I met Proust and took an instant dislike. His namby-pamby whining in Swann’s Way drove me to distraction, to a desperate need to slap him in the face if only, if ONLY he were standing in front of me. I toiled, I moaned as he made me walk beside him on Swann’s Way, on the Guermantes Way through the FICTITIOUS town of Combray (today the town of Illiers that appended its actual NAME because Proust’s opus, Remembrance of Things Past, put it on the map).

Ok, so he is a map changer. So he took a metaphor and extended it through seven novels. What’s it to me?

I have been hemming and hawing about revisions on my first two novels, lofting sadly about while I attend classes for my MFA in writing. Every time I sit down to work on them I have a critique due on an obscure novel by an old Italian communist, or have a book reading due for my class on the modern novel; the class with the professor who prescribed Proust to merrily kick off the term. Proust is a writer I had  run from in the past as if he were a mad, sick, raving lunatic high on crack cocaine drifting down the street toward me, weaponized with a broken beer bottle.

Not that I feared for my life, I feared for my works. I didn’t want them infested with “influence” as I’d seen in the novels, not to mention the creative memoirs, of so many with attributions to Proust, their very work at times oozing with Proustian language and sound. I thought of women writers first, for some reason, SEDUCED by this effete man who allegedly didn’t DESIRE women: a celebrated Lebanese novelist with her memories of war, the recent Columbia graduate with her novella about birds. “No,” I gasped to myself. “I won’t be mesmerized by the watch he sways slowly in front of me like a hypnotist, forcing me to watch the seconds, minutes, hours, tick away. So I can be thrust back into the past. So I will be forced to come face to face with his little foibles and tricks and use them, in particular the EXTENDED METAPHOR! “NO,” I GASPED NO!”

it’s been a month since I began my MFA program. I am now sitting pensively, quietly in my room typing this into my blog. I have to leave in a few minutes to find a place outside my small apartment to clear my head and push through Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles because our teacher has substituted it for Extinction, his angst-ridden novel I’d read over the summer because he’d assigned it to an earlier class and I thought I’d be clever and jump-start my reading assignments. I did open the Word file on my Mac Pro over the weekend to work on revisions of my first novel. I am now REVISING MY FIRST NOVEL AND ITS SEQUEL because of Proust. DAMN HIM. DAMN HIM. DAMN HIM. OH GOD I’VE FOUND THE EXTENDED METAPHOR FOR THE ENTIRE WORK AND ITS FALLEN INTO MY OPENING PARAGRAPH DESPITE ALL MY ATTEMPTS TO REMAIN SUBLIMELY ABOVE IT ALL, TO REMAIN PURE AND TRUE TO MY VISION, TO NOT BE INFLUENCED BY PROUST!