Reading

We’re into the home stretch now in our pondering of Proust -- four volumes down and three to go. We have been introduced to a fascinating and vast cast of characters, from the cook Françoise to the Prince de Guermantes. We have found out that Charlus is gay, and that the Duc de Guermantes is a Dreyfusard. Let’s take a break, then, before we tackle the last three tomes, and reflect on a new addition to the Proustian literature: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time, by Patrick Alexander.

Outside of Alexander’s offering, there are two books that stand as must-reads to gain insight into Proust’s massive work. The first is Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter, an excellent biography of the author of A la Recherche. The second is How Proust Can Change your Life by Alain de Botton, a witty look at how this author's writings can be applied to everyday living. Certainly there are numerous other books on Proust, but you can safely read these two and remain a serious but sane aficionado. Go beyond these and of course you risk entering into the dark realm of Proustian obsession. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing.

Why, in our web-connected age, do we still exist in information silos defined by nationality and language?

This is, for me, probably the greatest disappointment of the Internet era. (Okay, the fact that I didn't get to keep my million dollars of dot-com stock was my biggest personal disappointment, but that's a different kind of disappointment). An incredible technological unity has been established all over the world -- from my office computer to Africa and Asia and South America and everywhere on this planet, we all speak HTML and Unicode and TCP-IP and HTTP. So why isn't there more global cultural interchange going on?

Reality Hunger is a book-length essay about literature and culture by David Shields that's getting a lot of attention for its provocative key argument: we are wrong to think of fiction as the most exalted form of literature, because as readers we mostly value writings that bring us reality and truth -- which are, by strict definition, beyond the scope of fiction. Shields presents today's literary community as blind and confused, trained to pine after the ideal of the perfect novel, the sublime work of art, when in fact we crave something more primal than artistic excellence when we read.

There's a short story by Max Beerbohm, published in 1919, that sometimes comes up in philosophy classes. "Enoch Soames, a Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties" tells the story of Max Beerbohm, the author-as-character-within-the-novel, and his encounter with Enoch Soames, an unsuccessful writer and hanger-on in the London cafe scene in the 1890s. Enoch is frustrated that no one recognizes his genius, so he makes a deal with the devil to go forward in time and read about himself in the future where, he is sure, history will vindicate him.

In due course he and Max meet the devil himself in one of the cafes, and Enoch disappears, to pop up in 1997, where he searches the British Library to find out what we've thought of him. Some time later, he reappears back in the cafe, despondent. Before the devil spirits him away he explains to Max that he found only one reference to himself, in a work of fiction -- a short story by Max Beerbohm! And then he and the devil disappear. Max-the-character explains that he feels compelled to write this story about Enoch, as it will be the only way his friend will be known at all, despite the fact that it will be classified as fiction. He begs us to take it as biography.

The philosophical problem is, who and what is Enoch Soames? Within the framework of the story, are we to take him as fictional (as we do, and as the author-as-author does), or as "real," as both Enoch and the author-as-character insist that we should? The logical knots in this seemingly simple puzzle have yet to be fully untangled.