7. Is ‘In Search of Lost Time’ a long-drawn-out asthma attack?

7- Proustaverses 

The entire ISOLT is a long-drawn-out asthma attack, argues Dr. George Corganian de Corganoff in his 1945 thesis6 for his doctorate in medicine. 

7- Proustophiles 

A strange, slightly bizarre thesis by a doctor who – with the best intentions – tries to explain the style of the long sentences. In reality, an asthmatic person gasps for air during an attack, fights for every bit of oxygen, and breathes with desperate breaths while the patient has the greatest difficulty in squeezing the used oxygen back out. Even if the ISOLT were written exclusively in a succession of long sentences, which is clearly not the case, such an explanatory model is short-sighted and reduces the complexity of a work of art to an all-encompassing simplism. One could just as well write a doctoral thesis on the idea that the ISOLT is a prolonged hyperventilation attack. A similar remark can be made about the many psychoanalytic interpretations in which the Oedipal conflict, the excessively close mother-child bond, the conflictual relationship with the father, the jealousy of his little brother Robert, etc., are repeatedly discussed in an effort to explain everything. 

After all, for someone who only has a hammer at their disposal, everything is a nail.