Proust's Theories, Proust's Theorists

As most of you know, my interest now, when reading Proust, is the way in which Proust is read and how we are to read Proust and how Proust reads us. There is, of course that wonderful quotation in Time Regained:

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader. Besides, the book may be too learned, too obscure for a simple reader, and may therefore present to him a clouded glass through which he cannot. And other peculiarities can have the same effect as inversion. In order to read with understanding many readers require to read in their own particular fashion, and the author must not be indignant at this; on the contrary, he must leave the reader all possible liberty, saying to him: ‘Look for yourself, and try whether you see best with this lens or that one or this one.’ (VI:322)

To these ends, as I was reading On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, I noticed how Said turned to Adorno who in turn turns to Proust; I quote here from Mimima Moralia, “For Marcel Proust”:

The son of well-to-do parents, who whether from talent or weakness, engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, and that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. Such suspicions, though betraying a secret resentment, would usually prove well-founded. But the real resistances lie elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become ‘practical,’ a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He is not a ‘professional,’ is ranked in competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. (21)

Following this, Said noted that “Adorno, like Proust, lived and worked his entire life next to, and even as a part of, the great underlying continuities of Western society: families, intellectual associations, musical and concert life, and philosophical traditions, as well as any number of academic institutions. But he was always to one side, never fully part of it” (21).

For now, I have no comment but instead prefer to continue sharing the various theorists who have incorporate Proust into their own thoughts and how this very action seems, appropriately enough, Proustian.

Another thought though on inversion, it struck me that Proust in the above theory of reading speaks about inversion: is the author merely an inversion of the reader or vice versa?

J.A.