Contre Sainte-Beave
Il n’y pas de meilleure manière d’arriver à prendre
conscience de ce qu’on sent sou-même que d’essayer
de recréer en soi ce qu’a senti un maître. Dans cet effort
profond c’est notre pensée elle-même que nous
mettons, avec la sienne, au jour. Nous sommes libres
dans la vie, mais en ayant des buts. . . . C’est à un
sophisme tout aussi naïf qu’obéissent sans le savoir
les écrivains qui font à tout moment le vide dans leur
esprit, croyant le débarrasser de toute influence extérieure,
pour être bien sûrs de rester personnels. En
réalité les seuls cas où nous disposons vraiment de
toute notre puissance d’esprit sont ceux où nous ne
croyons pas faire oeuvre d’indépendance, où nous ne
choisissons pas arbitrairement le but de notre effort.
. . . Le sujet de romancier, la vision du poète,
la vérité du philosophe s’imposent à eux d’une façon
presque nécessaire, extérieure pour ainsi dire à leur
pensée. Et c’est en soumettant son esprit à rendre
cette vision, à approcher de cette vérité, que l’artiste
devient vraiment lui-même.
Contre Sainte-Beuve p 140
L'Album de Marcel Proust
Du côté de chez Marcel
Pastishes et Melanges
TLS Thursday, July 31 1919[Facsimile]
Jane Smiley's, Salon : Reading "In Search of Lost Time"
Reading "In Search of Lost Time" Jane Smiley, Salon.com, August 28, 2005 You will spend 70 days in a row with this man, and you will be charmed and offended and amazed and sometimes bored, but you will be lucky.
It is important that you go about your business while you pursue your reading project. You have to take M. with you on planes and trains and into hotels and to the dentist's office and into your child's piano lesson. "In Search of Lost Time" will not have its full effect if you sequester it. It must diffuse into your life, color every place you go and every scene you look at with its own tints. When you lift your eyes to glance into your own backyard, you want to do so with the sight of Albertine in your mind, quiet in her own chamber, forbidden to awaken M. too early in the morning; or the sight of M.'s friend, Saint-loup, stepping athletically over the backs of banquettes in a mirrored restaurant in Paris, making his way to M., who is sitting eating his supper; or the sight of Madame de Guermantes in one of her elegant turn-of-the-century Fortuny costumes and her red shoes. You want to listen to M.'s quiet voice in your head even while the news is on or while the dog is barking at the arrival of the UPS man. Seventy days in a row to spend with one narrative sensibility is a long time, but after you are finished, it will seem as though you were with him for years and are with him still.
Mmmmm... was wondering about that. As it happens this is impossible when reading it off the screen (anyone flaneured a wifi laptop owner reading Proust on a park bench or railway station recently?). True, nothing but the cost of printer ink to stop me printing out the requiste number of pages for the next outing. I was was of the opposite view: read it in one place and stick to that place. If Proust mostly wrote it in one room, then we might find it better, or find ourselves compelled by what we read, to read it in one.
I read it in a corner of one room which contain the PC. So far that works well. There is the consolation of the 'contemplation window' right next to it, which means it only takes the swivel of a chair and a short step to be standing looking out at a line of trees and a field beyond, sufficent perceptual input but mostly an familiar, unchanging scene except for the occasional bird flutter, to allow the brain to mull over the pleasure of what one has just read, to try to grasp what was meant or to attempt to quell its irritation at the prolixity, or to start rearranging his sentances.
Anthony M Ludovici
Never heard of Ludovici [wiki: Ludovici], but a lot of his stuff here, including, essays, reviews, short stories, poems, novels and much more. This is the first paragraph of his 1940-41 review of Derrick Leon's Introduction To Proust, in The New English Weekly: Ever since I closed the last of my nineteen volumes of Proust, which it took me eight years in my leisure hours to read and on the last page of which I wrote the date — February 5th 1938 — I have been looking for just such a book as Mr. Derrick Leon's "Introduction To Proust.
Look out for the What-Proust-wrote-of-Anatole-France quote at the end.
