Marcel Proust, as a writer, was even more, shall we say , “steeped” in literary work by others than were so steeped such equally “classic,” as they are by now called, or “canonical” twentieth-century novelists as James Joyce, who, like Proust, seems to have had but in fact did not have a photographic memory, and Vladimir Nabokov, who did have one, or than are such literary critics as ..