Supposed misinterpretations

It is ironic that Nicholas Zurbrugg should accuse Beckett of misreading Proust. His own study of the two writers, with its many clods of such unwieldy terms as 'positive modes of non-habitual action', is frequently disturbed by sudden irruptions of impatience with Beckett's supposed misinterpretations of Proust (so many little snide remarks that it is hard to believe that Beckett could ever have given the 'attention and assistance' to Zurbrugg's project that the Acknowledgements declare). My suggestion is that you don't look too closely at Zurbrugg's own reading of Proust. On page 65, for example, he begins an analysis of the 'Daltozzi suivant les femmes' incident in Jean Santeuil, only to forget, on the following page, that the narrator of the book is no Marcel and so is not actually Jean Santeuil at all, but a third person narrator. Little slips like these weaken his position on Beckett the critic, who at worst seems only to have been exuberantly perverse rather than shoddy in his analysis of Proust in his eponymous essay.

I am, however, indebted to Zurbrugg for drawing my attention to Beckett's first novel, the posthumously published, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Just the image suggested by the title, as it resonates with Proust's second volume of A la Recherche du Temps perdu: A l'ombre des Jeunes Filles en fleurs (in Grieve's translation: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), is deliciously funny.

Love is space and time measured by the heart

Recently a friend was given a birthday card with a picture of Proust on the front along with the line: 'Love is space and time measured by the heart'. Initially I was incredulous: whatever else Proust wrote, I was thinking, he couldn't have written a line like that, and especially one so easily absorbed into a trade that deals in inanities. I had to find that line. Surely it doesn't mean what it seems to mean: a soft focussed thought after a glass of champagne on a cliff by an ocean.

Of course, I was under-estimating the birthday card trade. If you put the quote into Google it comes up as is as one of the most quoted lines from Proust's tome of nearly one and a half million words. Every other person has posted it on their blog. It's certainly up for grabs. I'm curious about the translation, though. The original C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of the French, 'L'amour c'est l'espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur' is pretty literal: 'Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart'.  The Moncrief and Kilmartin translation, revised by D. J. Enright, is hardly different: 'Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart'. The active measuring heart on the birthday card -- where does it come from? Google doesn't say.

But context is everything. The line comes near the end of 'The Captive', where Marcel is torturing himself by imagining the lesbian adventures of his beloved Albertine. In the Enright revised translation, the preceding sentences read:

How many people, how many places (even places which did not concern her directly, vague haunts of pleasure where she might have enjoyed some pleasure, places where there are a great many people, where people brush against one) had Albertine -- like a person who, shepherding all her escort, a whole crowd, past the barrier in front of her, secures their admission to the theatre -- from the threshold of my imagination or of my memory, where I paid no attention to them, introduced into my heart! Now, the knowledge that I had of them was internal, immediate, spasmodic, painful. Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart. (p. 440)

If you look in the wonderful index in the' Guide to Proust', published at the end of volume six of the 1996 Vintage edition, it is possible to find some other great one liners about love. Why, I wonder, has nobody thought to put on the front of greeting cards, one of the following:

'Love is an incurable malady'

'To be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural'

'... love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us'

De ne rien ajouter de son propre cru

I am yet to track down the essay in which this appears, but according to Nicholas Zurbrugg's Beckett and Proust:

Perhaps the most important of all Proust's early dictums is his assertion, in his essay 'John Ruskin', that: 'le premier devoir de l'artiste est de ne rien ajouter de son propre cru' (CSB, 111) (the artist's first duty is never to add anything from his own imagination). (p. 42-43)

What is there left but physical violence?

It was only by chance that I got to see Richard Mills' opera, The Love of the Nightingale. 'Flu had kept the legitimate ticket holder at home and in bed. On Tuesday night, after a long day at work, my companions and I thought we'd be struggling to stay awake through the whole two and a half hours, but in the end there was not a moment to haze over. Here was Opera in all of its capitalised extravagance: blood, lust, rape, torture, revenge and murder.

The Love of the Nightingale is an opera about violence. In the program notes, the librettist, Timberlake Wertenbaker, writes:

Where does violence come from? I cannot answer this but I feel instinctively that it has to do with being silenced. Not to be able to express something, even anger, not to be listened to, what is there left but physical violence?