A quick check of the rest of his writing brought up amongst others a review of the Kinsey Report in which he writes:
Never having been to America, we have no knowledge of American women, but no informed Englishman would agree with the authors that transvesitsm — at least over here — is a male rather than a female aberration. Very rarely indeed is a male transvestist seen or prosecuted in this country; whereas, although prosecutions do not necessarily follow, it is a common spectacle to see females of all ages hurrying to assume male clothing on the slightest provocation. Proust says in Vol. II of the Coté de Guermantes, "Dans la vie de la plupart des femmes tout meme le plus grand chagrin, aboutit a une question d'essayage." To apply this to English conditions, we should suggest paraphrasing it as follows: "In the life of most English females, every crisis, domestic or national, culminates in their finding some pretext for getting into men's clothes."
In Anthony M. Ludovici The prophet of anti-feminism by R. B. Kerr does a bit of intellectual biography ending with:He is a brilliant writer with an unhappy tendency to run to exaggeration and absurdity.....All that he needs to give him his proper place in literature is an accession of moderation and common sense.
Ludovici specialised in Nietzsche, and thought the Nazis jolly good. But his writing can be very funny.
toujours du cote de chez quelqu'un autre*
Borges versus Proust: Towards a combative literature* My title: the author, Tim Conley's, phrase.The Proustian character is a macrometaphor for the sense of time ... this figure loses its boundaries in the regions of inexpressible sensation, that is, with the experience Proust calls "style:' There, time does not pass, for the character goes from being "lost" to being "regained" through a pure movement of time embodied. If you wish to lose your time and regain it with the same movement, one of your options might be to create characters. Like Proust's.
Proust's aesthetic
I feel with these gleaned bits and pieces as if I am trying to read Proust from a pile of pages discovered in a rubbish skip which I am laboriously going through, some too torn to read, others with the print smeared, but from which by perseverence a coherent, understandable story is emerging. * Proust's Aesthetic Analogies: Character and Painting in Swann's Way Jeffrey Meyers The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 377-388* The Past Recaptured: Marcel Proust's Aesthetic Theory John Arthur Hogan Ethics, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Jan., 1939), pp. 187-203There are a few papers online at The American Society for AestheticsUnfortunately not Meyer's.::This, just discovered from the Robert Musil site:
Frederik Tygstrup - The Monstrous Novel - An Essay in Literary History
With the research of the wasted time
The earlier version of Proust's introduction to Ruskin's Sesame with Lilies, Sur la Lecture ,was published in 1905. Sur la Lecture translates in Google, though it packs up half way.The final version, Journées de Lecture, is not readily available in English on the web. There is a paper in French with no author titled Journées de Lecture from The Association for the Diffusion of French Thought. The Google translation converts A la Reserche du Temp Perdu into ' With the research of the wasted time ', which cannot be unfunny for those who are struggling to read around Proust while procrastinating over The Novel itself: I take this to be a hint from the realms of cyber-mechanico translation to stop fiddling at the margins and get on with it. As usual with Google it gives up translating half way through. The bit is does do is comprehensible after a fashion.
I keep on getting images - What else with Proust on my mind? - of the man himself desperately attempting to translate Ruskin without help, then trying out the results on his mother and his friend Marie Nordlinger - before they collaborated in the effort - to rigolous effect. They roll around the place as they read his attempts to gets to grip with English, eventually realising they must step in to help him.
The more you use the internet to scout around Proust the more you realise only a small faction of the verbiage on him and his book will be of any use to what one might call the averagely intelligent reader in preparing for the novel itself. This paper, for example, titled Reading the age of names in A la recherche du temp perdu, might seem like a good idea to read before tackling it, or even part way through it, but soon the mind drifts off to the more tangible. In my case a single, hazy, monochrome photographs of Marcel Proust playing air guitar with a tennis racket, and thoughts of how he might interview on TV arts programmes now: a steely determination to avoid fascile answers to stupid questions by talking at every opportunity about how modern cars compare with the ones he rode in, driven around by Agostinelli.
