As I once opined, I’d rather read Henry Miller than read Proust. I actually like Miller, if not enamoured by him (I once used Miller’s life-affirming quote in one of the potpourris I wrote in college). What a wondrous writer! So misogynistic and whorish and brilliant he was canonical to the tee, quite risque to give you a palpable warmth, but not overt enough to rouse ickiness, and so elegant and surreal and compulsive. I feel ennobled reading him, save the passages where he pulled an Epstein and, well, raped a woman. It strikes me as honest and authentic, in his oblique and fanciful way. What Proust depicted was a man connivingly and covertly misogynistic and insecure and infantile, a quite emotional and irrational man, the fact veiled by his possession of a phallus. An educated and sophisticated man who fell for a woman without qualities (not of a Musilean stripe, mind you). He pulled a Professor Unrat, of a variant quite original it was comical (unlike Francine Prose’s adaptation, whose title reflected that of a 1930s film, itself an adaptation on Mann’s book). We could not see her for who she is through the lens of a paradoxically self-obsessed man who is not in love with himself as much as he is an airheaded coquettish woman of dubitable origin and station. She is Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson made interminably tedious and wretched, a distaste that would have been discernibly felt if the reader is not weighed down by, well, a phallus.
I remember the pseudonymous Palermo from La Casa de Papel airing how much he loves Proust amidst his marshalled hostages. Of course he does, and it is starting to make sense now. The person to whom I opined my hatred of Proust was actually my then partner, who was kind enough to reassure me that his mother did not like him either and that Proust was probably writing about a hopeless love interest of his, whom the scholars now believe to be an American by the name of Willie Heath. If so, I applaud Proust. Schadenfreude in conjunction with pity is one of the few reasons to write about anyone, or anything for that matter. Proust becomes readable again, by a happy fact that it was not the creation of a self-obsessed and entitled man who thought he could memorialise his own pitiable dalliance and get away with it.
Salisa lohavittayavikant 