Assimilation, metaphor and cultural memory

Let me now further explore the semi-public, semi-private cultural realm of unspeakable ‘otherness’ connected to expectations about assimilation introduced in the previous chapter. I will trace how this realm, in 19th-century France, was connected to the idea that assimilation implied secularisation in terms of the transformation of ethnoreligious culture into privatised ‘religion’. By exploring this cultural realm through In Search of Lost Time we will be able to trace how it hosts a specific kind of ethno-religious difference in which othering and secrecy, shame and the cultural memory of religious and cultural difference, intermingle and sometimes clash.

My interpretation takes shape as we follow our friends, the protagonist and Alfred Bloch, in their confrontation with a third, new friend, the Marquis Robert de Saint-Loup-en-Bray. Saint-Loup only features in the second volume of the novel, entitled Within a Budding Grove. The protagonist and Bloch first meet Saint-Loup in Balbec, the small, luxurious Normandy seaside resort where they spend their summer holidays.

In section one of this chapter, I analyse the protagonist's perceptions of Bloch and his family in Balbec in the context of Reinach's (1901 [1884]) concept of assimilation as secularisation. Section two addresses Benbassa’s, Arendt’s, and Bauman's analyses of the paradoxes of assimilation, and I read Proust's metaphorical style as a powerful literary critique of these paradoxes, and as a literary reflection on the habitual conceptual framework in 19th-century Republican thought that connected, on one hand, politics, the French nation, and the public, with, on the other hand, religion, other nations and privacy. In section three, I read Proust's metaphors as carriers of a cultural memory of hierarchy and power distribution over diverse societal groups and of this cultural memory's agency in the present; as literary devices that recall layers of identities and their interwovenness, cutting through the Republican divide between citizenship on one hand, and religious, diasporic and social belonging on the other.

Let me add a brief methodological note. Analysing metaphors when we want to learn about assimilation and secularisation compels us to develop a sociological concept of metaphor that is unusual in the existing literature, which mostly occupies itself with inquiries into the rhetorical and metaphysical functions of metaphor, particularly when dealing with In Search of Lost Time (Deleuze 1964; Genette 1966, 1972).