At the end of "Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet," which is also the end of Epistemology of the Closet,1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick evokes the figure of the woman who cannot know: "the omnipotent, unknowing mother" to whom Proust's novel is addressed, or the female reader thus interpellated, or, in a contemporary declension courtesy of the New York Times, the heterosexual woman terrified by her inability to determine whether the men she is having sex with are bisexuals and therefore (as the insidious reasoning would have it) likely to infect her with AIDS (248). Why does Sedgwick put the unknowing woman at the end of her book? It is safe to say, I think, that she is not defensively anticipating that anyone will take the author oí Epistemology of the Closet for an unknowing woman herself. In evoking this figure, rather, Sedgwick has a more pedagogical aim: she is marking both the oppressive ideological place always assigned to women in the construction of male sexuality, and her hope of having opened up ways of intervening in that process, instead of just being abjectly conscripted into it. In her reading of Proust, she suggests, she has in effect been modeling how women might occupy with "more of our own cognitive and desiring animation" the space of male homo/heterosexual definition that they already occupy "dumbly or pseudo-dumbly" (251).

Sedgwick ends the Proust chapter with the woman who cannot know, but she begins it with the woman who does know. Here is the chapter's epigraph, from A la recherche du temps perdu: "Vous devez vous y entendre mieux que moi, M. de Charlus, à faire marcher des petits marins. . . . Tenez, voici un livre que j'ai reçu, je pense qu'il vous intéressera. ... Le titre est joli: Parmi les hommes" (213). Although Sedgwick does not identify her, the speaker here is the monstrous arriviste, Madame Verdurin, who is trying to snag the Prince de Guermantes for her "little clan," as she calls her social circle, by inviting him to a "charity entertainment at which sailors from the neighborhood would give a representation of a ship setting sail." Here is the passage in English, with a bit more of its context:

You must know far better than I do, M. de Charlus, how to get round young sailors. . . . But really we are giving ourselves a lot of trouble for M. de Guermantes. Perhaps he's only one of those idiots from the Jockey Club. Oh! Heavens, I'm running down the Jockey Club, and I seem to remember that you're one of them. Eh, Baron, you don't answer me, are you one of them? You don't want to come out with us? Look, here's a book that has just come which I think you'll find interesting. It's by Roujon. The title is attractive: Among Men.2

Sedgwick is a comic critic as Proust is a comic novelist, so it is not surprising that she opens this chapter with a joke - a joke whose punch line, with its invocation of her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), is self-critical but not exactly self-deprecating, since it raises the question of whether Proust influenced Sedgwick or Sedgwick influenced Proust. The joke, in fact, might be a good example of what, as we shall see, Sedgwick herself calls her "nerve." But for all its nerve, or because of its nerve, the joke evinces a certain nervousness as well. Sedgwick, after all, isn't the only woman making a joke here, and the other woman's joke - indeed, in the longer version I have just quoted, a virtual stand-up comedy routine - starkly displays the aggression of jokes, in this case aggression of a specifically homophobic kind, aimed at the spectacularly closeted Charlus. While Sedgwick's joke, with its self-critical edge, differentiates her from the exuberantly gay-baiting Madame Verdurin, the self-criticism consists in acknowledging Sedgwick's contamination by Madame Verdurin, through the very medium of a worldly wit inseparable from homophobic knowingness. Wittily showing herself to be (almost) inscribed in Proust's novel, Sedgwick signals her implication in a witty regime of knowledge that extends well beyond Madame Verdurin - its promoters, Sedgwick goes on to argue, include Charlus himself, not to mention the differently closeted Proustian narrator - but that finds in Madame Verdurin its obscene emblem, its most grotesquely representative gargoyle.

This homophobic regime of knowledge, also known as the epistemology of the closet, has another name as well: it is what we call Western thought, whose fundamental binarisms, Sedgwick demonstrates throughout this book, all turn around the "question" of male homosexuality. Madame Verdurin exemplifies this vast regime, and not in the humble manner of a mere symptom, but monstrously indeed, in the full etymological sense of the term: her revelatory salience and her epigraphic eminence, along with her unsettling attraction to a book whose title sounds a lot like one of Sedgwick's own, make her a far more menacing figure than her apparent opposite, the woman who cannot know. (That Sedgwick quotes Madame Verdurin while withholding her identity, and that the quotation is in French, only reinforce Madame Verdurin 's horror-movie aura of unspeakability.)

