Tuesday, October 13, 2015

one single move to disengage myself



The narrator in The Aspern Papers brings flowers to the women he is trying to game and the people in the Ullman story take flowers away from lunch. That conjunction of flowers reminded me of the ritual idea that I had been toying with, re. the Ullman story – "they approach the lunch," I had been thinking, "as if they were going to a mass" – and so the approach to Miss Tita became, also, "sacrifice and ritual," as the movement of flowers from the garden into the Venetian palazzo became, in my mind, a continuation of the motion of the flowers away from the house in the Swiss village. "By flowers I would make my way."

As I typed out "sacrifice and ritual" I was also remembering that I had decided to avoid the placement of one book next to another when I thought about them and instead talk about one book at a time which I had not d … I can find dodges for myself and is it all right (I wheedle) if I have comparisons that don't lead to conclusions; for example, after reading Sarraute's Martereau I moved to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which was being discussed at Wuthering Expectations, and when Frédéric leant a large sum of money to another character without getting a receipt I put the book upside-down on a chair with the pages open because the narrator in Martereau had given away money like that as well; and the ending of Martereau was coming back to me, the narrator's knowledge of, and complicity with, the disgust that he is sure the other characters feel for him; from their direction it is subtly expressed but he witnesses it at the scale that the book sees: "I won't budge, I'm too afraid … one single move to disengage myself, to repel him, one single a bit too brusque move, and something atrocious, something unbearable would happen, an explosion, a frightful conflagration, our clothes torn from us, noxious, deadly emanations, all his distress, his forlornness on me" (tr. Maria Jolas). The "him," who is the character Martereau, asks the narrator to respond and move. There the book ends.

This young narrator is physically weak and sick, he can't undertake heavy professions, and so he lives with his uncle's family instead of making his way in the world, but there is not enough rest in the universe for him. There is no rest; there is no place where he can rest. Even when they are sitting and fishing he can be unsettled by one question about a knot. "Is my knot well tied? A fisherman's knot, you must have learnt it when you were a boy scout." With that, and for the millionth weary time, he is asked to consider himself, his being, his knowledge, the context it has when he puts it next to the expectations of other people, their own abilities, their accomplishments, the "tentacles" that they probe him with; and this is hell.

Martereau is Gothic without needing the mountains, banditti, or such large decorations; the scenery has adjusted itself to a river bank by a house and the imprisonment of the narrator doesn't take place in a castle, but the moods of suspicion, dread, the sublime, suffocation, etc, are shared; the medium for that dread in Sarraute is the intrusion of questions and presences; the Gothic is a genre of intrusions and presences – things coming at you – I say to myself, repeating the words – they come mysteriously at and around, they circle – you can't defend -- and there is the distress of elimination waiting for you --

Now if I finish at "putting the book down" there is no intelligent comparison between Sarraute and Flaubert. So, stop.


13 comments:

  1. yet another kind of horror: the fear of the ongoing processes of cosmic inexorability, where any move has unforeseen consequences. rather proustian? i'm reading "age of suspicion"/sarraute and she has that type of sensorium: using lots of subjective clauses to cover all possible interpretations. her takes on doestoievski and kant are wonderfully penetrating, i thought...

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    1. too many brain storms: i meant kafka, not kant...

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    2. Cosmic inexorability! That's it! That's the link between Sarraute and the Gothic and Existentialist writings as well (remembering that Sartre was one of her supporters), even if they don't all agree on the words they use when they refer to that dread; even if, in Existentialism, the Cosmic is not actually "cosmic," it is still an inexorable force that stares at you and infects you with staring.

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    3. Penetrating, and so many of the points she sees when she looks at them are there in her own fiction as well. "This continual need to establish contact ... " that she comments on in Dostoevsky is the problem of her books: "the immense, quivering mass, whose incessant ebb and flow, whose scarcely perceptible vibration, are the very pulse of life."

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  2. I find myself doing little but making comparisons with some books. I just read Stein's Three Lives and compared the three narratives to each other as I went along, trying to find connections and differences. The book came with the novella QED as an appendix; QED was Stein's original version of the material that became Three Lives. I read that novella and compared it with the three narratives of Three Lives as I went along, and when I was finished it I sat and thought about how these stories all pressed against each other and told the same story, and then I wondered what exactly I was searching for with all these comparisons, what ideas I was testing, and I had no answer.

    Right now, one of the books I'm reading is Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter. The translator includes a lot of notes and extra material, and he compares Pushkin's text to Russian history, other Russian texts including a non-fiction version of the same material from which The Captain's Daughter is derived, etc. I ask the translator (at some distance, of course) what theories he's testing with his comparisons, and I get no answer.

    Except perhaps that the idea that a story (or any artwork) can exist within only its own context, that a story can become part of our context or that our context can become part of a story, is the idea to test. Comparing artworks against each other forms a new set of contexts, right? All of these contexts have value, or maybe must have value, since that's what we do, create these new and transitory contexts. What I mean, I think, is that I'm backing away from the idea that one's observations ostensibly about the thing itself are in some way stronger than one's observations about the thing as compared to another thing. Though even when talking about things in themselves, we are comparing those things to ourselves, yes? I've given myself a headache.

    What I meant to say: Yes, so much of Henry James' stories, especially his later ones, can strike one as religious stories, as allegories about ritual. "Aspern Papers" has a lot of the atmosphere of a man who has infiltrated a religious society, snuck into an abbey to steal relics. There's a current of faith (or different faiths) and imagined beings and worship in that story.

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    1. Wow, that was long. I had no idea I'd gone on so. Sorry.

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    2. It's the potential for superficial quickness that worries me when it comes to comparisons; I'm afraid that I'll make the comparison, glance over it, and conclude, "That's lovely, that's symmetrical -- that looks so finished --" and leave it there, too happy with my completeness and neatness.

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    3. The worship in James' stories intrigues me because it's so close to the worship of nothing at all; the ultimate moment is just a whiff or intuition that the narrator (or whoever is observing) might have missed, and there's something even sinister in that effervescence: "This optical trick gave her a sort of phantasmagoric brightness, and while I was still the victim of it I heard a whisper somewhere in the depths of my conscience: 'Why not, after all—why not?'"

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    4. "potential" - from my own experience I would say the certainty.

      In "The Figure in the Carpet" James comes sloe to directly admitting to "nothing at all," although "directly" is so plainly the wrong word. He allows for the possibility.

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    5. If it's a certainty then I definitely shouldn't do it.

      In Turn of the Screw: "All of your worship-detective-work is directed at hallucinations of ghosts."

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  3. how much the observer knows will affect his comparisons and the results that accrue will vary as a result of that knowledge. anything can be compared to anything although contrasting is easier. drawing meaningfiul conclusions is another consideration. satisfying curiosity is always a legitimate aim the consequences of which are increased knowledge and a more finely tuned instrument with which to explore more comparisons/contrasts. ideally, i suppose, a point will be reached wherein the literary practician will know everything and all conclusions will be obvious; at that conjuncture further advance becomes meaningless. (having just read what i wrote, i understand that reading leads nowhere. i think i'll take up golf).

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  4. "I had decided to avoid the placement of one book next to another " oh no how horrible i cannot even think about it

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