Proust's Self-Reader: The Pursuit of Literature As Privileged Communication (Marcel Proust studies, no.7)

In this study of 'A la recherche du temps perdu', Phillip Bailey suggests that Proust and literary critics have promoted the novel as a work of 'privileged communication' in which ideas achieve a level of transcendency impossible to attain through speech. Bailey takes as his point of departure the protagonist's idea that 'chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-meme,' in other words, that readers of novels are self-readers. By analyzing the Recherche and Proust's introduction to John Ruskin's Seame and the Lilies, 'Journees de lectures,' he proposes to show that instead of being exceptional, communication through reading is thoroughly inadequate.