What is it to you how Ruskin feels: feel for yourself

In his Preface to La Bible d'Amiens, Proust writes:

When we work in order to please others, we may fail to succeed, but the things we have done to satisfy ourselves always have a chance of interesting someone else.

Here Proust is referring to his attraction to Ruskin's writings as a whole; he might also have been writing about the effect of the long discipline of À la recherche du temps perdu (in fact at that time yet to be begun) on the readers of the future, which the narrator Marcel anticipates near the end of the last volume when he declares that the work of a writer is 'a sort of optical instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself': the work as a physical conduit of thoughts:

...because what emerged from one man's thought can alone one day capture another thought, which in turn has fascinated ours.

In both this Preface to La Bible d'Amiens and his Preface to Sésame et les Lys, Proust struggles to understand what reading is, and more specifically, what was for him a significant but very nearly overwhelming experience: the writings of Ruskin. To the reader of Proust, who, even as she might discount these observations about a writer now thoroughly out of fashion, worries about the effect on her own writing of the rolling clauses of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust's analysis and dismissal of this anxiety of influence near the end of the earlier Preface is peculiarly comforting:

Admiration for a thought... gives rise to beauty at each step because at each moment it rouses in us the desire for it. Mediocre people generally believe that to let oneself be guided by books one admires takes away some of one's independence of judgment. "What is it to you how Ruskin feels: feel for yourself." Such an opinion rests on a psychological error that will be treated as it deserves by all those who, having thus adopted an intellectual discipline, feel that their power to understand and feel is infinitely increased and their critical sense never paralyzed. We are then simply in a state of grace in which all our faculties, our critical sense as much as our other senses, are strengthened. Therefore, this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom. There is no better way of becoming aware of one's feelings than to try to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought, together with his, that we bring to light. We are free in life, but subject to purpose: the sophism of freedom of indifference was picked apart long ago. The writer who constantly creates a void in his mind, thinking to free it from any external influence in order to be sure of remaining individual, yields unwittingly to a sophism just as naive. Actually the only times when we truly have all our powers of mind are those when we do not believe ourselves to be acting with independence, when we do not arbitrarily choose the goal of our efforts. The subject of the novelist, the vision of the poet, the truth of the philosopher are imposed on them in a manner almost inevitable, exterior, so to speak, to their thought. And it is by subjecting his mind to the expression of this vision and to the approach of this truth that the artist becomes truly himself.

Thus we have the happy paradox of becoming ourselves only as we become obsessed with the work of another (and perhaps even start to imitate this other, as Orhan Pamuk might add: there is much of Proust in Pamuk), and as a result of which 'our critical sense' is not engulfed but 'strengthened' -- an unexpected bonus. Certainly, Proust is serious in his cool analysis of what he calls 'idolatry' in the work of his beloved Ruskin. In the Preface to La Bible d'Amiens, Proust presses him hard: this Ruskin who, he finds, is too guilty of idolising the objects he describes to be entirely perfect; who occasionally writes sentences thinking more about the cadence of the words in their series than any precision of meaning. It is an issue that Proust continues to pursue in his Preface to Sésame et les Lys, where he analyses the temptation of the 'literary man' who, instead of realising that reading 'is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it':

...reads for reading's sake, to retain what he has read. For him, the book is not the angel that flies away as soon as he has opened the doors of the celestial garden, but a motionless idol, which he adores for itself, which, instead of receiving a true dignity from the thoughts it awakens, communicates an artificial dignity to everything that surrounds it.

He describes the general temptation to make a fetish of the subject matter of a much loved piece of artwork or book:

"Take us," we would like to be able to say to Maeterlinck, to Madame de Noailles, "to the garden of Zealand where the 'out-of-fashion flowers grow,' on the road perfumed 'with clover and Saint John's Wort'..."

These objects might seem to project an almost holy literary significance in themselves when, 'in reality', as Proust goes on to argue, 'it is mere chance acquaintance or family ties, which, giving them the opportunity to travel or reside near them, have made Madame de Noailles, Maeterlinck, Millet, Claude Monet choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that river bend, rather than others.' There is, however, a great irony in all this: Proust himself seems only to have ever travelled in his life so as to be able to see the world through the eyes of Ruskin, unless it was in pursuit of another idol: a lover; Proust perhaps the greatest idoliser of all. And yet it is clear from the body of his writings that, should he now happen to catch sight of tourists sampling the crumbs of a madeleine dunked in tea with bewildered concentration in Illiers-Combray -- this town-sized fetish, far bigger and more established than any road or field according to Madame de Noailles, and long outlasting any residue of Ruskinian interest in the Cathedral of Amiens -- this part of him would groan aloud.

