Modern Language Studies
Proust's "japonisme": Contrastive Aesthetics
Author(s): Jan Hokenson
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 17-37
Published by: Modern Language Studies
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Proust's japonisme:
Contrastive Aesthetics
JAN HOKENSON
No detail is single in Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, that "stately
cycle of repetition," as Henry Sussman termed the novel. Large motifs and
minute details recur, in patterns that establish a duologue of particular
and general, layering thematic constructs and interweaving such rhetorics
of stratification as those of law, science, ethnicity (Sussman 213-3). The
particular is freighted with thematics and, since Proust's protagonist is
also an apprentice learning his art, the largest aesthetic themes inform the
least detail. As Sussman suggests, aspects of an orchid or a brothel, for in-
stance, fit into the intertwined narratives of heterosexual and homosexual
romances. These in turn interrelate to "comprise entire counter-systems of
thought and structuration operational throughout the text," and produce,
among other things, parables of reproduction and autofecundity, or mod-
els of writing (222).
To read the Recherche as counter-systems of thought in this way is par-
ticularly useful when considering one pattern of details that has rarely
been noted in the Recherche: Proust's many references to Japanese arts.
Jean Rousset has shown how the allusions to the Mille et une nuits, those
childhood tales fantastically free of the time-space constraints of canoni-
cal French fiction, provide Marcel with a literary model, first encountered
on the dinner plates at Combray and only much later understood as a
prose alternative to realist fiction. However, to assume that every refer-
ence to "orient" indicates "Proche-Orient" is to miss the parallel pattern
of allusions to the "Extreme-Orient" of Japanese visual arts. Proust's larg-
er, overarching structure combines both sets of Oriental arts, the Arab
tales and the Japanese arts, into a counter-system of non-European aes-
thetics active throughout the text. The Japanese allusions in particular
Modem Language Studies 29.1 @Northeast Modem Language Association
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18 PROUST'S JAPONISME
function contrastively to hig
thetics (thus replicating th
ukiyo-e, the Japanese prints)
writing.
Klaus Berger describes a mom
at the end of the illusionist or
admitting, "I had come to the
ley," 2). Like Gabriel Weisbe
japonisme as a sudden visual i
prompting "the recognition,
an Eastern way of seeing" (3)
Paris in about 1862 they set o
crested decades later, moving
like a craze in the fin-de-si'c
nouveau, were currents in th
prints were dazzling: the str
reds and yellows, the simple
houetting, the indifference t
overlays and transparences.
that the phenomenon known
Contemporaries described it a
and Goncourt pronounced it
art historians echo Klaus Ber
Copernican proportions, mar
beginning of the modern.2
Like the painters, whom th
cism, writers also exulted at
things Japanese in A Rebours
in "Le Naturalisme au Salon,"
1 Philippe Burty coined the w
artistique et littiraire [May 1872
nese art and aesthetics (see Wei
differentiates between terms, art historians make the useful distinction that
japonisant designates someone who collects or studies Japanese arts without cre-
atively reworking them, and japoniste denotes someone who applies Japanese
principles and models in Western creative works. Thus the gallery-owner Du-
rand-Ruel was a japonisant but Monet was a japoniste. Champfleury coined the
noun japoniaiserie in 1872 as a pejorative term for what he considered mindless
popular enthusiasm for Japanese arts and curios, but the only surviving pejorative
is japonaiserie; thus Toulouse-Lautrec "did not lapse into mere japonaiserie." See
Berger 210.
