Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [2]
It is of more than incidental interest, with regard to the Search as this sort of gospel and prototype, that Roland Barthes found himself qualified to make certain reservations, certain criticisms, which do not alter his soterial purpose. He readily acknowledged that he preferred certain parts of the Search to others, but that each time he read the book again, the parts he then preferred were different ones, and that was why Proust was a great writer.
But the real trouble new readers have with your book is reading it for the first time. And most of that trouble, frankly, is the length—what you call longueurs. Now, if you get to know each other a little, there are ways of solving this problem. For instance, one could moderate the “academic” insistence that a reading of Proust has to be conducted straight through, from beginning to end, no dipping here and there, no looking ahead, or back.… There’s no need to stipulate such draconian conditions for achieving some sort of intimacy with you. That’s why I’m so eager to introduce you to your new readers. But for now, let me say that in introducing them to you, I want you to understand that there might be some problems—what appear to be contemporary problems.
Such as? Well, American readers are likely to be in a hurry—they haven’t time, they often say. It’s an expression you might appreciate. And you’ll have to admit you’re a very deliberate writer. You need to be patient with your American readers—actually, I think you are: you’ve already devised a technique for patience, at least for their patience. I’ve noticed that often on any one page or in any one passage—somewhere between a chant and a chapter—you manage to cast your spell, to sound your note, to tell your truth, for goodness sake! so that readers don’t have to read all the way to the end of the whole book to get what Proust is about.
You’ve seen to it that the message is sent on every page. Readers can read, and stop, and then, another time, resume. There are other books like that; we call them “wisdom literature,” and their matter is casually crystallized quite as often as it is likely to be exhaustively secreted. Of course I think there’s a real advantage in building up sufficient momentum to read straight through from “For a long time I would go to bed early …” to (six volumes on) “… between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time.” But say you had provided (or permitted) a way of reading your book which took our new readers’ impatience into consideration, which summed up as they went along—even that kind of epitomizing might well strike your new readers as a sort of jungle, a sort of maze—you remember all those comparisons critics have made of the Search to a Gothic cathedral, or a Wagner opera, or even a flying carpet. You’re not generally considered pithy.
Yet all through the tangled volumes of your work, you do crystallize the world into aphorisms and epigrams—I think you’re as succinct as any of those classic French moralists politely murmuring somewhere behind you. Why sometimes you’re faster than La Rochefoucauld himself (as when you say, “It’s from adolescents who last long enough that life makes its old men”). If I could admonish your new readers to watch out for those “moments of speed,” as it were, among the prolonged dimensions and the plethoric details, I think they would find the going a lot easier than they’d expected.
But all I want to do, for now, is to make sure that in meeting your new readers you know what to expect of them, what you have to come to terms with—as I hope to tell them what to expect of you and what they have to come to terms with