It has been suggested that the academic, quasi-academic and pseudo-academic writing on Proust can only damage one's reading experience of it. Having tried reading some of these offerings, it is beginning to seem to me this might be true. Though trying to find any excuse not to start right at the beginning - such as Swann's Way being too familar what with all the adaptations - the more read about the novel the more I am feeling I must cast aside almost all the opinions and theories and start. There have been enough interesting tit-bits - rather like the disparate and unconnected evidence a detective might gather in a murder enquiry which psychologically motive him and make him feel he will eventually solve the case - to pump up my enthusiasm for the real thing.
Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained and Filming the Unfilmable is an example of how not reading Proust but about Proust can be instructive and good preparation.
Proust's is not an ordinary novel. It might not best be picked up like a best-seller at an airport to stave off the horrors of a long haul flight. Just as one might gain more by studying Venice - might not you waste your precious holiday time walking round in ignorant circles getting tired, thirsty hungry? - before doing a tour, so there are a few things to train for before reading Proust that might help. One of these is Proust's aesthetic of reading, which this one page sample tantalisingly, but comprehendibly introduces. (Anyone got this? Please post up a bit more of it....).
Another is to grasp :
Proust's reliance on and exploration of the imagery of the optical and visual in his theory of perception, of which the Recherche is his greatest elaboration.
which comes from the except of Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten 1966- "Book review: The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually" Configurations - Volume 6, Number 3, Fall 1998, pp. 397-399 (again, please let me have some more of this if you have it).
Finally, and which is reflected in, and symbolised by, the way Pinter used the yellow wall in Vermeer's view of Delft in his Proust Screenplay, this is a book about how we can understand people through their art. And this, if you are piecing things together from little fragments like me, will take you through Ruskin to Venice and Turner, amongst others. And that's why I am beginning to read Albertine Disparue - chapter 3 as well as the Balbec sections for my introduction to Proustian 'love'. My argument is simple: one, it ain't chonological, so why do I have to read it from the beginning; two, it is more than a novel so treat it that way.
Proust's introduction to Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies
Journées de lectureThe National Library of the Nederlands, has a page explaining the background to Proust's 1919 introduction to Sesame and Lilies [Lecturer 1: Sesame - Of King's Teasuries], two lectures Ruskin gave in Manchester in 1864.
The Project Gutenberg
Sesame and LiliesProust, who spoke no English, did this adequately, but not without assistance: his mother wrote a rough translation of the first book, while his friend Marie Nordlinger did this together with Proust for the other. We can recognize his style, which was to become famous, in both of these translations.
'There might not be any days in our childhood that we experience as intensely as those of which we thought that we didn't really experience them: the days we spent reading a book of our own choice.' These words form the beginning of Journées de lecture. In long, dizzying sentences full of witty metaphors Proust describes in great detail the atmosphere in which he surrendered to the joy of reading as a child. For according to him, what we remember most from what we read is 'the image of the places and days on which we read'.
Proust saw reading as a means, while Ruskin saw it as an end unto itself. Ruskin compared reading to having a good discussion with sophisticated people of previous generations. To Proust, reading gives one magical access to chambers of the soul that had been closed before; it formed a critical mind and made the reader aware of his own inner life. According to Proust, reading becomes dangerous when it doesn't make the reader aware of his own inner life - but instead takes the place of that life. For - he says - finding truth is an ideal that can never be achieved by the passive reading of other people's books.
Tennis Rackets and Banjos
There must be a German compound for 'searching for one thing and finding another'. Not serependipity, as in 'chance find' - something a bit more directed. It's the same word in German by the way! They always look and sound impressive: bildungsroman; weltanshaung. Beautiful sounds. My favourite: schadenfreude. Mark Twain appears to have been irritatingly exercised by the German language. According to Paul Joyce
In a speech given in Vienna in March 1899, Twain imparted to the audience an 95 letter word which he claimed had recently been sent to him in a telegram from Linz:
Personaleinkommensteuerschätzungskommissionsmitglieds-
reisekostenrechnungsergänzungsrevisionsfund.
Twain added: "If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep beneath it in peace."
He would no doubt have been amused by Einmannmotorkettensäge (a motorized chain saw that can be operated by a single person ) which extends to Einmannmotorkettensägeführer for the operator of the device.
