such a paroxysmic effect. Many interpretations of this manifesto-picture are possible. For one thing, it proposes a particular vision of the Orient, one 'that serves as an outlet for our secret desires [and] languishes, spends itself, kills for us.' But it also posits an ideal realm--ideal in the sense of distant and unknown--where outdated Western notions could be casually swept aside. (p. 89, my italics)
Physical and mental enclosure, voyeuristic urges, proscribed eroticism, and secret desires: these are the stereotypical associations and impulses surrounding the odalisque and, by extension, the harem as they are conceived by the Western imagination, and it is these that Proust plays upon, via the mediation of nineteenth-century Orientalist painting, to unmask Charlus's protestations of purely aesthetic or philosophical curiosity in the 'Senegalais'. Moreover, although this is the only occurrence of the term 'odalisque' in the novel, the image of the harem transcends this particular context, allusively evoked or explicitly recreated throughout the novel as a means to explore the problematic nature of love, the vagaries of human sexuality, and even the processes of artistic creation. I shall therefore examine, by reference to the three inter-related emblems of enclosure, eroticism, and voyeurism, how and to what effect Proust conjures up the harem.
The quintessential 'femme enfermee' in A la recherche du temps perdu is, of course, Albertine who, in La Prisonniere, is sequestered by the jealous narrator-sultan. (10) Drawing on, but also re-writing, a trope that was routinely used of the inhabitants of the harem, the narrator, on more than one occasion, describes Albertine as a caged bird but, in Proust's version, this is a bird whose plumage has faded as a result of being imprisoned: 'Une fois captif chez moi l'oiseau [...] avait perdu toutes ses couleurs' (La Prisonniere, ARTP, III, 678). Departing from the traditional image in this way, Proust highlights the fact that not only has Albertine objectively lost some of her vitality, but also that, from the narrator's subjective point of view, she has lost some of her appeal. This re-writing of the trope thus reinforces a key idea in Proust's portrayal of...
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