Everyone is convinced that he can read enough to understand the most difficult and heartbreaking book.
About Proust's prose, what about? Compared to Joyce, the clarity itself has become. It was not always like this: at least for a poet like Paul Valéry, Proust appeared to be an opaque author over his powers of endeavor, an inaccessible creator.
So, each of us thinks he is (at least) a good reader, at least as good as Valéry. If we did not have full confidence in our cognitive virtues, why did we read? If we did not hope to eventually come to the ultimate, overwhelming sense of the Divine Comedy, we stopped reading, and maybe we would give up this habit, or we could also grab incomprehensible texts to rejoice / humble others, why could not the brave Joyce and us do?
Arrived here, I suddenly remembered that Roland Barthes had the modesty (and boldness) to say in an ironic interview that he was a precarious reader ("a mauvais lecteur," he declares) a quantitative point of view . It seemed to him that he had read too little, a few classics (Racine, Balzac, Verne, plus Sade, who is a very dubious prose writer, etc.) whom he also commented abundantly and excessively, ignoring names and works as prestigious . He reproached, as it would come, that he had thought too much and had read too little.
Of course, if we look at things and consider it good and efficient only for the individual who passes a five hundred-page book daily, then no one can really be an "ideal" reader, except those who apply "speed reading" to any books, regardless of the subject, may also be a treaty of virtues.
Reading presupposes (it is mandatory!) And moments of patient reflection, and reflection requires time, perseverance, no one thinks of pleasure and free of charge. The meaning does not come suddenly and does not offer itself, no matter how exegeted you are. In other words, the interpretation of a book is almost never a mystical rapt. The formulation of a critical hypothesis, the hermeneutic activity itself presupposes a long-lasting effort. In fact, we never read, we recite. Nabokov's statement is a precious record. Reading itself means a re-reading.
So I do not believe Barthes a bad reader, nor do he think he was doing the wrong thing when he read meditatively, analytically, minutely, slowly. It would have done wrong, I would have the impression only if it had passed in a single day (and at high speed) through a lot of books, from simple entertainment.
From the same point of view (and only from this point of view), Paul Valéry (a wise man who never became very sympathetic to me) was even worse. He read a little, chosen and was proud of it. He has tried several times to justify his gaps, lack of enthusiasm for some authors. I do not know, though, if he thought very much, I was rather confused in the Introduction to Leonardo da Vinci's method (who thinks clearly is clear, otherwise it is not possible), but it is a reading of the past, I refrained to repeat it, I did not like the book at all.
Besides a speech at the Academy about Anatole France (where he says almost nothing about Anatole France's writings, not even about Epicur's Garden, which, in principle, should inspire even a small excursion of pleasures), the article dedicated to Marcel Proust in the Nouvelle Revue française (no.112, January 1923, pp.117-122) , which was a pious tribute to the death of the prosecutor, and today it is nothing more than an extremely bizarre text, a subtle blasphemy, which then went unnoticed.
In his article, Paul Valéry asserts nonchalantly that he has not read Proust with great care and with pleasure. He crossed a single volume from Looking for lost time and immediately intuited that he has to deal with an original author, an innovator (an innovator is certainly not a great writer). But Proust's prose seemed rather incredulous. And for obscurity, Valéry (himself a difficult writer) found no vocation.
They say, as everyone knows (sic!), Proust's books are not read too easily. In spite of this, any difficult writer should be blessed and received with the greatest appreciation. If he forms some readers, he never does it for himself alone. These precious readers will also head to Montaigne, Descartes and Bossuet. The gain is of all writers who "express themselves in abstractions, in silogisms, which comprise in one sentence the body of one whole thought." They were not afraid to confront the readers: "Encore a peu of temps, et nous ne les comprendrons plus".
We, who have not really killed Proust in our youth (or maturity), will probably approve of Valéry. And we look at him with understanding and sympathy ...
