14 posts tagged “belle epoque”
Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet; with the Dictionary of Received Ideas (Bouvard et Pécuchet, Dictionnaire des idées reçues). Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin, 1976 (1874-1880).
It's so funny. It's so mean. It's so funny. There's no way to do right by it - one of B. and P.'s principal occupations is mocking the stupidity and unoriginality of other people, and they aren't precisely wrong to do so. It doesn't feel unfinished. The tone is so homogenous that it's easy enough to superimpose it over Flaubert's plot sketch for the last chapters (with another steel-trap ending, just like L'Éducation Sentimentale), have the received ideas for dessert and go to bed with heartburn.
It's so funny. It's so mean. It's so funny. There's no way to do right by it - one of B. and P.'s principal occupations is mocking the stupidity and unoriginality of other people, and they aren't precisely wrong to do so. It doesn't feel unfinished. The tone is so homogenous that it's easy enough to superimpose it over Flaubert's plot sketch for the last chapters (with another steel-trap ending, just like L'Éducation Sentimentale), have the received ideas for dessert and go to bed with heartburn.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1996 (1910).
They call it a novel, but the notebook format basically turns it into a series of prose poems held together by the Brigge persona, who sometimes is a solid character with a personal history and sometimes is just a voice - more willfully naive than a lot of Rilke's poetic speakers but recognizably continuous with them. So it's a book of wonderful moments: funny, often scary, circling around anonymity, death and time. My favorite might have been the fable about the man who exchanges his fifty remaining years of life for a titanic heap of seconds, which immediately start to vanish on him - but it's hard to choose.
They call it a novel, but the notebook format basically turns it into a series of prose poems held together by the Brigge persona, who sometimes is a solid character with a personal history and sometimes is just a voice - more willfully naive than a lot of Rilke's poetic speakers but recognizably continuous with them. So it's a book of wonderful moments: funny, often scary, circling around anonymity, death and time. My favorite might have been the fable about the man who exchanges his fifty remaining years of life for a titanic heap of seconds, which immediately start to vanish on him - but it's hard to choose.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung). Trans. Stanley Corngold. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996 (1912).
This was my teaching copy this semester. I think the Corngold translation is about as good as anyone's going to manage, and the footnotes are helpful, but the essays in the back turned out to be no use at all in the classroom; either they're smart but way too technical for undergrads (Corngold's essay) or just plain crummy (most of the others). If I teach Kafka again I'll probably go with the Bantam Classics Metamorphosis, which has the same translation and features generous excerpts from Walter Sokel's excellent "Education for Tragedy" in the back, along with some really silly old-school psychoanalytic readings (apples as anal impregnation!) that we can all laugh at.
This was my teaching copy this semester. I think the Corngold translation is about as good as anyone's going to manage, and the footnotes are helpful, but the essays in the back turned out to be no use at all in the classroom; either they're smart but way too technical for undergrads (Corngold's essay) or just plain crummy (most of the others). If I teach Kafka again I'll probably go with the Bantam Classics Metamorphosis, which has the same translation and features generous excerpts from Walter Sokel's excellent "Education for Tragedy" in the back, along with some really silly old-school psychoanalytic readings (apples as anal impregnation!) that we can all laugh at.
James, Henry. The Awkward Age. New York: Penguin, 1966 (1899).
After some initial casting about, the motor for the plot resolves into an older man's offer of a healthy financial bequest to a younger man on the condition of a certain marriage taking place. The Tragic Muse had a similar situation, but this time around the matter is treated with a great deal more hesitation and indirection; for one thing, a point is made of never mentioning the sum, so that it joins Milly Theale's mysterious illness and Lambert Strether's mysterious manufactured item in the list of Crucial Jamesian Unspeakables. On the level of form, the strategy has something to do with modernist ideas of purity: factoring out the contingent. On the level of plot, it has something to do with complete terror of being conditioned by the material world.
After some initial casting about, the motor for the plot resolves into an older man's offer of a healthy financial bequest to a younger man on the condition of a certain marriage taking place. The Tragic Muse had a similar situation, but this time around the matter is treated with a great deal more hesitation and indirection; for one thing, a point is made of never mentioning the sum, so that it joins Milly Theale's mysterious illness and Lambert Strether's mysterious manufactured item in the list of Crucial Jamesian Unspeakables. On the level of form, the strategy has something to do with modernist ideas of purity: factoring out the contingent. On the level of plot, it has something to do with complete terror of being conditioned by the material world.
James, Henry. The Other House. New York: NYRB Classics, 1999 (1896).
