I am appalled to see a bilious, vomitose and utterly intemperate assault upon Proust by Germaine Greer. By her reading A la recherche du temps perdu is too long, too obscure, grammatically otiose and incomplete. Therefore it is, in her view, 'a waste of time' to ever embark upon reading it.
While it may be true that one may read several pages before encountering any punctuation marks this, surely, marks Proust's genius in innovation. Furthermore Proust so so famously fastidious that extant editions are so heavily over-written as to be virtually illegible. His punctiliousness in the search of perfection in no small way explains the incompleteness of his oeuvre: it was only the Grim Reaper himself that interrupted this process of endless redaction.
But it really is her scurrilous slight of the series being 'too long' and 'too obscure' that draws my near-incandescent wrath. Since when has 'length' been a deterrent to the robust and muscular reader? It reminds me of the fatuous critique of Mozart by the Austrian emperor - 'too many notes'. This point must immediately be dismissed as vapid meaninglessness though, like the Emperor, I am sure that Greer has her sycophantic assenters.
And as for obscurity? What on earth is possibly condemnable about being willingly obscure? Must we have sound-bite clarity in all aspects of this vulgar monochromatic visualisation of correct writing? After all, one man's obscurity (or should that be woman's?) is an epicurean feast to another; possibly, we might add, to one with the intellect to mine nuggets of challenging apercus.
No, Proust is the unchallenged colossus of the literary world in the last century and we cannot countenance these garrulous snipings from our Antipodean harpy. Let time be the judge: will we in the next century be discussing Proust or The Female Eunuch? I rest my case.