2 See Edmond de Goncourt, Journal for 9 April 1884; Berger 1-2.
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JAN HOKENSON 19
Bonheur des dames and
Manette Salomon tries an
Zemganno among other
works.3 But Proust ove
reflexive use of the Jap
Through the three th
dimensions of Proust's
to conceal, beneath the
purpose of aesthetic inn
ship, learning the lesso
composers, and writers
unique literary creation
unconscious memory, t
text as his book of hum
have forgotten that in
metaphor, from a singl
cess-and the implied
comme dans ce jeu oi
bol de porcelaine rem
jusque-la indistincts
contoument, se colore
des maisons, des pers
meme maintenant ... l
cela qui prend forme
tasse de the. (1.47-48)
The narrator had been
dering whether the pa
sciousness. It is not s
3 The only extensive sur
William Leonard Schwartz's
Literature: 1800-1925 (Pari
iles and includes mention
In 1981 Elwood Hartman
"Japonisme and Nineteent
Studies 18.2 [June 1981]: 1
Japanese Tradition in Briti
More recently, Michel Bu
Japon depuis la France (Par
ed, Yann le Pichon publis
l'oeuvre de Proust" (Revue
tion of Proust's inspiratio
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20 PROUST'S JAPONISME
perhaps the single most cr
whole relationship-memory
out. But it is here, at the gat
eration of involuntary memo
phor for the bringing to con
homologue to the modernist
course of the novel, what ma
tiatory invocation of the Jap
of banal matter (paper bits)
of reality, at once imaginativ
for the man's art, this is a J
a French childhood resurrect
in the equally fluid elements
Proust weaves the vast tape
allusions. Readers have usu
historical markers of the er
chronicles the popular fancie
tine slinking in kimonos, M
a la japonaise," even Monsi
"chinoiseries de forme," o
modernist's Orientalism, tri
in the 1920's when japonisme
ture, William Leonard Schwa
Far-Eastern similes by Frenc
the Far East in Modern Fren
Proust as primarily a social c
accuracy (in 1879 Odette's ap
in 1887 she mixes Japanese
and French eighteenth-centu
affair she has only French
added that "Proust, like G
use of similes which depend
Japanese art" (106), quoting
And indeed it would have been difficult for Proust not to have encoun-
tered Japanese art. It was pervasive in a variety of forms in the salons
4 In 1997, while this article was in press, Luc Fraisse published his monograph
Proust et le japonisme (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997)
showing in fine detail the japonisant milieu of Paris in the Belle Epoque (Fortuny
gowns, Galle glass) as social background to the novel; Fraisse does not pursue
Proust's use of the Japanese aesthetic as a whole, primarily because of what he con-
siders Proust's habitual mixture of Orients-Japanese, Persian, Chinese-and con-
sequent absence of an "emploi exclusif du motif japonais" (37).
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JAN HOKENSON 21
he visited,5 in the conc
reviews he wrote for,6
friends he used as models for his own characters.7
Young Proust in 1890 sent japoniste comic verses to his friends, includ
ing the more somber "Ton esprit, divin Chrysantheme" (Cahier Marcel
Proust 120), which is a noteworthy bit of japonaiserie only because it show
Proust engaging, as more than passive spectator, in the Belle-Epoque craz
and casting his engagement into a proto-japoniste quatrain. Proust person
ally went to at least one japoniste painter's studio, Vuillard's atelier in Ca
bourg (the original of Elstir's "laboratoire"), and Vuillard made
drawing, now lost, of Proust, Montesquiou, and Delafosse at dinner in th
Bois in 1903. Japanese artistic interests were so strong among these grou
circulating around Montesquiou, Painter reports, that the Comte de Gruf
5 For instance, it was at Helene Bibesco's salon that he met Pierre Loti
(whom young Proust had proclaimed his favorite novelist-along with Ana-
tole France, another japonisant-and who was the author of the wildly popular
Madame Chrystantheme) and that he regularly talked with the japoniste painters
Bonnard and Vuillard (Painter 1.54, 57, 195). So reverent was his admiration for
the great japoniste Whistler, one of the originals for Elstir, that Proust surrepti-
tiously kept a pair of gloves the painter had left behind after their meeting at
Mery Laurent's villa. She and her famed lovers, Degas then Mallarme, had be-
come "converted," says Painter, "to Japanese art," and Proust was not the only
one who went to the villa to meet the leading practitioners of japonisme (Painter
1.218, Tadie 308).
6 For example, during the period when Proust was a member of the redaction
of Le Mensuel (November 1890 to September 1891) the review published, among
other japonisant pieces, an article in July of 1891 by Proust's friend Raymond Ko-
echlin about Edmond de Goncourt's new book Outamaro (Tadid 144 n.4). It was
Felix Fendon, long-time editor of La Revue Blanche, who coined the phrase "Bon-
nard japonard," and who directed many of the japonisant interests of the review;
see Joan Ungersma Halperin, Felix Fendon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siecle
Paris, New Haven: Yale UP, 1988: 232-4.
7 Robert de Montesquiou, for example, had been a noted collector of Japanese
art since first encountering it at the Exposition of 1878, schooling his taste with the
advice of Heredia, the Goncourts, and Sarah Bernhardt, as he recounts in his mem-
oirs Les Pas effacds. Montesquiou created a notoriously effete "oriental" sanctum in
his apartments on the Quai d'Orsay, possessed a wealth of fine Japanese artworks
plus five major books of Japanese art history by the 1920's, and employed the gar-
dener Hata to build a Japanese garden at his later residence in the Rue Franklin,
which Proust often visited, and then another at Versailles. (See Montesquiou 118,
123, 181-4, 216-24; Schwartz 92-3). Montesquiou is remembered less for such
japonisant poems as "Therapeutique" than for other writings and his role as literary
model to Huysmans and Proust.
