The Teller and the Tale E-Book

Gabriel Josipovici

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes,' writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a quarter of a century's worth of critical reflection on modern art and literature, Biblical culture, Jewish theology, European identity, the nature of beginnings, and the bittersweetness of writing fiction – to name but a few of the subjects upon which Josipovici's ranging, pansophic attention rests. The author describes paths between these distant regions of space and time with characteristic warmth and ingenuity. Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Pasternak, Eliot, Spark, Valéry, and Beckett dwell here alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Cervantes, and the Brothers Grimm. Each of these great writers is a point of departure for personal reflection, and a series of critical essays takes on a second life as a book of intimate recollections and fond remembrances, recalling departed friends and peers, evoking the pain and ecstasy of childhood, the personal struggle to be a writer, and the life-long project of becoming a person. Here is a snapshot of influences on one of the English language's most distinctive voices, and an opinionated, sensual, and informed exposition on Western literature and culture.

Leseprobe

THE TELLERESSAYS ON LITERATURE & CULTURE & THE TALE

1990–2015

Gabriel Josipovici

FOR TAMAR

Contents

Title PageDedicationPreface  Proust and ITristram Shandy: Not Waving But DrowningEmpty RoomsA Napoleon of Thought: Paul Valéry and his NotebooksReading Kafka TodayThe Stories of the GermansThe Legends of the JewsTwo ResurrectionsMedieval MattersThe Tallith and the DishclothThe Hebrew Poetry of Medieval SpainSacred TrashClaudel and the Bible‘Like a Bad Russian Novel’: Eliot in His LettersBoris PasternakGyörgy Kurtág: Samuel Beckett What is the Word‘The Itch to Write’: Beckett’s Early LettersWhy Write Fiction?Muriel Spark and the Practice of DeceptionSaying KaddishKafka and the Holy Rabbi of BelzThe LostCousinsAgainst the ‘Idea of Europe’Interruption and the Last PartHow to Make a Square MoveWhen I Begin I Have Already BegunThe Ouse’s Muddy Bank  Notes of First PublicationAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorAlso by Gabriel Josipovici Copyright

Preface

IT’S ONLY NOW that I have finished putting together this selection of essays and reviews written over the past quarter of a century that I see what a personal volume it is.

Three strands run through it: Jewish culture and experience; modernism and its discontents; and my own writing. Naturally they shade into one another. Thus the invitation to review a book on the Cairo Geniza allowed me to revisit my childhood in Egypt, while the review of a book on a family of Holocaust victims and survivors helped me understand how different is my own experience as a Jew with roots in the Middle East from that of the bulk of English and American Jews, who came from the Ashkenazi strongholds of North-Eastern Europe; meditation on the lives and writings of Kafka, Eliot, and Pasternak led straight to the heart of modernism, but questions of Judaism and anti-Semitism could not be avoided there either. Some of the later essays deal with problems I faced in writing various novels and short stories, and here I hope reprinting them will not be seen as mere self-indulgence; certainly in my own experience artists writing or talking about their work has been both intriguing and illuminating, even when I have not read or seen or heard that work or perhaps do not warm to it greatly.

I conclude with a response to an invitation to write about place, which allowed me to ponder what it means to me to live where I do, not far upstream from where Virginia Woolf drowned herself.

THE TELLER & THE TALE

Proust and I

MY DEAR DEPARTED FRIEND Gāmini Salgādo entitled his inaugural lecture as Professor of English at the University of Exeter ‘Shakespeare and I’, because, he said, that was his one chance of finding his name yoked to that of the writer he admired above all others. A similar impulse has led to my choice of title for this essay, but there are also deeper reasons (as, indeed, there were for Gāmini). Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, like Dante’s Divina Commedia, leads you in a spiral to the point where a door opens and you are invited – and find yourself able – to cross a threshold into a new life. You are able to do so because you have been trained for this purpose, much as a gymnast is trained, in the course of the three thousand pages that separate beginning and end. The book, like Dante’s poem, is as much about us, the readers, as it is about Marcel. Proust was clear about this and often alluded to it in the course of the novel, and he was also clear, from the first, that the role of all art was to lead us forward to a place or a form of life we are all in search of but cannot by ourselves attain. When, for example, Swann first hears the Vinteuil sonata, it takes hold of him in a quite literal way: ‘D’un rhythme lent elle le dirigeait ici d’abord, puis là, puis ailleur, vers un bonheur noble, inintelligible et précis.’ [‘With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him first this way, then that, towards a state of happiness that was noble, unintelligible, and yet precise.’]1