So while the last chapter oïEpistemology of the Closet is written between women - one who knows and one who doesn't - this frame is asymmetrical. But if the knowing woman looms so much larger than the unknowing one, this is because the former contains the latter - as though, monster that she is, she had already devoured her. "You must know far better than I do," says the knowing woman - never for a moment doubting the superiority of her own knowledge. And yet, the homophobic knowingness that Madame Verdurin exemplifies is itself the indissoluble bond of knowledge and ignorance. If the woman who cannot know occupies the space of male subject-making "dumbly or pseudo-dumbly" - dumbly, in this epistemologica! context, meaning "stupidly" more than "mutely" - the smartness of her counterpart proves always already to have tipped over into pseudosmartness, and no equivocating "or" can prop it back up; wit turns out to have pitched its mansion, from the outset, in the place of the dimwitted.

Any epistemology of the closet by definition predicates knowing on notknowing. The bond of knowledge and ignorance characterizes, of course, the relationship between subject and object, yielding such laws as:

1. My claim to worldliness depends on my knowing more about you than you know about yourself.

2. I know something about you that you don't want me to know.

3. What I know about you is the most damaging thing imaginable (i.e., that you, a man, love other men).

4. My knowing keeps you exposed to the degree that it keeps me hidden.

But ignorance inheres in the knowledge of the subject himself or herself, so that,

1. My knowing you depends on my not knowing myself.

2. In knowing you, I betray more of myself than I know.

3. The possibility of being known myself makes me afraid.

4. My fear makes me even more aggressive in my exercise of cognitive power over you.

5. My power therefore makes my knowledge look like delusion and even stupidity.

For instance - to put it back into Proustian terms - while Madame Verdurin is archly taunting Charlus ("Eh, Baron, you don't answer me, are you one of them?"), no one must know, least of all Madame Verdurin, that she wants nothing more than to unite herself with "those idiots from the Jockey Club" - which is precisely what she does when, in her worldly triumph near the end of Proust's novel, she winds up marrying . . . the Prince de Guermantes.3

"Vous devez vous y entendre" ("you must know . . . how to get round"), says Madame Verdurin to Charlus. If we change the phrase to "Vous devez vous entendre," we arrive at something like the advice that Proust's narrator seems to be whispering to every reader: You ought to hear (or understand) yourself. For this is just what no one in Proust ever does - not even the narrator himself, according to Sedgwick. "Infatuated with Charlus - ostensibly in spite of his homosexuality, but in fact 'quite unconsciously' because of it . . . - the Verdurin circle," Sedgwick observes, "nonetheless generates a ceaseless spume of homophobic wit about him, uttered beyond the reach of his appreciation but delicately reproduced for ours" (224). And who is doing this delicate reproducing, perhaps nearly as unconscious of the causes of his cathexis as the members of the Verdurin circle themselves? "Undoubtedly the insistence of this drama" - the closet drama of knowing Charlus's secret and keeping that knowledge secret from him - "is a sign of how predatory and wasting is the conscious imaginative life of the Verdurin circle. Still, the narrator circulates it as his and hence our imaginative life as well" (226). Circulating the circle's conscious and yet quite unconscious imaginative life, faithfully propagating the hateful pseudosmartness whose name is Madame Verdurin, delicately reproducing the ceaseless spume of homophobic wit generated by and around her, extending in ever-wider "concentric ripples" (246) her (hemi) sphere of infatuation, making it his and hence ours, the Proustian narrator, if not Proust himself, seems not merely to have been pulled into the Verdurin circle but, even more stupidly, to have become its most sycophantic member.

