Monthly Archives: August 2007

I just came across some wonderful passages in Proust; I’m about 150 pages from end, determined to finish it and Don Quixote by the end of the summer. The narrator has just had a series of experiences of involuntary memory, where something in his present — a sound or taste or sight — will trigger a memory that recreates in his mind whole sections of his past that he had previously forgotten. The madeleine scene from Swann’s Way is the most famous of these, although there are many. Immediately before these memories come to the narrator, he despairs of ever becoming a writer; he has spent years and years of his life wasting time, avoiding doing the writing he has always wanted to do. The memories start the process of bringing him back to his vocation, and they set him off on a long meditation on literature, writing, and the relationship of art and life.  I thought I’d share some short sections:

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never “developed” them … it is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.

I love the idea that we all have the materials of art within us; the difference between artists and everyone else is that artists learn how to make use of those materials. Proust calls art “translation” — taking our experiences, whatever they are, and plumbing the depths of them to find meaning and to transform that meaning into something beautiful. And he says it requires courage. We like to live with certain illusions about ourselves; we whitewash our darker characteristics and cover over our failings, but the artist will look for the truth, no matter how difficult it is to face.

Here’s another passage on art and life, this time about imagination and sensitivity:

It may well be that, for the creation of a work of literature, imagination and sensitivity are interchangeable qualities, and that the second may without any great disadvantage be substituted for the first, in the same way as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting pass that function over to the intestine. A man born sensitive but with no imagination might none the less write admirable novels. The suffering that other people cause him, his efforts to prevent it, the conflicts that it and the cruel other person created, all of this, interpreted by the intelligence, might make the raw material of a book … as beautiful as it would have been if it had been imagined …

So making art isn’t the same thing as making things up. I’ve never liked the idea that imagination is as simple as making things up; to me, it has more to do with putting ideas together, making connections, seeing what’s in front of you in a new way. So in my way of thinking, the sensitivity Proust is talking about, combined with intelligence, is actually a certain kind of imagination.

And finally, here’s a passage on criticism:

[Criticism] hails a writer as a prophet, on account of his peremptory tone and his very public scorn for the school that preceded him, when in fact he has absolutely nothing new to say. These aberrations on the part of criticism are so constant that a writer might almost prefer to be judged by the general public …. For there is a closer analogy between the instinctive life of the public and the talent of a great writer, which is no more than an instinct religiously listened to while imposing silence on everything else, an instinct perfected and understood, than between it and the superficial verbiage and shifting criteria of the recognized arbiters of judgment.

Apparently Proust isn’t so fond of critics.  (Although he’s not so fond of the general public either — to shorten the quotation I took out a parenthesis on how the general public generally doesn’t understand what an artist is doing.) He gives an interesting definition of art here, doesn’t he, that it’s “instinct religiously listened to”? And I do buy his argument that critics often get it wrong, that they take loud voices for true ones and newness for greatness.

Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, by Aoibheann Sweeney is an enjoyable read; I breezed through it in just a couple of days, which is unusual for me.  Which is not to say that it’s light reading, necessarily, just that it’s a book I was happy to spend hours with.  My copy came recently as a review copy from Penguin.The novel tells the story of Miranda, a young girl who lives first on an island in Maine with her father and later, after she finishes High School, in Manhattan. Her mother died somewhat mysteriously when she was three, leaving Miranda and her father on their own, although they are joined at times by Mr. Blackwell, a friend from the town across the bay. The father is working on a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but as time passes, it becomes clear that this is a project that will probably never be complete.  It is a pretense of work that keeps him occupied and give him a reason to live in such isolation.

About the first quarter of the book takes place in Maine, covering Miranda’s entire childhood, and then her father arranges for her to work at the Institute for Classical Studies in Manhattan amongst old friends of his. Once there, she struggles to make her way in a strange city and to absorb the new information she learns about her parents, and also about herself.

Miranda’s relationship with her father is one of the novel’s central story lines; the father spends most of his time lost in his studies and has no practical sense and little skill in maintaining a household, and so Miranda, with the help of Mr. Blackwell, learns early how to cook and care for the house and how to navigate across the bay on her own to get to school. She learns how to type so she can type up her father’s manuscript. She spends so much time alone with her father and devotes so much time to caring for him, and yet he is emotionally remote, caught up in the past and living with secrets that Miranda discovers only when she goes away.

Miranda’s father reads to her from his translation of Ovid often enough that the tales in Metamorphoses come to be familiar, and she tells several of the stories throughout the book (it’s in first person from Miranda’s point of view). They become a way for her to think about her own metamorphosis, or lack thereof, as she grows up curious about change and yet longing for things to stay the way they are. Ovid’s stories are about desire and its transformations, and they become the lens through which Miranda views the changes desire wreaks in others and in herself:

The tales in Metamorphoses rarely ended happily; the process of transformation, of hands turning into claws and feathers sprouting on shoulders, was sometimes a punishment and sometimes a reprieve. But mostly it was a compromise of some sort, a way to negotiate the chasm between desire and mortality, between human nature and human need.

There are many mysteries in the book — what exactly happened to Miranda’s mother? why is her father so reclusive? what exactly is the nature of his relationship to Mr. Blackwell? — some of which get resolved and others of which don’t. One of the most intriguing mysteries for Miranda is the mystery of desire itself — what it is and what it makes people do.

As in all first-person narratives, the pleasure of the reading lies in the reader’s response to the storyteller. Miranda speaks with a voice that is vulnerable and questioning, but there’s a toughness too, and even a kind of reticence — her life has not been easy, but she doesn’t spend her energy mourning it so much as trying to understand it.

The book was a pleasure to read — smart and meditative, with a narrator that enjoyed spending time with.