This is a good way to read a Henry James play without reading a Henry James play. It's his first novel after five years spent in an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the theatre (Oscar Wilde, that unclean beast, had captured the public heart) and is taken from a scenario originally intended as a three-act play. James would pull this adaptation trick more than once, and the results could be pretty awkward, but this one has its merits; after a clunky first act (excuse me, "first book") designed to get the machinery going, the melodrama plays out with brio. The style betrays its origins - mostly dialogue, with interspersed sentences that read like stage directions, stitched together with periodic paragraphs of Jamesian introspection - but somehow it does serve as a forerunner (a "precedent," James calls it in his notebooks) to the late style. I need to do more work to figure out how.
This is a good way to read a Henry James play without reading a Henry James play. It's his first novel after five years spent in an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the theatre (Oscar Wilde, that unclean beast, had captured the public heart) and is taken from a scenario originally intended as a three-act play. James would pull this adaptation trick more than once, and the results could be pretty awkward, but this one has its merits; after a clunky first act (excuse me, "first book") designed to get the machinery going, the melodrama plays out with brio. The style betrays its origins - mostly dialogue, with interspersed sentences that read like stage directions, stitched together with periodic paragraphs of Jamesian introspection - but somehow it does serve as a forerunner (a "precedent," James calls it in his notebooks) to the late style. I need to do more work to figure out how.
James, Henry. The Tragic Music. New York: Library of America, 1989 (1890).
This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.
There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.
This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.
There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.
James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 (1897).
Aw crap, it's another masterpiece, and it will probably have to kick off my dissertation because I have no idea how to dispose of it in a paragraph. Notes to self:
- Vertigo of perspectivalism - struggle of book is to find a synthetic viewpoint - I doubt it succeeds
- Child's viewpoint foregrounds the architecture - makesa choice of POV etc into a clear conceit (in Elizabethan sense?) - the sort of thing modernist novels will also use as structural grounding. But to describe a child's mind is not yet to speak as a child does; James almost never throws his voice.
- Disinterested perception = lack of agency; looking at her own life with her nose pressed against a pane of glass
- A hermeneutic education - her moral initiation consists of learning to read signs; prior to that it's senseless to think of her as making choices. To read a sign means to translate the world into the late Jamesian style. (Late style as gloss on a text? We don't always get to read the text itself.) The ambiguity isn't skeptical - interpretations aren't inherently fallible, they're only more or less apt.
Aw crap, it's another masterpiece, and it will probably have to kick off my dissertation because I have no idea how to dispose of it in a paragraph. Notes to self:
- Vertigo of perspectivalism - struggle of book is to find a synthetic viewpoint - I doubt it succeeds
- Child's viewpoint foregrounds the architecture - makesa choice of POV etc into a clear conceit (in Elizabethan sense?) - the sort of thing modernist novels will also use as structural grounding. But to describe a child's mind is not yet to speak as a child does; James almost never throws his voice.
- Disinterested perception = lack of agency; looking at her own life with her nose pressed against a pane of glass
- A hermeneutic education - her moral initiation consists of learning to read signs; prior to that it's senseless to think of her as making choices. To read a sign means to translate the world into the late Jamesian style. (Late style as gloss on a text? We don't always get to read the text itself.) The ambiguity isn't skeptical - interpretations aren't inherently fallible, they're only more or less apt.
Then she understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours - with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: 'I say, you little booby, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so you must take it all. Repudiate your dear old daddy - in the face, mind you, of his tender supplications. He can't be rough with you - it isn't in his nature: therefore you'll have successfully chucked him because he was too generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty.' This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle thumped her when she choked.
James, Henry. The Bostonians. London: Penguin, 1984 (1886).
This one is a real outlier and I am not sure what he was going for. A lot of it is making fun of those Boston feminists, which does not seem like a very nice thing to do, though the conservative Southern gentleman who's supposed to provide balance is no great shakes either. The ending does crank up the melodrama only to dissolve it in James's usual upsetting ambivalence, but it's not clear how much of the preceding we needed. I am sad to report that I kept getting distracted by marginalia from the previous owner, who apparently had been told it was a "novel about lesbians" and kept writing things like SEDUCTION and SUBMISSION in the margins, along with circling every single appearance of the adjective "queer." I'm surprised he or she didn't go on to other not-a-double-entendres like "toilet" and "ejaculated."