Can this be the same author, or at least the same text, about whom Sedgwick writes, in the same chapter,

[W]ith Proust and my word processor in front of me what I most feel are Talmudic desires, to reproduce or unfold the text and to giggle. Who hasn't dreamt that A la recherche remained untranslated, simply so that one could (at least if one knew French) by undertaking the job justify spending one's own productive life afloat within that blissful and hilarious atmosphere of truth-telling[?] (240)

How to reconcile this blissful, hilarious Proust - this authentically and sustainingly comic Proust - with the Verdurin groupie running around recirculating and assimilating himself to a homophobic wit that Sedgwick considers anything but funny? Here is how she frames a sample ofthat wit: "'Oh,' whispers unhilariously the sculptor Ski [another member of the circle] on the train: 'If the Baron begins making eyes at the conductor, we shall never get there, the train shall start going backwards'" (226). Not the least of the atrocities perpetrated under the sign of the predatory and wasting Madame Verdurin might be the pollution of the uniquely nourishing and exhilarating atmosphere constituted by Proust's novel. The "Mistress," as she is styled, of more than just her circle, she presides over a pervasive, irreversible process we could call, in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-Verdurin: a coarsening and spoiling and poisoning of the comic itself, in which blissful and hilarious truth-telling congeals into dopey and unhilarious paranoia, and the delectable Proustian narrator into just another bitchy character. "You must know . . . how to get round young sailors," wisecracks unhilariously Madame Verdurin. But how to get around her, or around her circle, when it gets around so much itself? Given that, despite its would-be exclusivity, the Verdurin circle so expansively illustrates Western ideology as to approach the inescapable condition of the universal, and given that, as Sedgwick also argues, the narrator's own infatuated circling around Charlus constitutes the organizing center of Proust's entire novel, it is hard to see how so much as a narrow margin of blissful and hilarious truth-telling, never mind a whole buoyant atmosphere of it, could ever be extracted from the immense empire of unhilariousness. How does Sedgwick manage to get around it? How does Proust?4

Or perhaps the question should be: what if the point is not to leave the Verdurin circle but, rather, to enter it in the right way? What if getting around it means getting around in it? As Adorno says of Proust, "He gives where he takes: where he is correct, there is pain."5 Sedgwick attempts to account for "the truth-effect of Proust" as produced by "a pattern ?? exception and exemption" (246-47), in which readers are "empowered" to expropriate the novel's "unswerving erotic pessimism" (241) - its pain - in the "service of sanguine manipulative projects" (242) - their pleasure. She offers the following example of such "creative mislabeling" (242):

I was reading Proust for the first time during just the short stretch of years during which it occurred to me to have ambitions that were not exclusively under the aspect of eternity: to want to publish visibly, know people, make a go of it, get a run for my money. Oddly, of course, it was reading Proust that made me want these adventures and think I could find them. The interminable meditation on the vanity of human wishes was a galvanizing failure for at least one reader: it was, if anything, the very sense of the transparency and predictability of worldly ambitions that gave me the nerve and skill to have worldly ambitions of my own. (240)

In perhaps another case of nerve provoking nervousness, Sedgwick subsumes her experience of being galvanized by Proust under the heading of "techniques of 'bad faith'," adding parenthetically, "The reader, by the way, who does not have a native endowment of these techniques can go for lessons in them to the infinitely discreditable main character in Remembrance of Things Past" (242). The facetious tone of "infinitely discreditable" and the scare quotes around "bad faith" suggest, moreover, that Sedgwick may be nervous about her nervousness, uncomfortably aware of a certain moralism in the discrediting and self-discrediting analysis she has been performing. (In one of her last essays, Sedgwick would adduce Epistemology of the Closet itself as an example of the "paranoid" strain in queer theory.6)

