My Years With Proust - Day 702

Saddening too was the thought that my love, to which I had clung so tenaciously, would in my book be so detached from any individual that different readers would apply it, even in detail, to what they had felt for other women.  But had I a right to be shocked at this posthumous infidelity, shocked that strangers should find new and alien objects for my feelings in unknown women, when this infidelity, this division of love between a number of women, had begun in my life-time and even before I started to write? It was true that I had suffered successively for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine.  But successively I had also forgotten them, and only the love which I dedicated to different women had been lasting.  The profanation of one of my memories by unknown readers was a crime that I had myself committed before them.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 939-940

Proust finds himself reflecting upon a fact that anyone who ever publishes a book realizes: once the book is published you no longer own it.  Not only do people get to interpret it all sorts of ways that you didn't intend (and that whole deconstructionalist thing about the reader's interpretation trumping the author's interpretation suddenly doesn't seem so funny or clever), but now people that the author will never meet get to "borrow" his characters and events and thoughts for their own repurposing. Proust writes, "Saddening too was the thought that my love, to which I had clung so tenaciously, would in my book be so detached from any individual that different readers would apply it, even in detail, to what they had felt for other women."  Marcel's intensely individualistic love for Albertine will now be "generalized" for much broader use, which, I guess, would qualify as proof that the author has, maybe incidentally, achieved an universality of experience and perception.  In the end Proust accepts it, partially because, "The profanation of one of my memories by unknown readers was a crime that I had myself committed before them." Essentially, he had done it himself, as all readers have.