Proust and Signs by Gilles Deleuze
Published 2008 · 136 pages · 60,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is Proust and Signs to read?
Proust and Signs scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Deleuze moves between Proustian literary vocabulary and philosophical terms such as essence, sign and involuntary memory. The register is demanding but less invented than Lacan or Derrida, and nearer to The Waste Land in allusiveness than to Finnegans Wake.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Sentences are long and heavily qualified, with chains of definitions and reversals, though the translation stays navigable. The prose is closer to Proust's own subordination than to the plain declaratives of Orwell.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- The book treats time, truth and essence as concepts, with Proust's scenes serving as illustrations. Ideas drive the whole argument, as in Notes from Underground, though the novel's episodes keep it anchored.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- In a short text Deleuze compresses four sign systems, the structure of a seven-volume novel and a theory of time. Almost every paragraph introduces a new distinction or example, which demands slow reading.
How Proust and Signs is regarded
Proust and Signs holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.