What kind of literary history is A History of Books

This idea that the book, the reading of the book, and writing itself, allows access to another world, a world beyond the visible world, is played out in A History of Books in a very funny story about Marcel Proust, drawn from the biography by André Maurois. This relates a dream in which Proust knocks on the door of the palace of the Gods on Olympus. Murnane’s version tells the story from the gods’ point of view, as they are reclining naked beside their bathing pool during the quiet hours of the afternoon, discussing in an indolent way the sounds of knocking that carry to them faintly from a distant part of the palace. They are inclined to ignore the knocking because, as gods, they’re not the kind of people who get fussed about such things, but the knocking goes on and on and on, day after day. So eventually they dispatch one of their number to go to the extremes of the palace to find out what the hell’s going on. Finally, the god comes back – having gone to the furthermost reaches of an infinite library in the palace where there’s a doorway that had once been built into the wall and then closed up again. He runs back to tell the others that he’s discovered the source of the knocking and “that the person at the door claimed to be the author of an enormous work of prose fiction, although he seemed no more than an asthmatic little poofter from a place called Paris” (113). This is a wonderful example of Murnane’s ability to parody his own aspirations, a crucial concern in this case, that the characters that one remembers, or the images that one remembers from reading a work, actually come from another world, and are calling you into that world.