!!!Proustmaxxxing!!!
(on Proust's fabricated folds...)
Once upon a time, Canadian poet and classicist, Anne Carson, began to read Proust (in French) for half an hour a day. She completed the entire series over seven years, usually reading after breakfast, after which she entered “the desert of after-Proust”.
I decided finally to commit to Carson’s Albertine Workout, if not for seven years, at least for August. I put the idea out on Instagram: turns out everyone else wants to too. !!!PROUSTMAXXXING!!! was born.
Anakana Schofield, one of the very best contemporary writers in the English language, runs regular live reading sessions from her Substack Binge Reading. She’s currently binge-reading Don Quixote, but welcomes !!!PROUSTMAXXXERS!!! Her commitment to reading for 4 hours a day is a reclamation of Lost Time that defies the current pressure to MAXX everything. It’s a Quixotic act in the best sense.
Join us here on Wednesday 5 August at 4pm IST/GMT; 5pm CEST, 8am PT. I’ll be reading in French. Any language is fine. No set amount, read at your own pace.
See you tomorrow?
But, wait, Proust and style? Of course.
I think of Proust’s literary style as “nested,” like email structures that ensure you reply to exactly the wrong person. You start at the beginning of one of his famously long sentences and hit a subclause. You step down into that sub-level, only to find another waiting at your feet. You descend another step, then another. You start to feel you will never surface. But then you begin to, one step at a time, the steps not even (that would be too easy), but every step up answers a step down. By the end of a paragraph you find yourself back on the surface, often in another time, another place. The landscape has completely changed.
One writer currently exploring near-endless sentences is the poet Ellen Dillon, with whom I shared this very smart essay by Hannah Smart on DFW’s long sentences.
If, as Simone Weil wrote, there are not enough poems about butter, then Dillon has expanded that genre with her Kerrygold-shaped Butter Intervention, which I recently bought when we both performed at Christodoulos Makris’ re:verb festival of poetry and the verbal arts.
Here’s a video of the highlights:
…but I have descended into a Proustian cellar of hyperlinked thought. Back to style.
The folds and subfolds of Proust’s sentences are recalled in the pleats of Yves Saint Laurent’s designs for Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s "Proust Ball,"(1971), in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the writer’s birth, for which YSL created costumes to be worn by, amongst others, Nan Kempner, Hélène Rochas, and Jane Birkin.
Proust was particularly keen on the designs of Fortuny (the Catalan designer, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo), born in the same year, and wrote, in La Prisonnière:
“The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan’s wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolize alternatively life and death were repeated in the shimmering fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a malleable gold by those same transmutations which, before an advancing gondola, changed into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal.”
Here’s a gown by Fortuny, blue and gold, bird-ridden, column-shaped, pleats contained within subpleats: we descend deep into its architecture and ascend again. COULD THIS BE THE DRESS??? This one sold at Christie’s auction house in 2011 for £2000. Surely, in real terms, compared to what must have been its original price, a bargain…
Text © Joanna Walsh 2026
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