Tuesday, December 15, 2015

to disappear beneath slow sea-water



Put the point at the end of the sentence, said Dorothy Richardson. It is one of the writing precepts that she gives to Miriam in Pilgrimage, and she offered it genuinely, not fictionally, to someone in a letter, following her own advice more and more as the books go on, or so I think now as I'm rereading them, and up to volume twelve, Dimple Hill, the sentences becoming more Proustian in this structural sense, the winding roam that ends with a cap that expands into suggestiveness because it is exact and surprising: "Returned from their first glance at the scene as it showed from the house which before had been part of it and now, itself only a window, left it empty, a vast expanse ending in a wedge-shaped ridge low against the low sky, her eyes sped once more across the flats, now beginning to disappear beneath slow sea-water, and reached the misty ridge and found trees there, looking across at her from their far distance so intently that she was moved to set down the little old spoon raised to crack the shell of the egg whose surface, in the unimpeded light, wore so soft a bloom." Not the same observations as Proust, or for the same reason, but still the sentence-weight placed on the "soft bloom," on a little thing, the capper is aimed at tininess and faintness, a passing object: a flower, in him, a slick of sperm, or a yellow spot that no one else can find, though it revived him when he was dying, said Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, who allowed the other man to lean upon his arm at the Jeu de Palme where Vermeer's View of Delft, 1660-61, was on display in an exhibition "the profits of which were to go to areas of Flanders that had been laid waste by the war." Marcel Proust: a Life, Jean-Yves Tadié, tr. Euan Cameron, 2000. "Several times he came back to sit down on that 'circular settee' which Bergotte rolls off to die," said Vaudoyer. "But," writes Tadié, Proust "did not die in front of the View of Delft." It is strange that this sentence is there in the biography when everybody knows that Proust did not die in front of the View of Delft. Logically we know it, because Bergotte would not have been able to roll away in the same place if his creator had done so first. It is odd to imagine myself as someone who was desiring, sighing, longing to be informed very clearly that Proust did not suffer a fatal attack in the Jeu de Palme before he had written the word "end" in his manuscript, which, according to Céleste Albaret, was an event that occurred in the following year. And what does she mean, asks Tadié, when there are at least four versions of the final paragraph, none of which can be singled out as the one that ended with Fin? "[I]n which version was the word Fin placed at the end? Certainly before the fourth but after the third. It was when Proust had succeeded in inserting the image of giants, which may have taken the place of the 'êtres monstrueux,' that he stopped; it was both because he had achieved a rhythmical fullness, and also because of the effect, not dissimilar to silence in musical tempo, of the single dash (not a pair, as in the Clarac-Ferré edition) which precedes 'dans le temps.'"

If Tadié wants to tell me that Proust did not die in front of a Vermeer then he has an idea of me that does not fit my actual existence, or perhaps that information resolved an imbalanced feeling there in the paragraph for him and he assumed that I, too, would have been arrested by that imbalance and clumsiness, desiring, in its place, a "musical fullness," and so, to get us both through the experience safely, he installed that phrase even though we are on page seven hundred and forty-four in a book where the section titled 'Death' does not come until page seven hundred and seventy-five. Between the two pages Proust nearly has a bucket and a chicken thrown at his head and he goes to the Ritz for dinner more than once.

Why, in that sentence, did I take the word "ice" away from the front of "bucket" and "hot" from the front of "chicken," which would have given them a clearer placement in the Ritz dining room? There must have been a reason. Now, as it is, the bucket might be a manure bucket and the chicken might be alive. The dying Proust is visiting a farm (how, with his asthma?); he is standing on the floor of a barn while a farm person, not looking where he is aiming, is cleaning buckets and chickens off the rafters. Probably there was straw as well but Tadié has not mentioned it. The owner of the farm sees the near miss and loses his temper at the farm person but Proust is charming, as he always was, a quality that Miriam analyses whenever she comes across it in another character during Pilgrimage. What does it mean, to say charming things? she considers. Why is it different in a man and in a woman? Chrisman never praises Ruskin for his charmingness* and nor was Laure charming. She was "pure, dissolute, dark, luminous." "I drank, I bathed in her radiant purity," wrote Jean Bernier, tr Jeanine Herman. L'amour de Laure, 1978. Do I ever know what to do with words? The difference between a live chicken and a cooked one lies between the words "warm" and "hot."


*"The ability to coo as gently as a dove was not a notable characteristic of Ruskin."


9 comments:

  1. i've thought that differences in the interpretation of given events reflect varying psychological distances between subject and object; the need for such distancing may indicate emotional states in either. for instance, love and anger are at the opposite extremes on the distance measuring stick and describing such variations in writing might take place in language that runs the gamut from lucid to incomprehensible. that plus individuals are born with differing predilections for locations on the scale. to some being hit on the head by a chicken may signal closeness, comfort, coziness; to others anger and extreme separation between chickener and chickenee might occur.

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  2. And yet Proust's position on the scale of 1 (you love being hit on the head with chickens) to 10 (being hit on the head with chickens drives you into an instant foaming rage) remains explored. I see a new avenue of inquiry for Proust scholarship opening up before us.

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    1. That should have been "remains unexplored."

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    2. no, i got what you meant and am in anticipatory agreement. there's more under heaven and earth, horatio...

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    3. i'm trying to sort out in my mind some ideas about ideas: the senses take in outside pictures(better word?) and contrast and compare them with each other to discern relationships. these relationships constitute ideas, yes? so there ought to be a way to categorized authors as to how they use these conceptions; i.e.: some use words frugally, joyce, cummings, and others, and some use them in a sort of microscopic chain, wherein one idea is covered by a whole lot of words; henry james, jane austen, etc. and most use words somewhere in between. chain of consciousness writing must just jam the ideas together in way that is supposed to seem natural, so that the reader more easily follows the progress of images. it's difficult to decide what actually is happening when thinking about the above; i guess the differing kinds of prose could be quanitified in some way, like joyce being a one and james being a ten, but i don't know if that would necessarily mean anything and maybe the whole idea is pointless anyhow... sometimes i wake in the middle of the night convinced i've just realized the solution to the whole thing, without really formulating what that whole thing might be... night crazies, i guess...

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    4. Where would you put non-sensual information in that system of idea formation then: the sort of knowledge that you get from opening a book and reading lines from it? If we form ideas by contrasting and comparing (writing this down I realise just how much I have no idea if it is true), then what relationship does the mind find between the taste of a pear (I've just finished a pear) and this line in the Penguin Classics edition of The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling," which is the object I have nearest to my left foot: "If the Squire had been as quick-sighted as he was remarkable for the contrary, Passion might at present very well have blinded him"? If I were my mind then I don't know what I would do with that.

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    5. two things: i just realized that ideas derived from books are the product of prior experience and present imagination whereas ideas from living and working involve interpretation from sensory data, both past and present. and: the rapidity of apprehension doesn't necessarily agree with the pace of events(reading speed) so that occurrences may slip by some readers faster than they can absorb the information; in this sense, perceptive acuity may mean more than comprehension. like tracking animals in the woods, sort of... (bosc?) as regards the t. jones, i've occasionally undergone a sort of white-out from diving into intense prose and having later to go back and dig myself out; probably not what the author wanted to happen, although i bet it occurs more often than most would want to admit...

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    6. Sort of a prowling, hunting, scenting action, rather than a closed, comprehending action.

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