All this is absolutely clear in the libretto. As King Pandion tells his guest, Tereus, before the classic interlude of the play within the play (or opera within the opera), 'the playwright always speaks through the chorus', and the refrain of the female chorus throughout the entire production is 'we do not have the words'. Philomele was once, as Procne her sister describes for her ten year old son, 'full of words and laughter'; when Procne confronts Tereus with the rape and mutilation of this sister -- he has cut out her tongue -- his answer is that he had no words. But did you ask? respond the women.

The chorus of women is the shimmering centre of the opera. In the program notes, the composer describes how he wrote not only for their 'separate personae' but also for their 'complex single composite character of many dimensions'. Along with the smoothly sliding platforms on the stage and the muted colours (all the better to set off the deep rose of Aphrodite's dress and the brown-red shock of blood on Philomele's white shift), the chorus mesmerises us with its circling anxieties and the tonal clusters of its piercing ululations.

My only reservation about the performance had to do with the final section of the opera: the scene where the main characters, at the height of their pursuit and anger, have been turned into birds. In itself this resolution or non resolution after Ovid could have been peculiarly beautiful; it could have been short and wonderful and strange. Initially the effect of the change in mood after the metamorphosis is refreshing. The muddy drama of blood and lust has given way to the simplicity of a pervasive white light with only touches of clear pink and blue and yellow; the clothing, like Philomele's hair at the end, is uniform white. The figures arrange themselves on the now becalmed wooden platforms. The family that had rent themselves apart -- Procne, Itys, the son that she, her sister and the Bacchae had killed in a frenzy of rage, and the instigator of the violence: her husband, the bearded Tereus -- now hug each other in an unlikely image of reconciliation that evokes, in the details of its colouring and clothing (even the beard!), images of the blessed in religious tracts, such as this one that I found on the Mormons' website, under God's Plan of Happiness:

The aunt, Philomele, prompts the nephew whose neck she had lately hacked at, to ask the kind of sweet, innocent questions that the previously sword-obsessed, petulant child would never have asked. Here the theme of the opera -- words and wordlessness, and the importance of questions -- is delivered to the child and the audience. As the lecture dissolves into virtuosic, inarticulate song, it does not so much become the soaring climax of the whole opera -- although it is also that -- but a great relief. Were it not for this unfortunate attempt at an epiphany, The Love of the Nightingale might have eventually convinced the most immovable of audiences -- those that had stayed away and so made our tickets cheap for no other reason than that the opera was contemporary -- and in decades it would have joined the Turandots and La Bohèmes as regular fare.

The same artifical attempt at the real

It is an interesting experience, once in a while, to read books that are seemingly effortlessly written and effortlessly read. They project the same temptation, as soon as you start them, as card game applications on an iPod; what happens to the boy, you wonder, even though the outcome is usually too cute, too deliberately quirky -- the whole of the story too entirely defined by the same artificial attempt at the real that you have read a hundred times before (I won't identify what I've been reading as it would be unfair -- the book was never meant to be anything other than what it is). This reading I've been doing is reading, certainly, but I know it is not the same as when I read the books that I have herded around my desk.


Surely this doesn't have to be so. After the publication of Orlando and during early paddlings into The Waves -- called then The Moths -- Virginia Woolf notes in her diary on 28 November, 1928:

Indeed I am up against some difficulties. Fame to begin with. Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that -- the tug and the suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; and if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner and the outer? I think a kind of ease and dash are good; -- yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible.

And yet she continues, recalling something of Kafka's repudiation of 'the shameful lowlands of writing' after his breakthrough with 'The Judgement' (23 September 1912):

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes... Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that do not belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry -- by which I mean saturated?

So now I am alone in the world

'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.' Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and for pages we walk with him -- so close that we could be inside his head as he rambles along the unimaginable country lanes stretching then out of Paris and looks out at the child who has been convinced not to come near him any more, or the elderly veterans whose natural affability has been poisoned, as he claims, by evil reports which he is powerless to prevent -- and so it comes as a huge surprise when, as he describes in the Second Walk, after being knocked unconscious by a runaway Great Dane, which sets him falling down a slope and injuring his jaw and the left side of his body:

My wife's cries when she saw me made me realise I was in a worse state than I had thought. (p. 40)

The mention of this wife, or woman, was enough to change my reading of the rest of the book: how to read about solitude and the agonies and comforts of such solitude, when all along there has been a woman intimate to him whose company is so assumed, so invisible, that it rates almost as nothing at all? Much as I loved the rhythm of the writing and the elongated meditations, even rants, it was also spoilt by an imagined Pythonesque version of the book that begins:

'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.'