Proust gives lessons in how to exempt oneself from the erotic pessimism he is at the same time elaborating, but the exemption is not necessarily discreditable. If, for instance, one still has the nerve, after all the pessimistic elaboration, to have worldly ambitions, this stupid persistence in one's desire, or this persistence in one's stupid desire, bespeaks a Verdurin-like infatuation, but also a quite «-Verdurin-like refusal to be ashamed of one's infatuation and therefore to project its stupidity onto its object. In an interpretation of the homosexual pickup scene that opens Cities of the Plain, Sedgwick maintains that the narrator's, and thus the reader's, worldliness is established by the concealment of their infatuation with Charlus, a concealment that depends on their finding Charlus himself, rather than their infatuation with him, "ridiculous" (228). "This scene was not, however, positively comic," Proust's narrator comments. "It was stamped with a strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which steadily increased" (6). "The scene was not . . . positively comic" means "the scene was not merely laughable" - as if the comic in Proust were only or even mainly about derision. And the scene is not merely laughable because, while the narrator projects onto Charlus and his sexual partner, Jupien, the "ridiculousness" of his infatuation with them, he also, Sedgwick argues further, misrepresents as their beauty the beauty of his description of them: "[W]hat after all grows and grows, in these sentences, and therefore what one is compelled to consume (and does consume) as beauty, is no indwelling quality of Charlus or Jupien or their encounter but the swelling, sustained, inexhaustibly affecting verve of the narrator's descriptive entitlement at their expense" (230). But why can't the scene and the narration of it both be swell ingly beautiful?7 And why can't both have features of the "ridiculous" - Proust's adjectives for Charlus are "fat, négligent, ridicule,"8 which the translator renders as "smug, nonchalant, fatuous" (6)9 - without either one's becoming reducible to the "positively comic"?

Sedgwick's characterization of the supposedly concealed narrator's discourse as "operatic" (229) and "aria"-like (230) seems, at any rate, to play on the unacknowledged but no less insistent homograph of the French fat and the English^/ - the "corpulent" (2) Charlus embodying both.10 And indeed, in the "outpouring of [the narrator's] aria" (230), the foolish (fat in French), the swelling (fat in English), the infatuated, the infatuating, and the beautiful all operatically coincide on the same stage, as they continue to do throughout the narrator's description of the encounter between Charlus and Jupien, putting the description and the encounter, or the "imperiously]" "shelterfed]" (230, 229) narrator and the vulnerably theatricalized characters, much closer to each other than Sedgwick's projective and power-centric mise-en-scène allows. The narrator, for instance, may not want to be seen watching, but he has no qualms whatsoever about telling us that, and, in lavish detail, why, he in fact failed to adopt the "most prudent method" (10) of surveillance. Avowedly, conspicuously "imprudent" (19, emphasis added), to the point where voyeurism borders on exhibitionism, the narrator-spectator risks not just getting caught spying but in effect tumbling into the reckless scene he is recklessly observing. Recalling an earlier homosexual encounter he has witnessed, this one between two women, the narrator notes, "Certainly, the affairs of this sort of which I have been a spectator have always been, as far as their setting is concerned, of the most imprudent and least probable character, as if such revelations were to be the reward of an action full of risk, though in part clandestine" (10)." Imprudent acts and imprudent actions, imprudent scenes and imprudent spectators, seem made for each other. And the imprudence of the narrator's action extends into his narration of it, the "childish" (10) naïveté of his detective adventures fully matched by the diva-esque extravagance with which he now rehearses them for us. The only partly closeted narrator, in short, makes a spectacle of himself: he has the nerve to put his descriptive entitlement at the characters' expense at risk. As impudent as he is imprudent, he persists, shamelessly, in his infatuation with a ridiculous, beautiful scene that he persists, just as shamelessly, in mirroring as well.

It is this imprudence, this impudence, this shamelessness, this nerve that makes Proust comic - as opposed to "positively comic," which is to say, as contemptuous of the other's desire as of one's desire for the other's desire. Proust's atmosphere of truth-telling is blissful and hilarious because his narrator's relation to the spectacles he describes is far more mimetic than projective: here, desiring the other's desire means imitating the other's desire, and imitating that desire's riskiness. What makes Sedgwick not just a Proust critic but a Proustian critic is that, even after the early "years of Proust-reading" (241), she remains galvanized by Proust's mimetic nerve. Ennerved (better than "empowered") by the brazen Proustian narrator, Sedgwick does not give up on her infatuations, or on their histrionic consequences: "With Proust and my word processor in front of me what I most feel are Talmudic desires, to reproduce or unfold the text and giggle." Far from being, as she claims, "compelled to consume" the aria that the text serves up to her, Sedgwick, acting (in the full theatrical sense) on her desires to reproduce or unfold it, redoubles the swelling performance of the already imitative narrator, and her giggling further blurs the line between interpretation and spectacle. For the giggle is itself mimetic. Unable to bear the stupidity of its desires, the laughter of ridicule projects that stupidity onto the other; as silly as what occasions it, the giggle delights in an atmosphere, indeed, of ridiculousness. In the ridiculousness of her desires - Talmudic desires, worldly desires to "publish visibly, know people, make a go of it, get a run for [her] money," the "desiring animation" with which she attempts to occupy the space of male sexuality - the giggling critic finds comic happiness.