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In the process of searching for something which will get me closer to understanding Proust without actually having to read him in great detail - though the more criticism I read the more it seems it might be better to start from the beginning and ignore what other people say about The Novel. Dan Schneider, linked to at the side, begins with "... In the last decade or so of his life, and posthumously, he worked on and published the work in eight instalments in French
...." which doesn't fill one with great confidence. Though of course we know what he means. He's just stumbling over himself in his excitement to explain how Proust did it, in a way that Proust manged not to do. Ben Stoltzfus [1 ] in The stones of Venice, time, and remembrance: Calculus and Proust in Across the River and into the Trees, the Proust - (Venice) - Hemingway article from The Hemingway Review ( Spring 2003), linked to at the side, has:
All of these sensory contacts-taste, sound, touch, and feel-are mnemonic catalysts that revive the past with great intensity and affective joy and none is attributable to voluntary memory. On the contrary, the key to the happiness Marcel feels is that these memories are involuntary. They occur spontaneously and are the result of chance encounter. Marcel relives these past events as though they were in the present, and because he has the illusion of escaping from time he no longer "feels mediocre, contingent, or mortal" (CCSI, 45). In fact, he feels immortal and, in due course, he imbues the art that organizes and captures these privileged moments with the immortality that will survive death. Indeed, for Proust, art in the broadest sense is the only immortality that men and women can hope for. In a secular world nothing lasts forever, but great artists live posthumous lives that mere mortals never will. The renown of Proust and Hemingway guarantees their survival, at least for a while, and it is interesting that both men, despite their profound stylistic differences and life styles, incorporated a consciousness of survival into their writing.
So it's either give up reading about Proust in order to read Proust or it's read some more about Proust in order to read Proust with greater pleasure and understanding. Or could the pleasure of reading it be diminished by too much reading about it?
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Maybe Proust could be roped into the Slow Movement? Or is he already in there?
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For the best part of a century great warehouses full of doltish, failed Ph.D. theses, as well as the great and the good in literary and cultural criticism, have offered the suggestion his long sentences were in some way connected to the writing style of Ruskin. In the 10 years from 1897 to 1906, he applied himself to the task of reading and translating Ruskin [1] [2] [3]. Was this what converted him to Ruskin's convoluted way of writing? The Victorian Web is a good resource. If you have never come across it before, give it a try. Here, from the Ruskin page, Examples of Ruskin's word painting.
But there is the question of the Ruskin early and late style.
Derwent May, Proust, p.65 (Pan ppbk ed.):
Ruskin's long, impassioned sentances, pursuing a thought far afield while simultaneously flashing with brilliant pictures, are nearer to Proust's style in A la researche than any other writer before him. In translating him, Proust had for the first time created such sentances in French.
DM, p.70:
Dickens's Bleak House was one of his favourite novels. Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens - George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, too - all played a part in bringing him to the idea of his own novel.
And he was a pasticher. [3]
He did also attend lectures by someone who taught some German philosophy or other. Probably Hegel.
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Casually thrown out in this In Our Times programme, which I must have heard before on the radio but have forgotten, a la Proust, was a remark about Proust using a tennis racket as a Banjo. Intriguing, except not one of the experts in the radio discussion picked up on it: a joke between cognoscenti.
But in half an hour searching for more Proust websites to include here, found this set of photographs of Proust, his family, friends, places and a couple of facscimile manuscripts. What should appear in the Proust with Friends page but a (Is he grimacing or straight faced?) Marcel on his knees - a young lady behind him standing on a chair adding to the jollity - doing, in what seems like in his mid-twenties, what we might have done in our teens to a Stones LP.
Since discovering he was keen on having photographs to hand, this is going to be one of the areas I will be looking into and thinking more about (one of my favourite films is Poliakoff's Shooting the Past). I already have learnt about this business of photographs in the style of painters: "She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places...." SM trans.
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The plan had been to concentrate on Proust on love but Art seems and equally important root to understanding the book. Ruskin seems to have popped up and will not get out of my mind.
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Amusing to see how Proust evades the non-French reader, when an Englishman may have so influenced his writing style, yet it was said (by whom?) he might have had difficulty ordering from the menu in English. What would he have thought if he knew that millions were still struggling with his book in English, and the intricacies of which of the various translations to read?