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22 PROUST'S JAPONISME
fulhe's patriotism (and probab
lot of Japs,' he said, meaning
As a young man Proust was s
the evidence of his novel, learn
ic. His good friend Marie Nord
translate Ruskin, worked on J
lier (Cahier Marcel Proust 191
left France for America in 190
Bing (Painter 1I.25). She often
when he was feeling particular
she who gave him the cut-pap
suffering from asthma, and thi
raculous and hidden flowers'
tion of the season he dared n
childhood. 'Thanks to you,' he
Far-Eastern spring"' (qtd Paint
sai that in 1907 he ordered th
write a review of Anna de Noa
later in his novel (111.130), he
mensity that can be held with
and accurately identifies their
Nordlinger, "the Japanese dwa
tion" (qtd Painter 1.3). In the r
Je ne sais si vous me compren
reverie. Mais bien souvent les moindres vers des Eblouissements me
firent penser a ces cypres geants, a ces sophoras roses que l'art du
jardinier japonais fait tenir, hauts de quelques centimetres, dans un
godet de porcelaine de Hizen. Mais l'imagination qui les contemple
en meme temps que les yeux, les voit, dans le monde des propor-
tions, ce qu'ils sont en realite, c'est-a-dire des arbres immenses. Et
leur ombre grande comme la main donne h l'atroit carre de terre, de
natte, ou de cailloux oi0 elle promene lentement, les jours de soleil,
ses songes plus que centenaires, l'4tendue et la majeste d'une vaste
campagne ou de la rive de quelque grand fleuve.9
8 Samuel Bing was the leading importer of Japanese art from about 1874 to
1914, as well as owner of one of the finest, and most often exhibited, private collec-
tions of classical and modern Japanese art in Paris; it was he who founded the in-
fluential review Le Japon artistique (1888-91). Proust apparently bought Japanese
artworks from Bing's as gifts, including "une garde de sabre pour [Robert de] Bil-
ly" (Tadie 424). See Gabriel Weisberg. Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900, Catalogue
for the travelling Smithsonian Exhibition, New York: Abrams, 1986.
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JAN HOKENSON 23
Why does Proust even
Japanese procelain), the
ters to him is the conju
resemble the giant cyp
nese porcelain artistry
free of time (in "ses so
imagination to recreate
as nature the bonsai is
the other, greater reali
its dual essence as art-n
he will continue to dev
che.10
Among the leading Impressionists who were fervent japonistes, Proust
singled out Whistler, Moreau, and especially Monet. In the 1890s, in Mon-
et's period of serial paintings, Proust was quite ill but he made an effort to
attend the Monet exhibit at the Durand-Ruel gallery, and as late as 1907,
during Monet's period of water-lily paintings (and in the same year as the
visit to Vuillard's studio), Proust still hoped to visit Monet and his garden
at Giverny.11 In the Recherche Proust uses Monet's work as model for El-
stir's studies of cathedrals and Normandy cliffs and for his own descrip-
9 Proust's review "Les Eblouissements par la comtesse de Noailles" was first
published in Le Figaro (15 June 1907), and reprinted in Nouveaux Mdlanges in 1954;
the text quoted here is from Proust, Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves San-
dre, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp.229-41: 237. Proust notes that one poem so well ren-
ders sensation, "fugace" but prolonged in the text, that it seems to him "une des
plus etonnantes reussites, le chef-d'oeuvre peut-etre, de l'impressionnisme litterai-
re" (my emphasis, 239).
10 Without referring to the bonsai metaphor, Jean-Yves Tadid suggests that this
review of Eblouissments "contient une esthetique," based on metaphor used as "im-
pressionnisme litteraire," quoting the review: "c'est la m6taphore qui 'recompose
et nous rend le mensonge de notre premiere impression,' la comparaison qui 'sub-
stitue a la constation de ce qui est, la resurrection de ce que nous avons senti (la
seule realite interessante)"' (Tadid 581-2).
11 At Giverny Proust would have seen the Japanese bridge over the water-lil-
ies, not to mention the hundreds of Japanese prints that still hang in the painter's
house. There is no record of whether Proust ever carried out this intention; see
Painter 1.207, II.94; Tadid 598. Monet began the water-lily studies around the turn
of the century, exhibited some of them periodically in Paris then many of them in
Paris in 1909, and completed them in 1922. On Proust's relations to the painters,
see the still useful study by Maurice Chernowitz, Proust and Painting (NY: Interna-
tional University Press, 1945), and Marine Blanche's Poetique des tableaux chez
Proust et chez Matisse (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1996).
