***** When we turn now to the actual social content of Proust, the hidden significance of such passions as snobbery and social climbing is at once revealed: so many the mystified figures of that longing for perfection, of an as yet unconscious Utopian impulse. At the same time, such social raw material, with its eternal receptions and drawing rooms and its profound class limitations, and the deliberate intention of Proust to paint a nobility in decay and on the point of vanishing into nothingness -- all of these things come to seem not so much reactionary as anticipatory. For it is precisely the leisure of this class, given over completely to interpersonal relationships, to conversation, art, and social planning (if one may so characterize the energy that goes into the building of a salon), fashion, love, which reflects in the most distorted way the possibilities of a world in which alienated labor will have ceased to exist, in which man's struggle with the external world and with his own mystified and external pictures of society will have given way to man's confrontation with himself. The Proustian leisure class is a caricature of that classless society: how could it be otherwise? Yet since it is (at least in Proust's society) the only leisure culture which exists, it alone can serve as a source of concrete images of what such a Utopia might be like....In this sense it is perhaps not too much to say that _gossip_ -- that meeting place of conversation and art, that profoundly fertile vice of both Saint-Simon and Proust (and indeed of Balzac as well, in a very different social milieu) -- may itself stand as a kind of distorted figure of that passion for the human in its smallest details which will be ours in the transfigured society and the transfigured world.
(Fredric Jameson, _Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature_, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971, pp. 153-4) *****
Yoshie