A N Wilson on Proust
A beginner's guide to reading ProustA N Wilson suggests the Pinter Proust Play a good place to start. If only it were avaialble on CD or DVD rather than tape! These are going to break soon with the amount of rewinding going on. Surely by now someone will have suggested to Mr. Pinter this might be a good idea. Time to buy the transcript.
Proust in the thrall of photography
Blog:
Hotel PointBrassaï, in a book call’d Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie, translated by Richard Howard as Proust in the Power of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2001) (though my sense of it would be something more forceful—“under the hold of,” “gripped by,” “in the thrall of”) points to a veritable obsession and onslaught of pictures, “the sempiternal appearance of photographs” chez Proust. Thus André Maurois: “All his life Proust attached an extraordinary importance to the possession of a photograph. He kept a whole collection of them in his bedroom and would eagerly show them to his friend.” Thus “the young Jean Cocteau” (in 1910) “subjected to the ordeal-by-album” in the Boulevard Haussmann apartment where “there were two tables in the room, one, within arm’s reach of Proust’s bed, covered with bottles, notebooks, the other ‘piled with photos of tarts and duchesses, dukes and footmen employed in great houses.’ ”
Translating Proust
Antonia has set me amongst these pigeons....A problem sentence in ProustLydia Davis, Penguin/Viking translator of Swann's Way, tackles translation through a concrete example. This is fascinating. Don't forget there are four pages here.Roland Champagne review
petit pan de mur jaune
A little patch of yellow wallVermeer's View of DelftA little more web searching and it is clear many people are taken up with the patch of yellow. Is that parallel or convergent? Pedantry or profundity?Marcel on the death of Bergottemight be where many come to this first the first time. I came to it from total incomprehension and ignorance, having read only snippets of A la Researche, though much about Proust. When the Pinter Proust play was first aired on BBC Radio 4, I listened to it with enthusiasm because how a screenplay could be constructed was of increasing interest to me. My simple-minded approach was that if this was a renowned playwrite and that was a devilishly difficult book, then the result the Pinter Proust Play was going to tell me quite a lot.But the screenplay starts with:YELLOW SCREEN[sound of bell]OPEN COUNTRYSIDE. A LINE OF TREES SEEN FROM A RAILAY CARRIAGE. THE TRAIN IS STILL.NO SOUND.MOMENTARY YELLOW SCREEN.THE SEA SEEN FROM A HIGH WINDOW. A TOWEL HANGING ON A TOWEL RACK IN FOREGROUND.NO SOUND.VENICE. WINDOW ON A PALAZZO SEEN FROM A GONDOLA.NO SOUND.MOMENTARY YELLOW SCREEN.THE DINING ROOM AT BALBEC. NO SOUND. EMPTYEXTERIOR OF THE HOUSE AT THE PLACE DE GEURMANTE, PARIS 1921. AFTERNOON. A MIDDLE-AGED MAN, MARCEL, WALKS TOWARDS THE HOUSE.when I had expected it to start with the tea cake and lime tea, though of course the book doesn't start with that immediately.At that stage I had no idea what the yellow was about.Right up to date. Now I know why Pinter chose to start with yellow over the evocations of smell and and taste. If you want to know you have to read Epstein:
art is a trick that allows us to indirectly convey the structure of our minds.Labels: Delft, प्रौस्त, वेर्मीर
Proust and Vermeer
Via a ramble on Proust on Ruskin on Turner, [1] all set off by the keep The Blue Rigi in Britain hoo-ha,
came across this post in blog Sketches of my Thoughts, which mentions this Proust/Vermeer dissertation in a website called the Essential Vermeer.
Also: Russell Epstein's 2002 paper:
Consciousness, Art and the Brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust
I have put the link to this in the side-panel under Read In
Antonia suggests there ought to be a link to the the painting in question, A View of Delft. The one she sends the link to is neat: the zoomed picture has a feature which allows a virtual magnifying glass to enhance sections of the picture. I particulary like this because it harks back to Pinter's screenplay methodology. You can only look at one bit at a time while using the magnifying glass, in an exaggeration of what one might be doing if standing in front of the real thing and having to move you head to examine the various patches of light.