If this is the case then a response to the novel that is personal and biographical need not be merely anecdotal or self-preening but could, on the contrary, lead one into the very heart of Proust. For just as Marcel’s story is seen (in the first instance by the relationship Proust establishes between Marcel and Swann) to be not merely the story of one person but of all human beings, so my personal response may turn out to be just one instance of a universal one. That, at any rate, is my hope for what follows.

I first read À la recherche at seventeen, in the year between school and university. In the mornings I was trying to write a novel and in the evenings I was reading my way through the great literature of the world, all borrowed from the wonderful Putney and Wandsworth public libraries. I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Dickens and George Eliot, Yeats and Rilke – and then I read Proust. I felt at once that Proust was true in ways the others simply were not; they might be profound, tragic, funny, moving and many other things, but Proust’s book had this peculiar quality of touching on my life at every turn, of actually being about me. Why did I feel this? What was it in the book that made me feel this?

At one level it was a plethora of tiny details, such as the pillow that appears in the second paragraph of the novel: ‘J’appuyais tendrement mes joues contre les belles joues de l’oreiller qui, pleines et fraîches, sont comme les joues de nôtre enfance.’ [‘I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood.’] This is the kind of observation that tends to pass below the radar of most writers, but it catches in one short sentence the way a freshly ironed pillow-case, as one lays one’s head to rest on it, brings flooding into one’s body the sense of the protected nature of childhood, how in that blessed period we slept so well because we had no responsibilities, our lives taken care of by our loving parents. It doesn’t tell us this but conveys it with that wonderful shorthand which is the privilege of great art – ‘comme les joues de nôtre enfance’. When I first read it I did not pause to think all this, and I did not see how it related to the theme of those opening pages and of the novel as a whole – it was just ‘felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’, as Wordsworth, who knew a thing or two himself about memory and the body, put it in Tintern Abbey.

Then there were the details of social behaviour, such as we get in the third paragraph of Un amour de Swann:

Les Verdurin n’invitaient pas a dîner: on avait chez eux ‘son couvert mis’. Pour la soirée, il n’y avait pas de programme. Le jeune pianiste jouait, mais seulement si ‘ça lui chantait’, car on ne forçait personne et comme disait M.Verdurin, ‘Tout pour les amis, vivent les camarades!’ Si le pianiste voulait jouer la chevauchée de La Walkyrie ou le prélude de Tristan, Mme Verdurin protestait, non que cette musique lui déplût, mais au contraire parce qu’elle lui causait trop d’impression. ‘Alors vous tenez à ce que j’aie ma migraine? Vous savez bien que c’est la même chose chaque fois qu’il joue ça. Je sais ce qui m’attend! Demain quand je voudrai me lever, bonsoir, plus personne!’ S’il ne jouait pas, on causait, et l’un des amis, le plus souvent leur peintre favori d’alors, ‘lâchait’, comme disait M.Verdurin, ‘une grosse faribole qui faisait s’esclaffer tout le monde’, Mme Verdurin surtout, a qui – tant elle avait l’habitude de prendre au propre les expressions figurées des emotions qu’elle éprouvait – le docteur Cottard (un jeune débutant a cette époque) dut un jour remettre sa mâchoire qu’elle avait décrochée pour avoir trop ri.

[The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your ‘place laid’ there. There was never any programme for the evening’s entertainment. The young pianist would play, but only if ‘the spirit moved him,’ for no one was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: ‘We’re all friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!’ If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme Verdurin would protest, not because the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, because it made too violent an impression on her. ‘Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well it’s the same every time he plays that. I know what I’m in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up – nothing doing!’ If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends – usually the painter who was in favour there that year – would ‘spin’, as M.Verdurin put it, ‘a damned funny yarn that made ’em all split with laughter,’ and especially Mme Verdurin, who had such an inveterate habit of taking literally the figurative descriptions of her emotions that Dr Cottard (then a promising young practitioner) had once had to reset her jaw, which she had dislocated from laughing too much.]