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24 PROUST'S JAPONISME
tions of water-lilies on th
comments on his work, ma
about the water-lily studies
shared and developed in the
filiation with anyone else fo
the old Japanese masters; t
and I like the suggestive qu
by a shadow and the whole
expressive resources that h
through them, the sensatio
continuity" (qtd Berger 312
Like Monet's, Proust's japon
even art forms. It is rather
rendered as such in the nov
port. Proust embraces parti
rendering of fugitive impr
indeterminacies opening im
er), and the sensory appea
Proust is astute at mining
the prints and paintings in
his allusions reflect Marcel's
initiation into a new aesthe
ence, is not as overt as the
the rest of Marcels' pantheon
erary, thus less intimately
bitions, and is more connec
that is, an aesthetic. Marcel
an heritage, beginning with
ing through the centuries t
positions the Recherche as t
erary innovator. The Japan
like a counter-system to cla
dental aesthetics.
Proust's japonisme operates at two levels in the Recherche, in discourse
and in story, to use Emile Benveniste's terms. As in the scene of the
madeleine, the deft japonisme in the narrator's own discourse is reflexive
of the text's large goals as artwork in its own right, and occurs chiefly in
Combray and Le Temps retrouve", in the origins and in the apotheosis of the
text. Also, when the characters comically repeat the worst abuses of the
Japanese aesthetic, as in the Verdurins' mawkish jokes about "la salade
japonaise," the narrator mocks mercilessly, as he always derides the mere
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JAN HOKENSON 25
social uses of art. Like
of value, and form a counter-discourse to the narrator's own aesthetic
judgment and practice.
At the level of story, the dozens of allusions to Japanese woodcut
prints, paintings, language, gardens, costumes, toys and games, can be
sorted into three types.
First, Proust satirizes the socialites' frivolous abuses of japonisme, chief-
ly in the boudoirs and the salons. Swann is appalled at Odette's craze for
chrysanthemums but, on his first visit to her apartments, he ultimately lets
himself be inveigled by her Orientalisms, including her silk cushions and
her "grande lanterne japonaise suspendue a une cordelette de soie (mais
qui, pour ne pas priver les visiteurs des derniers conforts de la civilisation
occidentale, s'&clairait au gaz," 1.220). Swann particpates in this travesty of
the Japanese object, and its relation to light, as the narrator suggests by
casting into japoniste allusion his refrain that comfort and art are incompat-
ible. As lover, Marcel replicates Swann in dithering over the beloved's
inane enactments of the worst abuses of the Japanese aesthetic which,
again, is invoked at the decisive origin of the affair. Marcel has scruples
but, always attracted to corrupt women and decadent men, "ce qui me de-
cida fut une derniere decouverte philologique" (11.357). He is both aghast
and excited by her corrupt speech, including the worst gibberish from
Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysantheme ("Oui, me repondit Albertine, elle a
l'air d'une petite mousme"). To Marcel the proto-japoniste writer, the lin-
guistic hybrid mousmi is like ice in the mouth ("nul [mot] n'est plus hor-
ripilant"). The whole scene burlesques Loti's colonialist erotics, and
Marcel is titillated despite himself: "Mais devant 'mousm&' ces raisons
tomberent..." The affair begins on a distinct note of japoniaiserie. Marcel is
more self-aware than Swann, and he does not participate in Orientalist
fakery so much as manipulate it, remaining, he thinks, superior to its deg-
radations.
A similar set of satiric allusions proceeds from the Verdurins' salon.
Aside from predictably garbled judgments on such japonistes as Whistler,
the most recurrent travesty concerns the running joke about "la salade
japonaise," which begins as a silly in-joke, the characters' coy way of let-
ting others know they have been to see Dumas fils' play Francillon.12 But
soon we learn that the Verdurin salad contains western potatoes. It is an-
other aesthetic hash, on a par with the Japanese porcelains jostling among
the Verdurins' Louis XIII vases, mindlessly making counter-systems inter-
12 In this play from 1887, at a dinner party one character asks why the salad is
called "la salade japonaise," and receives the comic reply, "Pour ce qu'elle ait un
nom; tout est japonais, maintenant" (Act I, Scene 2).
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26 PROUST'S JAPONISME
changeable. Unschooled in the
ing Orientalist fashions, the
Goncourt pastiche, this tires
Japanese that even the Verd
mond de Goncourt's dilettant
fermete de boutons d'ivoire
erotic realms (always subtend
court), such witless abuses of
deformations. They enable am
more serious uses of things J
consistently aimed at stupidit
which entices Swann and which Marcel learns to disavow.