There are other larger versions such as this from Kees Kaldenbach's guided tour through The View of Delft. Some I have come across have been cropped leaving out the yellow wall on the right.
Monty Python - All-England Summarize Proust Competition
Can't remember watching this.
A darn good read
Reading The Past Conditional: What mother would have wanted by Julian Barnes, made me think of the elements of narrative drive. How this Barnes (whether one is really interested in the subject matter) was impossible to stop reading in a way that many novels were not. They can often be a way of driving you away from themselves into your own thoughts. Maybe all good novels are designed to do that: you find yourself reading the words but not understanding them - like the automatic driving we are prone to from time to time - as you imagine, or see, the character you are engaged with, beyond the text, in little recursive loops. Then suddenly you realise you are doing this and try to find where you left off the text. Maybe a good novel is always longer than the text.::Diligently tackling Madam Swann at Home because it seemed it might be necessary to lead into Place Names: The Place in Within a Budding Grove, (How is it possible to get that title from the original À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs ? ) where I thought I was going to meet Albertine for the first time, I was swiftly completely bored and found myself scanning down the page at speed with the aid of the mouse wheel, which when depressed creates a little circular iconic device on screen, with a black dot in the middle and up and down arrows, making it possible to set the page scrolling down, slowly, all by itself. Doing this a few times with FIND set to 'Highlight all', which highlights in yellow, on such words as Swann or Odette, brings up a phrase or sentance such as " I don’t suppose for a moment that she has mastered the Critique of Pure Reason", which then necessitates, if it takes ones fancy, reading back and forwards a bit to see what it is about.
Albertine actually appears with her friends wheeling her bicycle at the beginning of the last part, Seascape, with Frieze of Girls. Though there are musing on girls and beauty and love in Place Names: The Place and Place names: The Place (Continued).
I know what I want to read in Proust right now: how he viewed love and its illusions. I have little or no interest at all in the mores or sociology of the French aristocracy at the moment. It seems the first Balbec sections might be a good starting point. From there it might be o.k. to return to the three chapter lead up to Albertine and eventually work back to Marcel and Gilberte elsewhere.
I am not treating it as a novel at the moment: more a treatise - picking out his gems of wisdom on whatever currently preoccupies us, by-the-by enjoying pieces of description or dialogue as there are encountered more by chance than design.
Someone said it was part novel, part autobiography and part (well what?). Reading through the Marcel Proust from Answers.com clarifies that a bit. Most people pick it up as if it were a novel. But once you read:
The vast seven-part novel is at once a kind of autobiography, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense meditation on love and jealousy and on art and its relation to reality.
and (though referring to ALRDTP):
Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of Contre Saint-Beuve. Proust described what he was working on in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel" (Tadié 513).
you can be excused for using it as a reference book more than a novel. Though, by the time you have read bits of it all over the place - and remembered them - you have read the novel because you know the story, its places, its characters. Since in any case it chops and changes chronologically, this way of reading it might be excused.
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For someone to be proud to have read Proust from cover to cover (in a year, say) is akin to a teenager tackling the Bible - at the end all you can really say is, "I have read it". It is simply not short enough or compact enough to encompass in the mind at the end. The general outline will be clearer. Certain things will stand out as being interesting or significant, but this will rather dependent on what the individual reading it is interested in at the time or thinks significant.
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This guy quotes :
[T]he greater part of our memory lies outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind ... disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away.... It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about.
which has me in mind of Dawkin's The Extended Phenotype.Other on Proust:(1) Titled The Necessary Process but do not ask me to attribute it because there no name on the page, but this page leads to this archive of Steve Mitchelmore's stuff.
(2) Blog The English Teacher, post: Reading Proust (part 4), where whether A la researche is autobiographical or not is discussed, and all the other Reading Proust parts ( n = 7).
Italo Calvino
Courtesy of Wood s Lot: a comprehensive Calvino site which should keep the new to him reader amused for a while.
de la gueule au gueuloir
Essay: How to Speak a book ( Richard Powers, NYT 7 January 2007). You think he might go on about his computer technology right through this piece but rewarded by sticking with it to learn just a few snippets about the dictation habits of a quite a few well know writers, including:In the final hours of his life, Proust re-dictated the death of Bergotte, supposedly claiming that he now knew what he was talking about.