At first sight this might be mistaken for Dickens, though it has a density perhaps alien to the Englishman’s more expansive style. But it differs in a more fundamental way: in Dickens, all the time one is laughing one is pleasantly distanced from the object of laughter; in Proust, even in a grotesque passage like this, the uneasy feeling grows on one that the way Mme Verdurin behaves as she listens to music is only an exaggerated form of the way we all tend to behave. There is a deep mystery underlying this farcical scene: how do we express what we feel? What role do our bodies have in our attempts to convey to others – friends, acquaintances, lovers – how we feel about a particular thing? Put this way it is easy to see how this theme is central to the whole novel. But it is also something we all encounter every day. Is it intrinsically wrong, for example – hypocritical? condescending? – to grow solemn and nod without speaking when someone tells you they have lost a parent or that their marriage has imploded? We do this because we do not know how we feel about what we have just been told, so we reach out for what we know from our experience of the world we should be feeling, and then try out what we hope will be the expression appropriate for conveying this feeling. Scenes of this kind proliferate in Proust’s novel; the paragraph about the Verdurins’ musical evenings, climaxing in the hostess’s dislocated jaw, is only one of the more extreme examples.

In this paragraph we are aware of the writer /observer, but we look past him, as it were, to Mme Verdurin and her salon. In other instances the laughter, the perception of truth and the awareness of the artist cannot be disentangled. Take this passage from the soirée at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte; Swann has just entered the hotel Saint-Euverte, thinking of Odette:

[p]our la première fois il remarqua, réveillée par l’arrivée inopinée d’un invité aussi tardif, la meute éparse, magnifique et désoeuvrée des grands valets de pied qui dormaient ça et la sur des banquettes et des coffres et qui, soulevant leur nobles profiles aigus de lévriers, se dressèrent et, rassemblés, formèrent le cercle autour de lui. L’un d’eux, d’aspect particulièrement féroce et assez semblable à l’exécuteur dans certains tableaux de la Renaisssance qui figurent des supplices, s’avança vers lui d’un air implacable pour lui prendre ses affaires. Mais la dureté de son regard d’acier était compensée par la douceur de ses gants de fil, si bien qu’en approchant de Swann il semblait témoigner de mépris pour sa personne et des égards pour son chapeau.

[(h)e now noticed for the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest, the scattered pack of tall, magnificent, idle footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests and who, pointing their noble greyhound profiles, now rose to their feet and gathered in a circle about him. One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions, tortures and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things. But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that, as he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.]

Note, again, how the pleasure, the sense of recognition, here comes from the combination of observation, invention of metaphor, and precision of language. The first of the three sentences, which we joined half-way through, is a long, typically Proustian one, which seems to meander interminably but knows exactly what it is doing as it suddenly swoops in on its real subject with the startling image of the tired footmen as greyhounds. The second is much shorter and drives to its conclusion from the start, but it still has time to loop out and remind us of Swann’s habit of comparing the world about him to his beloved Renaissance paintings, though the comparison of the footman to the headsman at an execution only reinforces the threat of its forward march, which is abruptly and comically undercut by the final phrase, ‘pour lui prendre ses affaires’. Just as we are trying to digest this we are thrust into a beautifully balanced passage in which two pairs of opposites are displayed, at the end, in a form of words which touches on the grotesque without quite tipping over into it: ‘du mépris pour sa personne et des égards pour son chapeau.’ How I love these bravura passages and feel that, had I the skill, the imagination and the linguistic resources, they are the kinds of passages I myself would like to have written.

But there were deeper reasons why I felt, in that magical first reading of the novel, that Proust was speaking to me in a way Dostoevsky, Dickens and the rest simply were not, that he was bringing to the surface truths I already knew but had not been able to articulate. These were less easy to pin down because they suffused the text, but that did not mean that I did not feel them at the time.