The second type of japoniste allusion at the level of story occurs among
the artistocrats. Almost everyone but Marcel's mother, his grandmother,
and the artists Elstir and Vinteuil are guilty of japonisant folly at some
point in the Recherche. The Guermantes characters are just as prey to fash-
ion, although they are associated with its creative aspects that will engag
Marcel. At her soiree in Le C6te des Guermantes Madame de Villeparisis is
painting a japoniste view, which no one can identify until the Duchesse d
Guermantes points out that it resembles the apple blossoms on a Japanese
screen. Later even Charlus, in a rare creative endeavor that associates him
with the artistic sensibility if not with true painting, paints a fan for th
Duchesse, notably a japoniste scene of black and yellow irises. The Duc and
Duchesse de Guermantes collect paintings from Elstir's japoniste period,
which Marcel studies in their library. In such ways they exhibit more aes
thetic discrimination in things Japanese than the Verdurins and the lovers
The third set of allusions, still at the level of story, appears in the sub-
text of Marcel's artistic aprenticeship. These concern the japonisme of th
finest painters of the period, chiefly Whistler, Degas, Manet, Monet
Moreau, and of course Elstir. They have attained the Japanese "way of
seeing," in Berger's phrase, that Marcel is only slowly acquiring. On one
occasion, for instance, just before his first visit to Elstir's studio, he makes
a (retrospectively) significant association with the prints but foolishly
does not pursue it. In his room at Balbec, lying in bed and musing on the
images of the sea reflected in the glass on the bookcases, Marcel consid-
ers the natural beauty of the sunset over the sea and ponders various ar-
13 This rmise en abfme, of the Verdurins' Japanese salad within a pastiche of a
famous japoniste describing the Verdurin's Japanese salad, is a common structur
in Proust's passages on artworks. See Peter Collier, "La mise en abyme chez Proust,
in Philippe Delaveau, ed., Ecrire la peinture (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1991
125-40.
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JAN HOKENSON 27
tistic analogues. But he
reflected and the reflec
its of paintings:
Une fois c'6tait une ex
mince d coupure du so
jaune paraissait un lac
ainsi que les arbres d
n'avais jamais revu dep
comme un fleuve sur
attendre a sec qu'on vi
regard dedaigneux, e
femme parcourant, en
me disais: "C'est curieu
enfin j'en ai djai vu d
ci." (1.804-5)
Wisely, Marcel recognizes the link between the Japanese "couleurs si
vives" and his childhood, but then ("d6daigneux, ennuy et frivole") he
dismisses the thought. In the Japanese model, Marcel has just seen for him-
self that cloud and lake lack a line of demarcation; this is the famous lesson
of the Elstir seascapes, that water and sky lack a line of demarcation like
the two interchangeable halves of literary metaphor, but Marcel cannot
apprehend the importance of what he is seeing nor of the Japanese associ-
ation. He discerns analogies in the seascapes with Monet and Whistler,
even noting the butterfly signature that Whistler developed to mime the
Japanese hanka (or seal). But it is only thirty pages later, after his visit to
Elstir's studio, that Marcel can assimilate Japanese analogies to his own
aesthetic development. The structure of this visual perception in his hotel
room continues to structure Marcel's nascent japonisme: vaguely associat-
ed with the purity of childhood impressions and artistic beginnings (of
Marcel, and primitively of Art), it is reflected against books, on the "vit-
rines de la bibilotheque," in interreflections of literature and painting that
he alone can make real, in ultimately writing this book.
Elstir's fictional career repeats those of Whistler and other Impression-
ists, beginning in historical or mythological studies and moving into an ex-
tended period of japonisme, then developing a mature style. Marcel regrets
that none of the paintings in Elstir's studio reflect his Japanese period,
"celle oi0 il avait subi l'influence du Japon," which Marcel had read about
in an English art review and which he knows is represented in the Guer-
mantes' collection (1I.835). His momentary delight at the japoniste sunset,
when he was unable to isolate the metaphoric land-water relations from
his own reality, anticipated this aesthetic discovery in the studio. He sees
it clearly in Elstir's painting of the Port of Carquethuit which "comparant
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28 PROUST'S JAPONISME
la terre a la mer, supprimait
tions Japanese art as a new w
ilated in painting and which
In such ways, Proust por
amusement, grotesque in the
always a fashionable contrast
ticeship in art.