From h2g2 In 1866, Dostoevsky was under financial pressure to complete his next book, The Gambler. He dictated the novel to a talented stenographer called Anna Grigorievna Snitkina. After the book was published, they were married.
Think of something else !
In Our Time this week does Borges. Turns out to be not quite something else because they are staight in there with how he used his failed love affair with Nora Lang. "How he translated his experiences immediately into literature....".Sure Lord Bragg won't mind me posting here the contents of his post-prog email newsletter he sends out to us In Our Timers:Hello,
I think that some listeners may have had a bit of a problem this morning because it seems to me, thinking back on the programme, that we dived into the middle of the labyrinth of Borges without attempting to describe the layout. There was a bit too much taken for granted. The fact that he is often described as "a writer's writer" and "an intellectual among writers" means that those who are engaged in studying his work have an enormous amount of fun, great theoretical possibilities and are deep into what is undoubtedly a forest of ideas.
Those of you who like novels with characters, plots of real suspense,situations which are recognisable and therefore engaging, in short, I suppose, the tradition of the realistic or historical novel as developed from
Shakespeare (our first historical novelist) and Defoe might find it unusual tobe faced by a writer who can often seem much more of a crossword puzzle setter or a theorist himself. Nevertheless, there's no doubting his influence on an enormous number of writers from the middle of the century onwards, nor of their appropriation of many of his ideas. So he was more than worth doing.
Here are a few excerpts from the programme's research notes. First from Edwin Williamson, the great authority on Borges and author of a recent life. He talks about how Borges saw himself:
"In truth, it seems Borges did not hold a high opinion of himself. In interviews he is consistently self-deprecating and compares himself unfavourably to other writers he admires. In many of his short stories Borges presents a version of himself (sometimes even using his own name), usually in a somewhat derogatory light, someone who is a vague, bumbling 'wannabe' writer. Alternatively, he depicts himself as someone who has suffered a mysterious and strange disappointment in life and views the past in a romantic and nostalgic light. In his work, Borges tends to excuse himself for not being more enthusiastic about life. He cultivated this persona, this retiring and apologetic man with a sense of other-worldliness about him. He once proudly confessed that "people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
He then goes on to talk about Borges' literary style:
"Borges is sometimes referred to as a writer in the "magic realism" style, but strictly speaking, although Borges influenced the development of magic realism by legitimizing the use of fantasy and transposing narrative models taken from genre fiction (such as detective stories and science fiction) into fantastical situations, his work and style differs greatly from that of "magic realist" writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende. In his essay The Art of Narrative and Magic, written in 1931, Borges questioned the premises of literary realism. His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author's ability to generate "poetic faith" in his reader. This was Borges' theoretical justification for the "magic realism" movement. The story should exist in its own autonomous sphere and on its own terms. It may or may not present a realistic image of the world we live in, but it retained a logic of its own. As Borges explained, fiction did not hold up a mirror to reality, rather it constituted "an autonomous sphere of corroborations, omens and monuments" that was best illustrated by the "predestined Ulysses of Joyce." Not only did Borges throw off the constraints of realism, he called into question the preeminence of the novel in the hierarchy of modern literature. He was drawn
to modes of storytelling that had long preceded the novel-fable, epic, parable, and folktale."
Efraín Kristal who is a leading authority on Borges as a translator had this to say about translation in the sense of its being the creative process.
"The fact that translation is central to Borges' creative process and to the very fabric of his stories with most of his protagonists' translators themselves derives from Borges' deep sense of what literature itself is about.
Borges saw us only as re-users and re-cyclers of ideas, stories and metaphors and he once said that 3000 years after the Iliad and the Odyssey it was unlikely that any new literary themes or metaphors would come about that had not been tried before. In this way we are, in Borges' eyes, condemned to translate, or to edit, or change emphasis or combine.
Borges once reflected on whether anything he had ever written was original: 'perhaps one thing', he wrote in a comment before his poem called Limits, 'perhaps this is the only work in which I have invented an idea: the idea of someone who has done something for the last time without knowing it, or someone who does not know that they will never experience something and doesn't know because they do not have the vantage point of death.'. Borges considered this perhaps his only original idea."
