Meanwhile, it must be considered that Marcel Proust had a special probe, or radar, capable of detecting all forms of stupidity, dullness, narrow-mindedness. But perhaps the most accurate word is superficiality. He had an uncommon talent for telling human beings incapable of depth. Interesting material in itself: the frivolous, the giggles, the ones who say nonsense to fill the time. Those who do not know, or do not want to, detach themselves from the surface of things, from their most external and most predictable patina. In this sense, it is a pity that he died a hundred years ago, because to his already amazing gallery of subjects tending to emptiness he could have added bunches, caught in our century. But starting with his colleagues (so to speak) writers: those who, from the top of the bestseller charts, have ultimately felt the need to communicate their intolerance towards Proust. For heaven’s sake, one is not forced to love the author of the Recherche! But that Ken Follett says, in a recent interview, that he “makes readers’ hearts beat” and Proust no, well, it’s all to be seen. And you have to consider what heart you have. But the worst is that Valérie Perrin, the author of Changing the water to flowers, at the last Turin Book Fair, confided to the public that she had ditched Proust out of boredom. She got the applause laughing, in fact (I’ll be back in a moment). But she also exposed herself to the risk that someone might oppose the boredom felt by reading her. The applause, I said: symptomatic, especially in a temple of books, of a subtle and invasive cultural populism. A more sophisticated evolution of the famous Fantozzi cry on the Potëmkin Battleship. But if that was the liberating act of the common citizen clerk against the cloak of cinephile snobbery, in Perrin’s case there is a pleased (and very vulgar) nudging himself among the like: but yes, let’s say “what a sucker!” let’s confess our desire for simple stuff, let’s take off our intellectual masks. Mah.
The exit irritated me. And, I repeat, not because we should feel compelled to read Proust, but because – by dint of not accepting the challenge of complexity – we have become monstrously boring. We do, Madame Perrin, other than Proust! Victim, in some way, of those who have not read it or read it in bits and pieces and talked about it anyway. By reducing thousands of pages or to the story of a pastry soaked in infusion; or a static, long-winded, tiring introspective narrative. Self-fiction before self-fiction: there are those who have had the courage to define it this way. Or – with the best of intentions – to distil it in the somewhat cloying spirit of the existential vademecum or the book that changes your life.
For charity. Although I am well aware of the tons of Proustian bibliography, that is, of the fact that everything has been said on the Recherche, I would say that the only way to read or reread it is to sweep away, with a rather brusque gesture, madeleine, self-fiction , alleged prolixity, self-help. And ask us a simple, stupid, naive question; do it to Valérie Perrin, to our brother, to the uncle seen at Christmas, to the elderly fans of Chiara Ferragni, and to literary scholars and influencers, even to contemporary writers. It doesn’t matter whether they have read Proust, whether they love it or hate it. It matters that they are alive, and somehow vital. Well, the question is: what is the thing that scares you most of all, excluding death? It is probable that, formulated in different and more or less precise ways, the answer is, in essence: the passage of time. There is nothing more to add. The only, irreversible, irreversible and desperate time that passes. What involves wrinkles on the face, loss of position and of loved ones, dizzying and somehow amazing distance from one’s own youth. I would like to meet a single human being who is over the age of twenty-five and is not bewildered and secretly distressed by all of this. Here you are. The news is that Proust is waiting for us all here. At the crossroads of that intermittent awareness, of the consequent nostalgia, and of the desire to get something back. A man born in 1871 and died in 1922 spends a decade of his existence in a literary enterprise that functions like a time machine, allowing him to go through the years in the opposite direction to their flow. Boring, cold? On the contrary, it brings into play – to go back in time – every fiber of his body, every layer of sensory capacity (the deep deposits of his “mental subsoil”), and an unattainable domain of syntax. He is the king of subordinates, of metaphors that incorporate other metaphors; constructs sentences that, read aloud, literally take your breath away (and not figuratively). But above all he knows that, to get something back, one must devote oneself to exactness, minutiae, exhausted precision: no rain is the same as another, it must be said of that rain that arrived in front of the optician’s shop, with drops of water. «Similar to migratory birds that take flight all together». And, to say, the flowered bedspread in the room where we spent the summer holidays cannot be, it is not just any bedspread: it has a specific smell, and this smell – writes Proust – is an “intermediate, sticky, tasteless and fruity “. And we go on, we go on for hours, for days: the foliage of a chestnut tree, a book in which we come across with amazement in the name of a known person, the good smell of the air on summer evenings, the spectacle the same of summer, “the total spectacle”, and your grandmother who had no irony except for herself and kisses you with her eyes, the fresh asparagus and the scent that remains in the urine, bell towers like gigantic croissants. The purples and blues in the clouds, “so beautiful”. The stormy and mild evenings of February. The trips we didn’t take. And the houses, the streets, the avenues, “fugitive like the years”. I ran out of space, but not time, time to get back the time by reading Proust. I also wanted to tell you about a certain relentless light that makes you want to escape his attention, of certain prolonged notes emitted in the morning by invisible birds, of the path of the hawthorns, of that time I was in Iliers, and of a phrase that says that ours imagination “is like a battered barrel organ.” But it will be for another time; and then I’m too moved again, as always when I talk about Proust, and nothing, I’m sorry for Ken Follett and Valérie Perrin, I’m so sorry