'No you're not.'

'Shut up.'

I see shades of blue everywhere

If you bear in mind Chekhov's legendary advice that if you hang a gun on the wall during the first act of a play, it needs to go off in the last -- advice that is sound if you want the netting of your plot to be taut and ultimately unsurprising -- there's a curious effect in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. Certainly, the gun in the first chapter goes off a second time near the end of it: the man (Dr Henry Selwyn) who is observed testing the report of his old game hunting rifle in the framing of a window shoots himself with the selfsame rifle only eleven pages later. Then the guns repaired by Corradi in the second chapter -- in the narrator's childhood -- are taken out into the garden so that the gunsmith can 'fire a few rounds in the air for sheer pleasure, to mark the end of the job.' (p. 38) But after this, there are no further reports -- no obvious but delayed result -- only the muted sounds of cities coated with soot and ash and dust: the muffled layering of memories over the still discernible treasures of once splendid emporiums, laden docks, music and iridescent insects. The deaths -- and there are many to come -- are so quiet, even drained. In the Jewish cemetery near the end of the book, the grave on which the narrator lays a stone has only a single body in it, although four names have been cut into the gravestone. Sebald's narrators write both here and in On the Natural History of Destruction about how the sight of rubble had always been intimately associated with cities when they were young  -- and, strangely, with the excitement and possibility that these cities suggest to someone who has moved there from a small village or town. And yet these journeys elsewhere soon become haunted remnants of journeys, and there are always the shadows of birds flying overhead and the landscape itself, become an almost featureless plain, is left with only the faintest of tracings by the lives that have passed over it:

I see shades of blue everywhere -- a single empty space, stretching out into the twilight of late afternoon, crisscrossed by the tracks of ice-skaters long vanished. (218)

Others have written about the butterfly man. While I'm yet to read these accounts, I have to admit that I found the butterfly man to be the one occasionally forced element of the book. When Ambros Adelwarth is said to have told his doctor, just before his final and ultimately fatal session of electric shock therapy, that he forgot to turn up for a previous session because '[i]t must have slipped my mind whilst I was waiting for the butterfly man', the explanation is too fey, too neat; there is the butterfly man from the first chapter, we understand by then, and he must be included. The figure of Nabokov -- as both a child and an adult -- with his ridiculously large butterfly net, is definitely, in part, a comic figure with its seeming, if eccentric, healing powers, as Max Ferber discovers on the top of Grammont. But Ferber also finds that the meaning of its passing through his life eludes him. He can never succeed in making its portrait afterwards, and considers his attempt to do so 'one of his most unsatisfactory works' (p. 174). There is an ominous faerie quality to the 'messenger of joy', or so Luisa Lanzberg thinks of boy she had once seen with the butterfly net, '... to signal my final liberation' (p. 213 - 214) -- an image that only signals, in the end, the soundless death of her fiancé and a further narrowing of the path 'that grew narrower day by day and led inevitably to the point I have now arrived at' (p. 208) -- that is, to the imminence of her murder by the Nazis. In fact, the butterfly man -- at first just a clipping reminiscent of other photographs that the narrator sees (p. 16) -- is the strongest sign of the hand of the author -- that this book of 'prose writing', as Sebald liked to see the writing tradition in which he was working -- a kind of Speak, Memory as runs the unspecified title of the Nabokov autobiography that Mrs Landau is reading when Paul Bereyter of chapter two first speaks to her -- is actually more fictional, more artfully crafted, than it sometimes appears from the dizzying heights of reading, when like an entranced moth or bird, you pass over its nearly paragraphless pages and its blurred photographs -- all this evidence that is being gathered, as Landau puts it of Bereyter in a Berhardian moment -- at too great a speed, even as you appear to be hardly moving at all.