BERNEVAL

I am always fascinated by the text that is what it is describing it to be. I rather like the description of Leonardo’s practice in one of the lectures from Italo Calvino (Six Memos for the Next Millennium). One can picture in the mind’s eye the columns as they are being described as being written.

Let us take the fable about fire, for example, Leonardo gives us a rapid summary: the fire, offended because the water in the pan is above him, although he is the “higher” element, shoots his flames up and up until the water boils, overflows, and puts him out. Leonardo then elaborates this in three successive drafts, all of them incomplete, written in three parallel columns. Each time he adds some details, describing how, from a little piece of charcoal, a flame bursts through the gaps in the wood, crackling and swelling. But he soon breaks off, as if becoming aware that there is no limit to the minuteness of detail with which one can tell even the simplest story. Even a tale of wood catching fire in the kitchen fireplace can grow from within until it becomes infinite.

No surprise that the lecture is called “Exactitude”. Pleasant surprise that I found myself recalling a short story by Carol Shields in which the narrator, a professor of literary studies, is found asking “So where exactly do I stand, then on narrative enclosures? Or, to put it another way, how small can ficto-fragments get without actually disappearing? […] And I’m not just talking minimalism here. I’m saying that fiction’s clothes can be folded so small they’d fit inside a glass marble.” (from “Ilk” collected in Dressing Up for the Carnival)

Exactly, small and precise. Folded.

And so for day 616
20.08.2008

Edmund White on Proust

Proust may be more available to readers today than in the past because as his life recedes in time and the history of his period goes out of focus, he is read more as a fabulist than a chronicler, as a maker of myths rather than the valedictorian of the Belle Epoque. Under his new dispensation, Proust emerges as the supreme symphonist of the spirit. We no longer measure his accounts against a reality we know. Instead, we read his fables of caste and lust, of family virtue and social vice, of the depredations of jealousy and the consolations of art not as reports but as fairy tales. He is our Scheherazade.

From a different time setting, there is Zero Patience a musical about AIDS by John Greyson which has a song that also apostrophes the figure of “Scheherazade (Tell a Story)”

And for some reason (a passing reference to Proust in a citation from Barthes Le Plaisir du texte), I am carried to a passage by Rosalind Coward and John Ellis in Language and Materialism, a passage that recalls for me those wonderful waterfalling sentences that cascade upon the page and into memory:

The continual process of writing is not a mere addition, a piling-up of citations onto other citations to form an ever more compact tissue of realist language; it is a constant process of displacement and revision. Each new citation alters those that have gone before; imperceptibly, the form of the realist illusion is changed, new sociolects emerge and others have their particular energies scattered and redirected. It is this aspect of intertextuality that is exploited in avant-garde texts: they throw together scraps of phrases, etc. but without a unifying, totalising position. They play with and in ideology.

It is the vision of emergence and scattering that recalls the sweep of a grand novel and its play with the recurring phrase…

And so for day 615
19.08.2008

I like this characterization of the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straus.

There is an Hassidic parable which tells us that God created man so that man might tell stories. This telling of stories is, according to Lévi-Strauss, the very condition of our being. The alternative would be total inertia or the eclipse of reason.

This is from the Massey Lectures delivered by George Steiner under the title Nostalgia for the Absolute. I like it all the more because Steiner situates Marx, Freud and Lévi-Strauss in a narrative of his own.

And so for day 611
15.08.2008