There was the interconnection between love and need, which runs through the whole book from the initial scene of the mother’s kiss to the disappearance of Albertine. Again, I sensed that what Proust was saying was ‘true’ in a way the other novelists and philosophers I had read were not, even though I could not at the time grasp – nor felt the need to – exactly in what this truth lay. Why, for example, does Marcel say, when his mother finally agrees to read to him that night: ‘J’aurais dû être heureux: je ne l’étais pas […] il me semblait que je venais d’une main impie et secrête de tracer dans son âme une première ride et d’y fair apparaître un premier cheveux blanc.’ [‘I ought to have been happy; I was not […] I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and brought out a first white hair on her head.’] I didn’t fully understand it at the time and yet, such is the way art works, I think I did: her giving in to him is the source of enormous relief for that one evening, makes the absolutely intolerable finally not just tolerable but pleasurable, but at the same time it heralds the end of his sense of his mother’s absolute authority and therefore of her invulnerability. She can be swayed, she is human – but by that very fact she is suddenly vulnerable, subject to time like all of us and therefore will one day, eventually, die.

And then there is the extraordinary ‘truth’ with which Combray begins and ends:

Certes quand approchait le matin, il y avait bien longtemps qu’était dissipée la brêve incertitude de mon réveil. Je savais dans quelle chambre je me trouvais effectivement, je l’avais reconstruite autour de moi dans l’obscurité, et – soit en s’orientant par la seule mémoire, soit en m’aidant, comme indication, d’une faible lueur aperçue, au pied de laquelle je plaçais les rideaux de la croisée – je l’avais reconstruite tout entière et meublée comme un architecte et un tapissier qui gardent leur ouverture primitive aux fenètres et aux portes, j’avais reposé les glaces et remis la commode à sa place habituelle. Mais à peine le jour – et non plus le reflet d’une dernière braise sur une tringle de cuivre que j’avais pris pour lui – traçait-il dans l’obscurité, et comme à la craie, sa première raie blanche et rectificative, que la fenêtre avec ses rideaux, quittait le cadre de la porte où je l’avais situé par erreur, tandis que pour lui faire place, le bureau que ma mémoire avait maladroitement installé là se sauvait à toute vitesse, poussant devant lui la cheminée et écartant le mur mitoyen du couloir; […] et le demeure que j’avais rebâtie dans les ténèbres était allée rejoindre les demeures entrevues dans le tourbillon du réveil, mise en fuite par ce pâle signe qu’avait tracé au-dessus des rideaux le doigt levé du jour.

[It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the brief uncertainty of my waking dream; I would know in what room I was actually lying, would have reconstructed it around me in the darkness, and – fixing my bearings by memory alone, or with the assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed the curtains and the window – would have reconstructed it complete and furnished, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, keeping the original plan of the doors and windows; would have replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed site. But scarcely had daylight itself – and no longer the gleam from a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod which I had mistaken for daylight – traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its first white, correcting ray, than the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway in which I had erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily installed where the window ought to be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the fireplace and sweeping aside the wall of the passage; […] and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings glimpsed in the whirlpool of awakening, put to flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted finger of dawn.]

We have all woken up in a strange bedroom and had to readjust rapidly our sense of where walls and cupboards and doors and windows were, but who before Proust had thought to talk about it? But of course this is more than the bringing to light of something well known and rarely discussed. It plays a positively Nabokovian role in the novel (Borges has written eloquently on how reading Kafka leads one to see the ‘Kafkaesque’ in earlier writers, and though Proust is a greater novelist than Nabokov, the particular artistic strategy I am exploring at this moment is more central to Nabokov’s cruel imagination than it is to Proust’s), forcing us, as happens so often in this book, to discover that firmly held beliefs are actually erroneous, and by so doing giving a solidity and ‘reality’ to the new beliefs which no Flaubertian realist could ever achieve. In Dreaming by the Book, a fascinating exploration of how writers, via their works, teach us to use our imaginations, Elaine Scarry argues that Proust gets us to imagine the solid surface of his bedroom precisely by concentrating on the immateriality of the images the magic lantern projects lightly over the walls: ‘the perpetual mimesis of the solidity of the room’, she says,

is brought about by the ‘impalpable iridescence’ of Golo fleeting across its surfaces […] Taken in isolation, the walls, the curtains, the doorknob are for the reader (as opposed to Marcel inside the book) certainly as thick and impalpable as the bright coloured images issuing from the magic lantern. Yet by instructing us to move the one across the surface of the other, the transparency of one somehow works to verify the density of the other.

