The circulation of feelings in the Belle Epoque and the narrator’s gossip in Marcel Proust

The author examines the connection between the genre of gossip, an important device in Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, and the circulation of pleasures in the Belle Époque. The main features of this period are characterized in relation to the phenomenon of decadence, which is presented as a kind of design bureau where tastes and aesthetic standards were produced. During the Belle Époque, society underwent integration, there was an intensive cultural exchange in which, for four decades, high society, based on hereditary aristocracy, set the tone for all other strata. This determined the circulation of pleasures, which is compared to Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism. Decadence as such did not go beyond the sphere of social aesthetics.

In Proust’s novel, the narrator appears as a considerable gossip, which is connected to the need to realize the socio-critical function of the novel outside ideological certainty. For this, the writer needed to bring the lives of people comprising high society as close as possible, overcoming the fact that they are uninteresting and nothing happens to them. Instead of giving the narrative a “literary quality,” Proust, according to Fredric Jameson, turns it into “whispering.” This is achieved, firstly, through the reader’s pleasure, caused by the discourse of gossip, which has positive social functions. Secondly, the narrator in the novel, a melancholic and morbid person, reveals a plan of almost detective investigation in which the tension between past and present, imaginary and genuine, as well as between the novel’s material and narrative, is removed. The pleasure of talking about people who receive pleasure is transmitted to the narrator as well.