At the level of discourse, it is
enfleur that the narrator's japo
to merge with Marcel's own
ing his prologue on the japonis
moves immediately into evoc
membered. These scenes and
tute his "moi essentiel," and i
(a) a non-European relation to
and (c) evanescence and fugit
Initially the narrator carries t
Eastern and Far-Eastern, sowin
young to understand. Thus f
es describing the water-lilies
each color, form, and glint o
that in late evening the bed o
"d'un bleu clair et cru, tiran
goit japonais" (I.169). Elsewhe
"lavees comme de la porcelain
ter they seem midway between
narrator is practising a liter
"nenuphars" into text, as suc
allusions suggest, while rende
ing as those of a generic "go
Crucial moments in the nar
thetic apprenticeship often co
when Marcel is still joyous at
dancing free of time-space con
reer with his first compositi
sure at a japoniste vision of a
But this profound aesthetic j
most painful loss in the nove
between them is again Japan
Mais quand sur le chemin d
une allee de chines bordee d
un petit clos et plantes "i in
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JAN HOKENSON 29
taient, quand ils 6taien
japonais de leurs ombr
tre, je savais qu'avant u
on m'enverrait me cou
mere, retenue a tabl
monterait pas me dire
je venais d'entrer 6tai
avec joie, il y avait un
bande rose est separde
d'une bande noire. (11
The narrator depicts t
at sunset as signal for
japonais de leurs ombre
pain, a focal aesthetic m
stitute the dual worlds o
its imagery of indeter
association, he continue
ance of the passage, us
Hokusai and Hiroshige:
atteindre la fin, il touche
c'est du c6t6 de Guerm
succ'dent en moi..." It is
that Marcel learns the e
profonde"--of his succe
which they point him,
integral with the natur
Marcel learns in A l'Om
spears of apple blossom
Paris room so that he m
of japoniste blossoms an
by the time of Marcel's
morrhe he can instantly
sait aux pommiers comm
exaltation at such natu
art, the aesthetic role o
14 The Japanese motif of
used by several French pa
Salomon and Paul Claudel in
include the eddying wate
bridge, the snow-dusted b
tifs, see Wichmann 74-153.
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30 PROUST'S JAPONISME
sociated sense of pain remains
larmes parce que, si loin qu'elle
qu'elle etait naturelle..." The p
producing Marcel's last mome
cedes from the knowledge tha
even the Japanese art that cat
but nature. These are the van
record in writing (as the narr
them from time. The allusions
sociated with artistic creation.
It is the narrator who points out in japoniste terms how badly Marcel
blunders with Gilberte on the Champs Elysees (he should have been con-
tent to love her at a distance without worrying whether the image corre-
sponds to the reality, "imitant ces jardiniers japonais qui, pour obtenir une
plus belle fleur, en sacrifient plusieurs autres," 1.401). In Du C6te de chez
Swann Marcel is too young to envision love like a Japanese garden, which
cultivates representations of absence rather than entrammelling realities.15
But later in Le Temps retrouve, by the time he visits Gilberte de Saint Loup
at Swann's old house ("un peu trop campagne"), it is Marcel who implic-
itly criticizes her for not having japoniste wallpaper: "ces grandes decora-
tions des chambres d'aujourd'hui oii sur un fond d'argent, tous les
pommiers de Normandie sont venus se profiler en style japonais" (111.697).
This particular allusion operates, like the wooblock sunset reflected on
the glass at Balbec, to introduce an aesthetic problem and its imminent res-
olution. In this scene, Marcel is again musing in bed, on the eve of his re-
treat from Paris into a sanitorium, and remembers seeing a sun-splashed
image of the Combray church spire reflected that morning on the bedroom
windowpane. Like the absent japoniste wallpaper that he only imagines,
the Church spire was only an image, yet more real in its suggestiveness
than the actual church, than the florid realistic European wallpaper on the
walls: "Non pas une figuration de ce clocher, ce clocher lui-meme, qui,
mettant ainsi sous mes yeux la distance des lieues et des annees, etait
venu... s'inscrire dans le carre de ma fenetre" (III.697-8). He now "sees"
imagined and remembered images as superior ones, and the language for
15 The narrator replicates this japoniste lesson in La Prisonniere, with love letters
and a kimono. After Marcel watches Albertine sleeping, he stares at her kimono
draped over a chair; the interior pocket contains her letters, and Marcel is alter-
nately desperate to read them and fearful of discovering proof of her infidelities,
"Mais (et peut-etre j'ai eu tort) jamais je n'ai touch6 au kimono.... ce kimono qui
peut-Atre m'eiet dit bien des choses" (I1.73-4). The contrasting Japanese associa-
tions, around the two women and two sets of letters, measure the distance from
childish hopes to cynicism.
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JAN HOKENSON 31
the Japanese wallpaper a
terchangeable ("sont ven
is still unaware of the im
of metaphor as time-spa
turns to read the Journa
abandons his literary am
With Proust's extraord
used several contemporar
that, against the backgro
nese aesthetics, he use
japoniste.16 Following M
disquisitions on Tolstoy a
to the European literary p
cherche of literary japon
court is ostensibly quote
important... confronte d
thetiques [la litterature
teraires" (606). As such
Goncourt pastiche is also
literary link between Ma
The narrator uses their h
failure as writers to rea
discern aesthetic value.
