The Year of Reading Proust discussion

I am a poet, so I've never tried this, but I do an exercise with my creative writing students (I teach at a university) that I call the "Proust exercise" where I have them take a passage from their writing and pick a point--any point--to go in and expand, adding more details, showing them how anything can be expanded upon (if they so desire). Most of them are underclassmen and have a hard time coming up with a few pages, so I find it a great exercise, but I don't think they're really imitating Proust.

I came across this passage at the end of Chapter 15 in Richard Wright's autobiographical novel Black Boy. At this point in the book, he has made it to Chicago in 1927, escaping the violent racism of Mississippi, but still struggling against hunger and fear in a culture he seems unable to adapt to or understand:


I spent my nights reading Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past, admiring the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological structure of the Frenchman's epic of death and decadence. But it crushed me with hopelessness, for I wanted to write of the people in my environment with an equal thoroughness, and the burning example before my eyes made me feel that I never could.

After reading this wonderful description of Proust's writing, I went on a search to learn more about Richard Wright. In this video, @ 0:54, his approach to writing reminds me of Proust's. Thank you, Jim, for posting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAdM-f...

I love book references within books. LOVE. Though I read Black Boy in high school after I was blown away with Native Son and decided to do a study on Richard Wright. (for class credit, of course). His experience and writing are amazing but I certainly would never have caught this reference at the time!

Marcelita wrote: "After reading this wonderful description of Proust's writing, I went on a search to learn more about Richard Wright. In this video, @ 0:54, his approach to writing reminds me of Proust's. Thank you..."

You're welcome!

@Jeremy - yes, and the more good books you read, the more good books you discover. It's wonderfully, a lifelong treasure hunt that can't be exhausted...

When I sat down to write my first novel, Parisian by Heart, I purposefully tried to write like Proust. I even began the novel with a sentence that I tried to craft after the first line in ISOLT: "For a long time I used to go to bed early." (From Moncrieff/Kilmartin) My first line is: "For as long a time as I can remember, I have wanted to go to France."

Not only did I go on to try to write like him, I put Marcel in the novel as the main character and tried to write his dialogue as I imagined he might speak. I don't know how well I succeeded, the novel has sold fairly well and reached the quarter-finals of Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award in 2011. However, my sister, who is a voracious reader, read it and said I needed to write less like Proust and more like Hemingway- one of my least favorite writers!

Jeremy wrote: "I love book references within books. LOVE. Though I read Black Boy in high school after I was blown away with Native Son and decided to do a study on Richard Wright. (for class credit, of course)..."

I'm just reading this now Jeremy, but you should definitely check out https://www.smalldemons.com/ if you like/LOVE book references within books.

Barry wrote: "I've nailed corkboards to my walls and ceiling and spend all my time in bed, but I don't write, and my wife never hears my bell for coffee service :("

Hilarious!