Causeries, or Critical Chit-Chat, or A Gift for Slighting the Gifted

Marcel Proust, as a writer, was even more, shall we say (in order to invoke the first near-complete and also tea-based experience of involuntary memory had by the would-be-writer narrator “Marcel” of À la recherche du temps perdu, which as you may not know was the second novel Proust never finished writing, the first of these having been Jean Santeuil), “steeped” in literary work by others than were so steeped such equally “classic,” as they are by now called, or “canonical” twentieth-century novelists as James Joyce, who, like Proust, seems to have had but in fact did not have a photographic memory, and Vladimir Nabokov, who did have one, or than are such literary critics (for Proust, at heart, was a critic) as the neo-conservative and photographic-memory-blessed – or perhaps cursed – Harold Bloom, who does not appear to have been quite so, well, influential as I imagine he would like to be, and – of course I do feel some anxiety here about naming myself – the non-neo-conservative, non-photographic-memory-blessed, and equally non-influential Kevin Kopelson.