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ABSTRACTS David Ellison (University of Miami) Proust and the (Fateful) Question of Culture: or, Art and its Phantoms In Geoffrey Hartman's book 'The Fateful Question of Culture' (Columbia University Press, 1997), after a brief survey of certain "uncanny" texts of the early 19th century which thematize the threatening and bizarre artificiality or even "ghostliness" inhabiting fictional works aware of their own fictionality (Schiller's 'Der Geisterseher' is read by Hartman in much the same way that Helene Cixous has read E.T.A. Hoffmann's 'Der Sandmann'), the author announces the theme of his meditation: "Culture, at present -- I mean the ring and function of the word, its emotional and conceptual resonance -- even when it is abusively applied, keeps hope in embodiment alive. Consciousness, as ghostly as ever, cannot renounce that hope in a living and fulfilling milieu" (26). I would like to keep in mind Hartman's organizing dichotomy -- ghostliness versus embodiment or fulfillment -- as I analyze a passage from Proust's 'A la recherche du temps perdu' which, in staging a certain combat between nature and culture, emphasizes the ghostly character of the latter and its association with deceitfulness, artifice, and mendacity ('Sodome et Gomorrhe' II,2, Pleiade 1987-89 Vol. III, 200-29). The aesthetic and the ethical come together and lose their separate identities as distinctive fields in the thematics and pragmatics of lying ('le mensonge'). I will argue that the usual view, which holds that Proust exalts (high) cuture in a late Romantic or Modernist aesthetic triumphalism, does not take into account the ways in which the question of culture is textualized in the 'Recherche,' often in a comedic or ironical tonality. In parfticular, a certain leakage or contamination between inner and outer narrative frames in the episode under consideration should cause the reader of Proust to question the truth-value of the narrator's assertions in his explicit aesthetic theorizing, notably in the peroration of 'Le Temps retrouve.' The hope of embodiment or fulfillment which Hartman finds in the "resonance" of culture coexists uncomfortably, in the Proustian universe, with the ghostly overlay of art and the phantomatic, hypothetical/conditional ruminations of the narrator's 'discours mensonger.'

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