This one is a real outlier and I am not sure what he was going for. A lot of it is making fun of those Boston feminists, which does not seem like a very nice thing to do, though the conservative Southern gentleman who's supposed to provide balance is no great shakes either. The ending does crank up the melodrama only to dissolve it in James's usual upsetting ambivalence, but it's not clear how much of the preceding we needed. I am sad to report that I kept getting distracted by marginalia from the previous owner, who apparently had been told it was a "novel about lesbians" and kept writing things like SEDUCTION and SUBMISSION in the margins, along with circling every single appearance of the adjective "queer." I'm surprised he or she didn't go on to other not-a-double-entendres like "toilet" and "ejaculated."
James, Henry. The Spoils of Poynton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (1897).
Simultan's sharp theory about Jane Austen is that those characters who violate ethical norms themselves suffer the most from it. Something like that principle is still at work in George Eliot; Gwendolyn's punishment for marrying Grandcourt is half Grandcourt himself, half her own conscience. James's characters, on the other hand, finds themselves in an ethical landscape that is losing its perspective and breaking up into a Cézanne painting. Our heroine Fleda is tempted by a moral transgression that would benefit everyone she cares about and injure no one other than some unpleasant people whom we hardly encounter in the book. The only thing holding her back is her own principle, and without a social canvas to back it up it's easy for that principle to look like perversity; all the more so since the scheme of values we do encounter most often is the aesthetic, and both James and Fleda are quite aware of the tie between aestheticism and the Hobbesian marketplace.
Simultan's sharp theory about Jane Austen is that those characters who violate ethical norms themselves suffer the most from it. Something like that principle is still at work in George Eliot; Gwendolyn's punishment for marrying Grandcourt is half Grandcourt himself, half her own conscience. James's characters, on the other hand, finds themselves in an ethical landscape that is losing its perspective and breaking up into a Cézanne painting. Our heroine Fleda is tempted by a moral transgression that would benefit everyone she cares about and injure no one other than some unpleasant people whom we hardly encounter in the book. The only thing holding her back is her own principle, and without a social canvas to back it up it's easy for that principle to look like perversity; all the more so since the scheme of values we do encounter most often is the aesthetic, and both James and Fleda are quite aware of the tie between aestheticism and the Hobbesian marketplace.
It should go without saying that Fleda maintains her integrity at the cost of everything else. Virtue for James is its own punishment, and in that respect his books are as black as Candide - but here no one is snickering in the gallery.Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists' materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she was now doing. They had never been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from them.
James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima. New York: Library of America, 1989 (1886).
James closes his "The Art of Fiction" (1884) with a note on Zola, of all people:
The later plot is driven by a nebulous oath of revolutionary loyalty which Hyacinth has taken, providing a fine ambiguity - the oath is inexorable but carries not a featherweight of compulsion; it may never fall due at all. James clearly enjoys the paradox (it's a kind of precursor to Milly Theale's illness in The Wings of the Dove) and thus it's a disappointment when the trap actually does spring shut; the body of the book so clearly broadcasts the difference between James's method and Zola's that the conclusion suggests an author throwing up his hands and letting the genre do the work for him. It's a surprise in retrospect, then, how long he does manage to ride the genre without it throwing him.
James closes his "The Art of Fiction" (1884) with a note on Zola, of all people:
Zola gets precisely one oblique reference in The Princess Casamassima - there are "certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and scientific realists, of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long desired to put his hand; but, evidently, none of them had ever stumbled into Lady Aurora's candid collection." Hyacinth never gets to read his Zola, but that doesn't really matter insofar as he's living a skewed Jamesian version of a Zola novel - an attempt by the author, it would seem, to do urban naturalism with both light and energy. The results are weird and mostly gratifying. There is indeed a princess, who's a properly stunning femme fatale, as well as a ragtag bunch of socialists whom James is mostly content to treat with irony. Indeed James seems to be smiling through his beard at the very deterministic tropes he's appropriated - does he really want us to think that Hyacinth has aristocratic manners and facility in French just because he's the illegitimate son of a lord and a Frenchwoman? Or is this Hyacinth's own misguided take?In France to-day we see a prodigious effort (that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy, his results would be of the highest value.
The later plot is driven by a nebulous oath of revolutionary loyalty which Hyacinth has taken, providing a fine ambiguity - the oath is inexorable but carries not a featherweight of compulsion; it may never fall due at all. James clearly enjoys the paradox (it's a kind of precursor to Milly Theale's illness in The Wings of the Dove) and thus it's a disappointment when the trap actually does spring shut; the body of the book so clearly broadcasts the difference between James's method and Zola's that the conclusion suggests an author throwing up his hands and letting the genre do the work for him. It's a surprise in retrospect, then, how long he does manage to ride the genre without it throwing him.