Proust's many years of work on Ruskin's writings, both as translator and commentator, is often described in terms of one long procrastination, with his mother's far too forceful encouragement, at the expense of the 'real' work of À la recherche du temps perdu -- a distraction from which only his mother's death could save him -- but it is in fact impossible to envisage his ever being able to write such a work without this impassioned engagement with the other's writings, and the inevitable disillusionment as his 'critical sense' came alive. The struggle with the temptations of idolatry -- which he notices in his own relationship to reading Ruskin as well as in the work itself -- provides the structural frame of La Recherche: the temptations and weaknesses and partial realisations of Swann and the temptations, weaknesses and more clearly realised conclusions of Marcel, which will lead, it is implied, to the production of the actual book we are reading -- a literary Mobius band: a 'sort of optical instrument' with which we, impassioned readers as well, might see not only what he means but what in fact we mean ourselves.

A good formula to test the quality of a novel

Nabokov's penchant for Robert Louis Stevenson reminds me of Borges's for G. K. Chesterton. In his preparation for a series of lectures on European Fiction for Cornell University in the United States, Nabokov had written to Edmund Wilson seeking his advice on which English works to include. Wilson had responded by suggesting Austen and Dickens, to which Nabokov replied, 'I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers.' He then declared: 'I shall take Stevenson instead of Jane A.' Although Nabokov later revised his opinion of her and included Wilson's recommendation of Austen's Mansfield Park along with Dickens's Bleak House in his lecture series, he retained Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" notwithstanding Wilson's dismissal of this writer as 'second-rate'.

There it is, then, this lecture on Stevenson, as published in the edited versions of Nabokov's lectures, Lectures on Literature: a curious inclusion among Austen, Dickens and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Proust's The Walk by Swann's Place (Nabokov's translation of the title), Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Joyce's Ulysses. Despite his admission in the lecture on Kafka, that in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" there is 'none of that unity and none of that contrast' that is found in the 'fantasies', as he puts it, of Kafka and Gogol -- and that Stevenson's characters 'are characters derived from Dickens, and thus they constitute phantasms that do not quite belong to Stevenson's own artistic reality, just as Stevenson's fog comes from a Dickensian studio to envelop a conventional London' -- despite this admission of the story's derivative qualities, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" remains right in the physical centre of his series of lectures: between Flaubert and Proust.

A clue to the story's hold on him, perhaps, is given in the introductory remarks, "Good Readers and Good Writers":

It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.

Near the beginning of his lecture on "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Nabokov states: 'There is a delightful winey taste about this book; in fact, a good deal of old mellow wine is drunk in the story: one recalls the wine that Utterson so comfortably sips.' Such delicious sensations are not to be analysed. During the series of lectures, Freud is dismissed variously as a 'medieval quack' and 'the Viennese witch doctor'.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar associations for Borges in his fondness for G. K. Chesterton. Once, in an effort to understand Borges's preference for this writer whose photographs and even penned self-portraits show him to be something like a large, softened leather, tobacco-smelling couch,  I bought an over-priced, oil-fouled, cloth-covered edition of his collected Father Brown stories (once red) from Gould's Book Arcade, whose rotting spine came off as soon as I tried to turn its pages. I read several stories before giving it away (probably, after all, just back to Gould's), and remember now only something about an arrangement of corridors only slightly less brown than the corridors in Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes, and as crowded and musty as the furthest, most inaccessible and slightly urine-smelling aisles at the back of the Arcade where I found it, very likely, on the floor.

Though I would not have it look as though I wanted to complain

There's a strange panting, obsessive quality to the narrator in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Significant is the narrator's confession early on:

It was the time in which our du was rooted, the time when he too must have called me by my Christian name, I hear it no more, but it is unthinkable that at six or eight years he should not have called  me Serenus or Seren just as I called him Adri. The date cannot be fixed, but it must certainly have been in our early schooldays that he ceased to bestow it on me and used only my last name instead, though it would have seemed to me impossibly harsh to do the same. Thus it was -- though I would not have it look as though I wanted to complain.

In Mann's extensive communication with Herman Hesse, whose The Glass Bead Game unsettled him by what he saw as its resonance with Doctor Faustus, and with whom he grew closer and closer over the years, neither Hesse nor Mann ever use anything but the formal address and never the first name only.

I picture Mann writing his Doctor Faustus on a hard wooden seat.

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.