This may be true, but Scarry misses what is to me the central reason for our sense of the solidity of the room: the fact that for so long it is so flexible. Precisely because the walls and cupboards and windows of the room are moved by the power of habit and imagination this way and that, when sleep is finally banished and the erstwhile sleeper fully awake, we assent to the reality of this room and forget that it too is, after all, just as much the product of Proust’s imagination and writerly skills as all the other rooms that have been paraded before us: two minuses make a plus.

But all this is really a prologue to my central theme. The real reason why I felt that À la recherche was ‘true’ (was in some sort of way ‘my truth’, while other novels, great though they might be, were like distant mountains I could admire but which in the end could be of no help to me in my life) lay in Proust’s relation, in the book, to the art and act of writing books. I had felt the frisson, the angel passing over my face, in the previous year, when, at sixteen, I had read The Waste Land and encountered the lines:

On Margate sands

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

I had no idea what that was about, but I knew it was vital to me. Now of course I see that it moved me because there, in the middle of what was undoubtedly a great poem, was a raw cry of despair at the impossibility of holding the world together for long enough to make any kind of art. And here in Proust, in the midst of this gripping and charming narrative of bucolic childhood, was a passage in which the hero, seized with the desire to speak of the beauty of the day, is reduced to banging his umbrella on the ground in frustration and crying out: ‘Zut, zut, zut, zut.’ A little later, daydreaming about Mme de Guermantes, he writes:

Et ces rêves m’avertissaient que puisque je voulais un jour être un écrivain, il était temps de savoir ce que je comptais écrire. Mais dès que je me le demandais, tâchant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une signification philosophique infinie, mon esprit s’arrêtait de fonctionner, je ne voyais plus que le vide en face de mon attention, je sentais que je n’avais pas de génie ou peut-être une maladie cérébrale l’empêchait de naître.

[And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or that perhaps some malady of the brain was hindering its development.]

I too had, at seventeen, been reduced to the equivalent of ‘zut, zut, zut, zut’ again and again. I too was feeling, even as I read this book, the sense of impotence every time I contemplated the notion of writing ‘A Novel’.

A little later I came across Kafka’s Diaries, and found there the same paradox that was so troubling me at the time: the violent need to write, to express something, and the impossibility of doing so – not having the words for it, not having the form for it, not even knowing what it was that I was so desperate to ‘express’. If Proust and Kafka and Eliot had felt this, I thought, and gone on to write what they had, then perhaps there was hope for me; perhaps I was not doomed to a lifetime of frustration, a physical feeling so intense that I felt at times I was about to blow up.

But of course reading À la recherche did even more for me. It gave me the powerful sense that it didn’t matter if one could not see one’s way forward, it didn’t matter if one was silly and slow and confused, it didn’t matter if one had got hold of the wrong end of the stick – what mattered was to keep going. I began to see that the doubts I had were in a sense the temptations of the Devil, the attempt to make me give up at the very start by presenting things in absolute terms (I can do it / no, I can’t do it); and that what Proust (like Dante before him, I later discovered) was offering was a way of fighting that by saying: All right, I am confused, then let me start with my confusion, let me incorporate my confusion into the book or story I am writing, and see if that helps. If I can’t start, then let me write about not being able to start. Perhaps, after all, confusion and failure are not things one has to overcome before one can start, but deep human experiences which deserve themselves to be explored in art. Perhaps, indeed, the stick has no right end and therefore no wrong end.

I had, in effect, begun to understand Proust’s tactics in À la recherche. For Marcel differs from Bloch or M. de Norpois or Mme Verdurin not because he is more intelligent than they are but because, unlike them, he is uncertain of what he feels and thinks; he differs from Swann not because he suffers more from the agonies of jealousy and betrayal, but because he will not let go of his anguish and confusion by taking refuge in a convenient cliché, such as ‘she was not my type’. Instead, he goes on worrying at his responses – to love and desire, to the acting of la Berma, to his disappointment with Balbec or Venice on a first visit – and incorporates his misunderstandings into the narrative. What this does, again, is to make the book feel ‘true’, because understanding, here, as in life, is always seen as provisional and capable of being reversed at any moment.