Or, to use a more Proustian language, she refinds it, recovering it where it seems to have been destroyed, turned into snickering anticomtdy: "Look, here's a book that has just come which I think you'll find interesting. . . . The title is attractive: Among Men." Madame Verdurin 's homophobic wit serves her "worldly ambitions," especially her ambition to appear worldly: to appear, that is, to know her way around the world. At the same time, and in the same place, another woman is making a joke that serves her own worldly ambitions, but that might actually raise a giggle. The epigraph, it is worth recalling, is in French, and Sedgwick does not provide a translation of it: "Tenez, voici un livre que j'ai reçu, je pense qu'il vous intéressera. ... Le titre est joli: Parmi les hommes." Sedgwick, we have seen, has the nerve to imply that Proust is imitating her as much as she is imitating him. But quoting him in French, and leaving him in French, offers additional comic rewards. Both trace and fulfillment of Sedgwick's dream that Proust's novel "remained untranslated," it permits her to spend this chapter of her book, if not her entire "productive life," "afloat within that blissful and hilarious atmosphere of truth-telling," reproducing and unfolding Proust's text as if for the first time. And within this dream of being-in-Proust lies another: while Sedgwick in effect translates Proust, she translates herself into Proust as well. Mimetically adventurous (or linguistically versatile) enough to have written Parmi les hommes, or at least a book that, in French, would have almost the same title, this Proustian critic - looking more Proustian than ever - puts herself afloat in a worldliness that, if it begins in the Verdurin circle, happily drifts away from it. In the very large circle of Madame Verdurin, worldliness is about getting around in the world and yet going nowhere. Out of this world, Sedgwick unfolds a Proustian worldliness of floating, of levity: a comic worldliness in which, at once expanding and lightening up, one has the nerve to become fluently foreign to oneself, while the unhilarious world goes round and round.

NOTES

1 . Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet," in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 213-52; hereafter page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Random House, 1993), 604; hereafter page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.

3. In another of those Proustian twists that typify the epistemology of the closet, the Prince de Guermantes, moreover, has been revealed, to the reader if not to Madame Verdurin, as homosexual - as indeed "one of them" in the sense that Madame Verdurin insinuates.

4. One of the ways Sedgwick will get around this problem in her later work is by positing in Proust's novel a movement from "paranoia" (in a volume like The Captive) toward the "reparative" (in the final volume, Time Regained). See "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You," in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Series Q (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1-40, quotation on 16.

5. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 2 vols., trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:182.

6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes," in "After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory," ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, special issue, South Atkntic Quarterly (SAQ) 106, no. 3 (2007): 625-42, quotation on 638.

7. Sedgwick herself shrinks the scene, at any rate, when she claims that "we are given none of the language [that Charlus and Jupien] exchange" (230); the narrator does in fact quote an exchange of language between them (9).

8. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, Sodome et Gomorrhe and La Prisonnière, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Antoine Compagnon, Pierre-Edmond Robert, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 6.

9. But which Sedgwick amends as "smug, nonchalant, ridiculous," explaining that she wants to point to the "particular adjectival effect" (228) whereby "ridiculous," unlike "fatuous," implies an audience secretly consuming Charlus's performance, at his expense.

10. Sedgwick calls him "fat" (226). Elsewhere, including in Epistemology of the Closet, she discusses the politics of fat and her own identity as a fat woman. On homography and homosexuality in general, and for another influential reading of Charlus in particular, see, of course, Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994).

11. "Comme si de telles révélations ne devaient être la récompense que d'un acte plein de risques, quoique en partie clandestin" (10). This phrasing leaves even less distance between spectator and scene.

Author affiliation:

Joseph Lavapis professor of English at Tufts University. He is the author, most recently, o/The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Duke University Press, 2009). His current project is a boo\ on comedy and the Cold War.