Is there a way not to feel guilty about not having read the whole of "In Search of Lost Time"?

Yes, Proust. The greatest writer of the last century. But who has read him? And who reads him today? These questions recur after receiving and leafing through an interesting, useful, and perhaps necessary book by Roberta Capotorti and Eleonora Sparvoli, namely "Proust nel tempo". A century and more of readings, interpretations and critical trajectories (Carocci, 274 pp., 26 euros). A book by two scholars for scholars, among whom I am an intruder and an incompetent. If there is one thing that saves me and justifies me, it is the fact that I have been a thoughtful reader of In Search of Lost Time, albeit an occasional one and, ultimately, resigned to impatience and laziness, because, at a more than mature age, I told myself: ‘It is Proust’s fault, not mine. He is a writer who demands too much of his readers; he demanded a religious faith, a devotion unblemished and free from personal weaknesses.”

Well, I’m in the clear, and I’ll defend myself by saying that I prefer Kafka. Alongside – or in contrast to – the epic, lyrical and snobbish poet of the French bourgeoisie and nobility between the 19th and 20th centuries, I place the mystical rabbi, the Hasid from Prague, an employee at an insurance company, more inclined towards parables and aphorisms than towards apotheosis and aesthetic glorification. Consequently, I must acknowledge not only my failure to read Proust’s entire masterpiece, but also my surrender to the absurd temptation of weighing up and comparing the two most incomparable storytellers of the twentieth century.

The reality and truth is that I read Proust not so much out of any particular passion for Proust himself, but because of the passion I harboured for his most timely and brilliant critics and interpreters – the very best of critical essay writing: namely Walter Benjamin, Erich Auerbach, Giacomo Debenedetti and Edmund Wilson. Incidentally, Proust (like Kafka) did not give rise to a school of thought; there were no ‘Proustians’ after him, just as there were no ‘Kafkian’ writers; instead, there were thinkers and critics whose interpretations of In Search of Lost Time made it possible to derive social and moral philosophy from a narrative.

I began at around the age of twenty by attending Debenedetti’s lectures on the twentieth-century novel – lectures which, following his death, became legendary and were later published in book form. But Debenedetti certainly did not measure up to Proust in the 1960s, when he taught his students that the revolution in the novel during the first two decades of the twentieth century was closely related to Freud’s depth psychology and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Among the critics who discovered Proust in the 1920s, Debenedetti was the first to do so in 1925, when he was just over twenty years old, immediately observing that In Search of Lost Time lends itself to being anthologised, even though its most striking feature is a continuity of rhythm that renders it indivisible in its unbroken flow. The ‘Proustian tone’ asserts itself ‘from the very first line of the novel’. It is a ‘poetic magic’ that instantly creates a musical atmosphere, and whose perceptiveness does not miss a single sensory detail or any accompanying emotion the moment it arises.

If Debenedetti was himself, in person, somewhat like Proust, then for the melancholic and meditative Benjamin too – who was equally steeped in French literature (Baudelaire, Zola, Gide, Apollinaire, Valéry, Péguy) – Proust is a model, an example, a literary and biographical phenomenon. In the fifteen pages that Benjamin wrote in 1929, entitled ‘Towards a Portrait of Proust’, the portrait emerges right from the opening lines as follows: ‘The depths of the mystic, the art of the prose writer, the verve of the satirist, the learning of the scholar and the obsession of the monomaniac’. His great literary work either establishes a genre or dissolves it; it stands as a case unto itself. Benjamin, adopting a somewhat journalistic style for once, pulls no punches and proceeds by accumulation, speaking of the ‘greatest work of recent decades’, an ‘unusual illness’, ‘uncommon richness’ and an ‘abnormal disposition’. Proust drove his publisher to distraction with his revisions of the galley proofs, which were filled to the brim. He also said that he would have liked his entire work to be printed in a single volume with pages in two columns, and without any line breaks. Finally, here is the writer as a man: ‘Proust’s defining trait is not humour, but comedy; in him, laughter does not lift the world up, it hurls it to the ground (…) the unity of the family and the individual, of sexual morality and social decorum, effectively falls to pieces. The pretensions of the bourgeoisie are shattered by laughter’. And further on: ‘In his curiosity, Proust had something of the detective about him. To him, the privileged class was a clan of wrongdoers’.

On the other hand, Auerbach, as a social critic and philologist, in his 1927 essay entitled Marcel Proust: The Novel of Time Lost speaks of the “unprecedented richness of the linguistic fabric”, but not only that: “The nervous, pedantic and timid cadence of the sentences’ is that of ‘an extremely singular person, a monomaniac suffering from all manner of tics and obsessions (…) a hypersensitive capacity for observation, consistent to the point of madness and terribly aberrant; the colossal novel unfolds amongst his few motifs and events as if in a cage, without seeing the world flowing by right next to it’.

Well, there’s enough here to overcome any reluctance or even boredom that might prevent readers from reading the work in its entirety.

A final essay from 1931 concludes the reception of Proust and his work outside France. It is by Edmund Wilson, the master of American criticism, who in his book Axel’s Castle addresses and explains European literature from Symbolism onwards to his fellow Americans. Here it is: “Marcel Proust is the first great novelist to have applied the principles of Symbolism to fiction (…) His enormous novel is, on closer inspection, a symphonic structure rather than a narrative in the common sense of the term’. Yet Wilson corrects himself: ‘But anyone who has stopped at The Young Girls in Flower and knows only the subjective Proust is bound to form a mistaken idea of the quality of his genius (…) From this point onwards, we find ourselves violently hurled into the life of the outside world. The contrast between the dreams, meditations and lamentations of the neurasthenic hero and Proust’s powerful imagination lends dramatic force to a pervasive sense of humour’. Wilson says that Proust learnt from Dickens and goes on to surpass him, for example, in the tragicomic portrait of Baron de Charlus. Thus, stylistic musicality by no means exhausts the originality of In Search of Lost Time: “Proust ferociously dismantled the social hierarchy he had previously depicted. He shows us that the values on which it is founded are a sham.” Wilson is right. To understand Proust, one must not stop at his initial stylistic tone and his symbolist approach to knowledge and memory. Proust is a great and ruthless moralist; he reveals that even “the world of lovers can be a hell”.

What lies ahead? I shall read Capotorti and Sparvoli’s book to find out what else has been learnt about Proust after a century of critical studies, from Bataille and Contini right through to Orlando and Mariolina Bertini.