The Goncourt text inverts the basic features of japonisme. The first indi-
cation occurs immediately, when the Goncourts dither over Verdurin's
book on Whistler by praising the surface "joliesses." Then they adore the
way the Verdurin table is decorated, "rien qu'avec des chrystanthemes
japonais," and of course the Japanese salad, even its presentation on Chi-
nese plates. Most telling, by contrast with Marcel's later reflections, Proust
has the Goncourts comparing the light effects of sunset on Trocadero
16 Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were prominent collectors of Japanese art
and defenders (inventors, they once claimed) of japonisme, as described in their au-
tobiographical La Maison d'un artiste; following Jules's death, Edmond de Gon-
court published Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes (1891) and Hokousai' (1896).
See Hubert Juin, "Preface" to Edmond de Goncourt, Outamaro, HokusaY (Paris:
Union Generale d'Editions, 1986) 5-16. Although they were early pioneers in the
japonisant movement along with F6lix Braquemond and Philippe Burty, they dis-
liked modern japoniste painting and were soon sidelined as interpreters of the Jap-
anese aesthetic by Louis Gonse, Samuel Bing, Henri Focillon and others less
committed to the Goncourt's focus on the miniature and the exotic. See Berger,
Wichmann; also Deborah Johnson, "Reconsidering Japonisme: The Goncourts'
Contribution," Mosaic 24.2 (Spring 1991): 59-71.
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32 PROUST'S JAPONISME
buildings to pink pastries (11
en Orientalist allusions (includ
with neither taste nor any
japonisme, far from adding to
methods, is merely decorativ
The pastiche ends abruptly
sumes years later, as Marce
evening during the black-out
el's final section, leading to M
right, and its first long (thre
erary japonisme. The Japanese
visual apprehensions of the c
aesthetic references articulati
The first sentence adapts a f
dark smudges against a distan
vealed to be birds in flight (1
planes. The japonisme once re
wartime city. Moonlight now
precious Goncourt style of a
actually "en style japonais," in
aesthetic to the scenes of Paris in snow and this entire "vision d'Orient"
(111.737). The emphasis is no longer on resplendence but on simplicity, pu-
rity of line and form, spare vivid contrasting colors, delicacy of method
and suggestion of unstated essence; moreover, the Japanese aesthetic is al-
lied with the European, in one mature dual vision:
Les silhouettes des arbres se refl~taient nettes et pures sur cette
neige d'or bleute, avec la d licatesse qu'elles ont dans certaines
peintures japonaises...
The focus on "nettes et pures" is exact and aesthetically accurate, as is the
balance of the passage equilibrating the japoniste silhouettes with those fa-
miliar from the high backgrounds in Italian Renaissance painting:
... ou dans certains fonds de Raphael; elles etaient allong"es a terre
au pied de l'arbre lui-meme, comme on les voit souvent dans la na-
ture au soleil couchant...
The silhouetted trees again "s'dlevent intervalles r guliers," but on a city
prairie,
une prairie paradisiaque, non pas verte mais d'un blanc si &clatant
a cause du clair de lune qui rayonnait sur la neige de jade, qu'on au-
rait dit que cette prairie etait tissue seulement avec des petales de
poiriers en fleurs. (111.736)
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JAN HOKENSON 33
Like a pendant to the na
bray," on the fluid water-
and with their Dantesque
ing fixity, not infernal n
grace. The white pear blo
of the japoniste perspectiv
icy fountains, starkly sil
ing on "le charme myste
context, the final words
they are an integral part o
Japanese prints amplifie
tirety of his aesthetic her
stir's vision and has now
Following immediately a
left in silence or in liter
counters it like a rebutta
unite scattered motifs in a
a new vision of a citysca
bray to Balbec and from
modem writer the amalg
unique creation. As Marce
discoveries he is to make
novel recommences, com
In the modernist round
subtly and recurrently t
the writing of this text. In
diverse japonisme of othe
thetic and literary judgm
narrator's prose japonism
first strong visual and em
ing, in visual imagery ofte
such as japoniste apple b
typically Proustian fashi
impressions and, increasi
including seascapes and s
Marcel learns to plumb,
and artistic experience. I
of metaphor. Contrast o
reflects the truth of ima
Throughout his japonism
tional sadness in pain at
of beauty in nature) and
cealed essence, that is, a
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34 PROUST'S JAPONISME
both cases, as in the Recherch
natural beauty that is comple
work then on itself. Proust's
glass recapitulate in graphic t
from Japanese art which is a
nation.