Borges positively encouraged translations of his own work and was delighted whenever people made their own changes. Similarly writing by other authors which he translated himself became his work in a sense. When Efraín interviewed a man in Buenos Aires who had translated Hesse with Borges he questioned him about their methods. Apparently they had wilfully added references to Hesse's text which simply were not there in the original, and were quite accustomed to remove or add a couple of syllables to a line. Apparently the fellow translator did not even understand German: Borges would simply call him on the telephone and dictate the translation.
Ephrain added that Borges seemed to have a photographic memory and once blind he would give poetry readings where he would say 'and now I'm going to read the following poem' and then he would read as if reading from a piece of paper in front of him. In fact he was reading, but from his mind.
I can't fail to take something from Evelyn Fishburn whose enthusiasm and depth of knowledge were again so profound that she found it, as the others did, difficult to encompass their finest thoughts in the time allotted. Here are her reflections on what she calls reality and nihilism:
"We might worry, with all this uncertainty and paradox, that Borges could leave us with nothing left to believe in at all, or even believing that there is nothing at all. Borges wrote a very long and intricate essay called the New Refutation of the History of Time in which he argues that time is an illusion and that all reality is an illusion. As the essay comes almost to a close he suddenly continues launching a whole credo on realism. Realism is not proved in the essay but Borges is certainly not a nihilist writer - he is more interested in showing that we simply do not know or that we are not able to know. A deity might have a view of the truth of things but we ourselves are not able to know and Borges, whilst expressing his deep scepticism about our ability to know, is also keen to explore the value of wondering."
Finally, I particularly liked a reference she made which brings in Shakespeare:
"Borges' work is populated with references to real people and to real works of literature. He uses these in a particular way, almost as a shorthand. When he talks about Shakespeare, Shakespeare is not unlike God who creates myriad creatures and then loses his whole personality in those creatures from everything to nothing. Borges often uses literary and cultural references in his work as a kind of adjective. In this way he might mention Schopenhauer, for example, and it will be a particular aspect of Schopenhauer that he is honing in on which sheds a particular kind of light over his work."
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg
Virginia Woolf on film
In side-bar the link to her essays I have put up does not include The Cinema, first published in Arts in June 1926. Having just first listened to a BBC archive of her giving a short talk, Words Fail me, 29 April 1927, her upperclass accent seems to echo right through the essay as I read it immedately afterwards, proving in a way her very point about how cinema has to find its own way of communicating. By that I mean if you read the essay first without hearing what she sounded like, you would probably imagine someone not quite so grand. Having heard her first, then read it, one can't quite accept the ideas because they come from this voice! Pure prejudice of course, but this can be the reaction. In the same way a film that is made like a book is written, fails in the way she describes so simply and well in this essay in a way reminiscent of Orwell..
Claudia Roth Pierpont
writes in The NYTMagazine in 1996 writes on Virgina Woolf the writer and Virginia Woolf the icon which helps in a way to get over the snobbism difficulty, if it is one. And, as we read here, who wouldn't like to have fallen butter side up like her, with a nice little inherited income to enable her to fix her mind on writing....
I am so interested in The Pinter Proust Play because it seems to be so helpful for anyone who is more interested in screenplay than novel writing, but who also want to see the points of depart and intersection between the two in any case. I have a disadvantage in not knowing Remembrance well: only dipping into sections that have immediate interest because of some stimulus, such as trying to get to grips with the idea of Love and Place through reading the Balbec sections.
Comparing the scene where Marcel meets the girls giggling on the beach [ Pinter: The Promendade, Balbec, 1898....I was standing in front of the Grand Hotel when I saw coming towards me five or six young girls, as difference in appearance and manner from all the people one was accustomed to seeing at Balbec as could have been. One of these stranger was pushing with one hand, her bicycle."] with the book is as good a way as any of seeing where Woolf has got it or not about film or not: Pinter's screenplay is now generally regarded to be a work of genius in screenplay terms.
Virgina Woolf at the age of 17:
Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, & ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
Bartleby
