Proust¹: A Primer, which the Author Painstakingly Annotated to Allow How Not to Read about a Lout Whose Crimes Spouted against Humanity Are Not in Doubt²

by Trent Walters

Squatting on the bottom library step, the mousy, elfin-framed man named Arthur⁴ dusted his snake⁵-skin suit, glanced at his watch⁶, then adjusted his horned¹-rims to watch an old woman⁶ wheeze and labor⁷ up the steps with a dolly that held his titanic⁸ stack of manuscript pages. She paused to catch her breath and pushed long tresses of gray hair out of her face.

“Cease wool-gathering, Miss Mykoytress.” His eyelids hooded to slits. “We haven’t words enough and time⁹ before I present my doctoral thesis.”

“Did you reproduce this thesis and read three-thousand pages of Remembrances?”

Art raised himself, as if slowly uncoiling his legs. “That facsimile records the achievements of the all-time greatest novel.”

“I read the first fifty before I realized I hadn’t read the first.”

He hissed, ready to strike.

“I reread it, realizing he taught himself to write on my time. I don’t have much left.”

Scenting the proverbial lost sheep’s weakness, Art flicked his forked-tongue⁷ and slithered⁷ up the steps to make the intellectual kill. “He had strapping male companions, one of whom Proust bought an airplane which the companion promptly crashed into the ocean. Proust never regained the time lost from the loss.”

“I prefer Of Mice and Men.” The tresses of her hair writhed and turned him to stone.

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1 Pronounce Proust like Faust² jousting it out with the metamorphosing Mephistopheles, whose elfin frame housed a Machiavellian mind that deluded the most casually espoused Marlowean/Goethean readers of Chairman Mao’s social policies.

2 The author uses assonance³ to demonstrate artfully⁴ the proper pronunciation.

3 The auctorial³ terms “ass-onance” and “pomp-ass” resonate like pans⁹ of Teflon-coated Freudian slips for the propensity to use overly erudite³ and pompous³ terms like “auctorial” in a flagrant flaunt of critical authority.¹⁰

4 The “author” impishly misdirects the reader with “Arthur” to obfuscate his identity slipping a devilishly deceptive “author” into the title.

5 The wise old woman archetype tempted into servitude by the wise old serpent male archetype.

6 Sly injection of the symbol of time.

7 Scathing indictment of the bourgeois laissez faire.

8 Double entendre alluding to the recyclable Greek myths and the ship that lost a thousand faces⁹. Note the juxtaposed conflation of a child’s and a man’s play toys: a doll-y and a ship (with phallic suggestion)–let alone the bio-ethical reproductive dilemma of cloning inherent in a “dolly.”

9 Marvel at the coy allusion to Andrew Marvell’s poem.

10 Never trust auctorial³ critical authority.