Framing the affair: Proust and the Dreyfus affair

Marcel Proust's In Search ofLost Time is not strikingly political in any normal sense of the word "political." But a close examination of the text finds that Proust's narrator is concerned with politics. It is through the novel's representation of the Dreyfus Affair that this political interest is most apparent. The Dreyfus Affair serves a number of functions within Recherche. In Within a Budding Grove and Time Regained, the Affair appears merely as an illustration of the social kaleidoscope. The narrator uses the Affair to illustrate why an author must retreat from society in order to create the work of art. This work of art may then contain general truths that can substitute for the author's involvement in politics. In The Guermantes Way and Sodom & Gomorrah (and a rare appearance in The Fugitive), the narrator critiques idealized conceptions of political influence, truth, and change. The narrator shows that motives are ambiguous and tenuous, and that the "truth" in politics is always elusive. This leads him not to political cynicism, but to a conception of politics that sees the instability and unpredictability of society as having positive and negative effects.