I love Germaine Greer. I know some people find her deliberately provocative, but all I see are those double initials, GG, which in my whimsical world give her all the quaint and haunting glamour of an old-fashioned movie star:
BB
MM
GG
She is more than forty years older than me, and yet I have always thought that we would get along just like sisters, with me shuddering in a corner and weeping and wailing, and her screaming at me to shut up. But when it comes to French literature, it’s weird because it's almost like we come from two totally different generations.
Now, I'm aware that she has gained notoriety for being controversial and for saying some intense stuff about ‘issues’ of all kinds, but I swear I have never once thought she was batty until this week, when she came out with the most
startling declaration in
The Guardian—that reading Marcel Proust's seven volume novel,
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, is a waste of one’s time.
I’m just going to jump straight to the ludicrous conclusion that some of you might not have gotten around to reading
Proust yet, not because I think you’re all illiterate imbecilic nincompoops, but because either:
a) You all have boyfriends and girlfriends who want to have sex with you constantly, leaving you little to no time for reading, or
b) Because
I know that
you know that it’s fundamentally wrong to read a book by any author whose name you don’t know how to pronounce properly, which I am pretty sure is the reason why Brown, Dan is more popular than Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr.
If this second point applies to you, then let me take all the mystery out of it for you and tell you that it’s
PrOOst. Although if you’re British, please follow the authority of Monty Python Pty Ltd, who pronounce it PrOWst, mainly just to piss off the French I guess.
Anyway, some of you may be wondering why I would risk my life taking GG on over this issue. Others amongst you might not give any sort of shit about it whatsoever, mainly because you're more naturally inclined towards gazing at photos of scowling, bestubbled, young men wearing lobster bibs and tearing away at corn cobs instead. In which case, I dedicate this peace offering to you and hope we can be friends:
Because what I really want to say is that I am halfway through
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu myself, and after five of the most exhilarating months of my life, it pains me dreadfully to discover that Greer thinks the whole thing is a waste of time:
If you haven't read Proust, don't worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself.
Really, Professor? Because there are so many other things about myself I was worrying about up until now. For example, my perennial unemployment record! My complete retardedness in relationships! My startling inability to fill out a tax return! My clandestine crystal meth addiction!
Up until now, the one thing I was
least worried about in my life is the fact that I am well on the way to finishing
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu before I turn thirty, which is surely one of the most admirable ways to look at the shortage of Point A in my life (see above), but sometimes you really just have to accentuate the positive or you'll never get through the day.
I honestly think that in this holy month of Movember, one would expect the man with one of the most iconic moustaches in the world to garner more respect.
Anyway, the other way to look at it, even if you don’t yet share my ardour for Proust's breathtaking prose style, is to understand that Germaine Greer represents a despicable older generation—one that we, Generation Y-ish, should hate and deplore for making us all go to uni for decades just so we can be perennially unemployed, addicted to crystal meth and unable to fill out a tax return. (Let's not also blame our retardedness in relationships on baby boomers too, because—be honest—that one's purely our own fault).
So the best way I can think of showing that naysaying baby boomer generation what we think of their values is to rebel against Greer, quit school and start reading Proust immediately. That'll teach 'em.
Of course, if you think life should be handed to you on a silver platter and you're lazy and irresponsible and everything else your parents say you are, you will be affronted by the idea of spending more than $150 on seven volumes of a novel written by a dead, French homosexual. You might think that 2,408 pages and 1.25 million words is a bit ambitious for your own high-fructose-corn-syrup-addled brain which is no doubt more focused on illiterate grammatical renderings and getting laid. But guess what? So was Proust!
As Greer notes, he can barely even write a sentence—JUST LIKE YOU! He doesn’t ‘get’ full stops—JUST LIKE YOU! She calls him a fake heterosexual voyeur—ISN’T THAT WHAT THE GIRL WHOSE BREAST YOU WERE TRYING TO TOUCH LAST WEEKEND CALLED YOU?!
So I think Proust is the perfect symbol for our very special brand of Generation Y insouciance and rebellion. Let’s burn those terrible Che Guavera t-shirts and replace them with Marcel Proust ones! Let's stop listening to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and being complicit in our parents' irrelevant 1960s nostalgia orgy! In the case of Greer vs Proust,
choose Proust, and together we will carve out a new identity for our generation, one that says: Fuck you I won't do what you tell me, Germaine Greer—reading Proust is just as good a way of wasting my time as anything else currently on offer.
Although I must admit that gazing at photos of scowling, bestubbled young men who have recklessly tumbled backwards on their piano stool at the edge of a windswept cliff can also be a perfectly wonderful way of passing the time, too.