Many elements fuel Marcel's apprenticeship, and japonisme is only a
minor vein running through the whole. The care and consistency with
which Proust deploys it, however, signal its importance to the text's pri-
mary artistic aims and methods. To miss Proust's japonisme can lead to
skewed readings, particularly of such focal components as the madeleine,
the Vivonne, the wartime prologue. In her fine analysis of oral elements in
the teacake, for instance, Julia Kristeva notes the Japanese metonymy but
like most readers overlooks its artistic import, and instead infers a geo-
graphical function aimed at establishing a maximum distance between the
birthplace and a foreign country (Kristeva 48-9). Several such puzzling ref-
erences fall into place once Japan is recognized as the provenance of a new
aesthetic-not only to the Impressionists but also to Marcel. Such Japanese
allusions work together to build a counter-system to the impasse Marcel
has reached in his heritage as a modem Western writer.
The artist-figures, for instance, rise or fall in japoniste terms. Because
Marcel must become the only great writer, the literary equivalent of Elstir
in painting and Vinteuil in music, Marcel twice repeats that the painter
spent years studying Japanese art (the second time occurs apropos of the
Guermantes collection, when Marcel reiterates that Elstir "avait 6te
longtemps impressionne par l'art japonais," 11.125). But the novelist Ber-
gotte is not allowed a japoniste period, being instead insistently associated
with mere "chinoiserie." Norpois refers to his "chinoiseries de forme," and
even the "petit pan de mur jaune" in the Vermeer painting, which exposes
to him his own limitations as a writer, is likened to a specimen of Chinese
art, revealing to Bergotte the pointlessness and aridity of all art, including
his own. It is again Norpois who dismisses such "symboliste" writing (in
terms once used by Proust) as hothouse products of Mallarm 's chapel.17
Bergotte and the previous generation are relegated to an arid Orientalism,
quite notably not japoniste. Ultimately, it is the literary figures who matter
most to Marcel's success. Proust positions him to succeed where others
fail, dismissing Bergotte's Orientalism as superficial and mocking the
"horripilant" japonisme of his most celebrated predecessors in this vein,
17 In "Contre l'obscurite," originally published in La Revue Blanche (15 July
1896), Proust inveighs against the willed obscurities of the Symbolists; rpt in
Proust, Essais et articles 86-91.
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JAN HOKENSON 35
Loti and the Goncourts
japoniste apprenticeship
arts, and integrates it i
tions. The global aestheti
legacy as a writer.
Proust's contrastive us
originality helps explai
"Buddhistic." Paul Clau
literary japoniste himself
nature recalls religious
course of explaining the
poetry, Claudel wrote:
[La nature] tremble a
s'agit de la surprendre
certains mystiques jap
le Ah! awareness. (II y
de Marcel Proust.)18
Marguerite Yourcenar
par la constation du pa
sonnalite ext rieure, par
ognized that such obse
Buddhists would disput
dans l'espace" or the on
art historian Yann Le P
the natural object (such a
ings in "la disponsibilit
parfait," or in Proustia
a major figure in the shi
rative. But I doubt tha
underlying Japanese ae
notion of an impersonal
18 Paul Claudel, Oeuvres
Pliade (Paris: Gallimard, 1
19 Letter of Marguerite
Archive, Harvard Univer
influences: un ecrivain pe
ed., L'Universalite' dans l'o
ternationale des Etudes Yo
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36 PROUST'S JAPONISME
A la Recherche du temps perdu
anese aesthetic contrastively
and to point the way for new
FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
20 Yann Le Pichon's brief essay on "L'Influence du japonisme dans l'oeuvre de
Proust" (Revue des Deux Mondes [October 1996]: 125-39), appearing after the NEM-
LA session on Proust and the completion of this article, cites some additional let-
ters referring to Japanese art, some references in Jean Santeuil, mentions Odette's
furnishings, but focuses on the japonisme of the Impressionists as Proust's models
and on the Zen-like "emotions esth4tiques" of Marcel in nature. Le Pichon per-
haps overstates the case for Zen in Proust, but clearly the Japanese concept of the
artist as translator of affect into signs of the natural world merits consideration in
studies of Proust's aesthetic ideas. As Le Pichon says, Proust's japonisme is a "sujet
quasi inedit et pourtant evident" (125).
21 For a discussion of Japanese "affective-expressive" poetics, versus Western
mimetic traditions, see Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on
Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990).
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JAN HOKENSON 37
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Prestel-Verlag, 1980. T
From Whistler to Mati
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Kristeva, Julia. Proust
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Le Pichon, Yann. "L'Inf
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Rousset, Jean. Forme et signification. Paris: Jose Corti, 1984.
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Tadid, Jean-Yves. Marcel Proust. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
Weisberg, Gabriel et al. Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1845-
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