It also leads to the spiralling movement of the novel. As is well known, behind the three or four abortive starts of the book proper lie the many rejected openings, and behind those the years of uncertainty. All of this is not airbrushed out of the picture but acknowledged and overcome by being incorporated into a larger rhythm, which gathers momentum as the book develops, moving in ever wider spirals, but always returning to its origins, until the end, which both closes and finally opens the book to us, its readers, in precisely the same movement as Dante’s.

It also leads to a kind of spiralling within the layers of the self and the ages of one’s life. Whenever I read in the middle of the episode of the goodnight kiss, suddenly, abruptly, ‘Il y a bien des années de cela’ (‘this was many years ago’), I want to burst into tears. Of course in one way that has been prepared for by the opening word of the whole novel, ‘Longtemps’, which implies a maintenant, a now. But this sense of looking back from a present in which the book is both being written and – one of the miracles of literature – read (with none of the nostalgia of English versions, such as L. P. Hartley’s ‘The past is a foreign country’) is, for some reason, deeply moving. Let me quote the whole passage. Marcel’s father and mother have come upon him on the staircase outside his bedroom and his father, with that gesture which reminds him of the Abraham of Benozzo Gozzoli telling Sarah to go and be with Isaac, has just uttered the amazing words of reprieve, ‘couche pour cette nuit auprès de lui’ (‘stay with him tonight’). ‘Il y a bien des années de cela,’ he goes on,

la muraille de l’escalier, où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n’existe plus depuis longtemps. En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours et de nouvelles se sont édifiées donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n’aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre. Il y a bien longtemps aussi que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman: ‘Va avec le petit.’ La possibilité de telles heures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi. Mais depui peu de temps, je recommence à très bien percevoir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’éclatèrent que quand je me retrouvai seule avec maman. En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé; et c’est seulement parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’on les croirait arêtées mais qui se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir.

[Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. It is a long time too, since my father has been able to say to Mamma: ‘Go along with the child.’ Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s absence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them anew, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air.]

Somehow, going backwards and forwards into the self and its history is one with having the courage to start wherever you are and go forward, however stupid and inadequate you feel yourself to be, because the impulse to utter and to make is one which must be given its heed if we are not to deny what is deepest and most basic to us.

This leads me to my final point. It has to do with a misunderstanding of Proust that was in vogue some years ago and is perhaps less so now. Back in the seventies Claude Simon came to the University of Sussex and gave an eloquent lecture. His thesis was that with Proust one could start anywhere and move on from there to the entire novel, and he demonstrated this by starting with the episode of the great fish being brought to the table in the restaurant in Balbec. It was a beautiful and illuminating performance. It was also given in the heyday of structuralism and when both Simon and Robbe-Grillet were rather more in thrall to the theories of Jean Ricardou than was good for either of them. When I challenged Simon at question time and asked why, if indeed with Proust we had an example not of the writer at work but of writing at work, as he was suggesting, using a contrast popular at the time, he should have had such difficulty starting, should have spent ten years struggling to find his subject and his way into his subject, he brushed my question aside. But I think it is a pertinent one. Proust, thank God, is not Ricardou. He is not even Robbe-Grillet. They may all come out of him, as Hockney and Bacon came out of Picasso, but there are deep differences. Proust’s work is so moving because his message that we must start anywhere and have the courage to go on has to do not just with writing but with living. It is because the two are inseparable that I find him, like Dante, in the end, so profoundly satisfying a writer. But then I would. I owe him everything.

1 References are to the 1987, four-volume Pléiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, with C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translations from the six-volume edition revised by Terence Kilmartin and then by D. J. Enright (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992).

Tristram Shandy: Not Waving But Drowning1

YOU’VE COME HERE to listen to a lecture. You are looking forward to a pleasant evening – instructive, you hope, but also funny. But what if, when you arrive, there is no lecturer? What if, instead of facing a podium and a lectern, you sit down and find yourselves looking at a large mirror which takes up the entire end wall of the room and which reflects back to you nothing but yourselves, sitting and waiting? And what if nothing happens in the course of the evening but the sitting and the waiting and the looking at yourselves sitting and waiting?