Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Why I decided to read Remembrance of Things Past
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

When I was a junior in high school, the honors English curriculum was American literature, pretty much from start to yesterday. It turned out to be just as rigorous a class as any English course I took in college; we read a lot of books. That being said, the texts we covered were, more or less, restricted to the big guns of the proverbial canon (pun, as always, intended): Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, James, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck. It was a good sampling, but hardly an exhaustive survey of the rich tapestry of American literature.

That’s where the Blue Book came in. The Blue Book was, essentially, a series of course packets that everyone in the class got. It was filled with excerpts from and secondary sources about authors that we weren’t reading. We didn’t read anything by Ezra Pound, but we knew he was an influential poet. We didn’t read The Jungle, but we knew that Upton Sinclair was a pretty righteous dude. Theodore Dreiser sticks out in my mind for some reason, if only because I had never heard of him before, and very rarely heard of him since (until I took a Dreiser class in college. Suffice it to say, An American Tragedy made a third of my semester a tragedy). But I knew he was influential, and I felt confident in my authority to speak to that fact.

What does this have to do with Marcel Proust? Well, Remembrance of Things Past (or more accurately [and more lame, in this blogger’s myopic opinion], In Search of Lost Time) is sort of the granddaddy of Sister Carrie–type books: many more people speak to its virtues and influence than have actually read it. Everybody (or, at least, everybody who chooses to have an opinion on this sort of thing) accepts Proust’s masterwork as a paragon of modernist literature and, possibly, the best novel of the 20th century. All the right people say so. But how many people have actually read it? For real. It’s like, 4,000 pages! Honestly, I just bought volume one, Swann’s Way, with absolutely no idea what it’s about. It’s a matter of trusting “all the right people,” but more than that, it’s about becoming the right person.

I’ve heard Ulysses described as the Mount Everest of 20th century literature, but that’s not quite accurate. I’ve read Ulysses (sort of); it’s a long, dense, challenging book. But there are more challenging books (you don’t even have to leave Joyce’s repertoire to find a more challenging book. You know what I’m talking about). It’s dense, but readable: Not to pile on Dreiser, but An American Tragedy is the sloggiest slog that one could slog through. And it’s long, but complaining about a book’s length seems, to me, to be incredibly juvenile. Add to that the fact that Ulysses is firmly ensconced in the culture (to wit: I just wrote a story about Bloomsday in Boston), and you’ve got, perhaps, the Mount McKinley of 20th century literature.

That would make Remembrance something like the Marianas Trench. (Maybe that’s not so accurate. Has anyone ever been down there? I think so, right?) Maybe I’m over-, or mis-, stating things here, but wouldn’t that in itself be telling? That a voracious reader and university-trained English degree-holder doesn’t know the slightest thing about the supposedly best book of the century? So either I’m an idiot, or literary victim, or completely on the ball. Either way, I’m embarking on this journey. What I’ll learn, and where it’ll take me, is anyone’s guess. I’ll keep all of you, my precious readers, in the loop.

Tags: books, Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

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