Two Knausgaard bits

(I need to stop blogging and get off the computer, this is ridiculous! Going to leave Ferrante post for another day but wanted to close these two Knausgaard tabs.)

Ane Farsethås interviews KOK for the Paris Review. Here Knausgaard explains why Madame Bovary is the world's best novel:

I’ve read the novel many times, and its details are so vivid—the world is clear and crisp as a landscape after a heavy rainfall. And it has that incredible torrent of emotions and dreams and desires that gain even more force by being so fundamentally misplaced. I think it’s better than In Search of Lost Time. Proust doesn’t have that kind of concentration. Flaubert is interesting. I just read his letters, and they really go backstage. He writes about everything! The most obscene things, sex, prostitutes, what have you. They’re as chaotic as life itself. And then you see that perfectly constructed facade of the novel, which in a way contains it all, but indirectly—it’s highly controlled and composed. That made me realize the value of Bovary is much higher, a thousand times higher than the letters, even though the letters are livelier and closer to life. It’s about creating a universe that’s entirely self-contained and not just true, but actually valid. It’s that validity—which, in the best books, is endless—that is perhaps the true nature of literature.

And an interesting essay by Siri Hustvedt.

Closing tabs

Edward St. Aubyn interviewed at the Times (via):

In the English education system, the last two years before university are spent intensively studying a small number of “set books.” Few people — even as slow a reader as I am — are likely to spend longer in the company of a book than an A-level student. The works I studied over those two years were Racine’s “Phèdre” and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” for French A-level. “The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James; Joyce’s “Ulysses”; poetry by Yeats and T. S. Eliot; and “King Lear” were my set books for English. James’s idea of a “center of consciousness” presiding over a scene, Flaubert’s slogan “le style est tout,” Joyce’s claim that “imagination is memory,” Racine’s austere adhesion to the classical unities and many other aspects of those works became part of the foundations of my sense of taste and, even if I wanted to question them, continued to influence me when I became a writer myself.

Also: the daily routine of Hunter S. Thompson; the career of a human cannonball (FT site registration required).

If Rambo were a liberal

Great interview with Lee Child at Playboy. (Tip courtesy of L. who picked up the magazine at her hipster hairdresser's!)

(NB I did think it highly implausible when Lee Child said in a recent interview that Reacher would vote Democrat!)

Teaching Madame Bovary was utterly exhilarating. I am increasingly convinced that every year I should just teach a seminar called "Interesting Books" whose only rationale would be that everything on the syllabus is something I think you can't afford to miss if you love novels! I think the main purpose of my spring-semester leave will be reading a ton of novels for the ABCs of the novel book (especially the classic Chinese and Japanese ones I mostly don't know), but it also should mean that I could roll out a couple new courses next year without it inducing a nervous breakdown.

We decide on curriculum as early as November for the following academic year, which is often tough (what will I feel like teaching in September 2013?!?), but I'm thinking I should repeat an old graduate seminar I only taught once - the Idea of Culture class (I have a new one I want to develop, on eighteenth-century modernities starting with Hamlet/Descartes and moving through Swift, Sterne, etc., but I need to get more work done on the ABCs of the novel project before I teach something that puts all sorts of interesting new ideas in my head!). Maybe do the MA seminar one more time, as it counts as a service course (otherwise I need to teach two lecture courses if I don't want to teach in the Core). An undergraduate seminar on voice in fiction that would include Sebald, Bernhard, Ishiguro, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, various others. And - this is the duty I am feeling, but it would also be a pleasure, though a lot of work! - a new lecture course, for undergraduates primarily but graduate students also, on eighteenth-century nonfiction. Perhaps just focused around Boswell and Johnson, as I have never taught Boswell's Life of Johnson and suspect that, rather like Clarissa, it is a book that students probably won't read at all if I'm not teaching it!

Absolutely gripped by Diana Wynne Jones's reflections on writing, which are giving me a huge hunger for some serious time immersed in Sidney and Spenser - that, too, is on the agenda for sabbatical reading. (There's also an early essay that makes me keen to reread LOTR!)

Miscellaneous other light reading: Dani Shapiro's Devotion; Reed Farrel Coleman's Gun Church.

Cracked kettles

From Madame Bovary, part II (translation by Lydia Davis), one of my favorite passages in all of nineteenth-century fiction:

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them.  Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language.  He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression.  Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

Objective correlatives

I must confess that I became ridiculously excited during today's class on Madame Bovary. Check out these sentences (Lydia Davis's translation):

Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.

He had his cap pulled down over his eyebrows, and his thick lips were quivering, which gave a stupid look to his face; even his back, his placid back, was irritating to look at, and she found displayed there, on his coat, all the man’s dullness.

The letter was a tangle of spelling mistakes, and Emma followed the gentle thought that clucked its way through them like a hen half hidden in a hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the fireplace, for a little gray powder slid from the letter onto her dress, and she thought she could almost see her father bending toward the hearth to grasp the tongs....

[Justin cleaned Emma's boots,] which were caked in mud—the mud from her rendezvous; it would fall away as dust under his fingers, and he would watch it rising gently in a ray of sunlight.

It was the first time Emma had heard such things said to her; and her pride, like a person relaxing in a steam bath, stretched out languidly in the warmth of the words.

A strange business

At the LRB, Julian Barnes on Lydia Davis's Flaubert:

There is a slightly pretentious term in wine tasting and wine writing called ‘mouthfeel’. (It is also slightly baffling: where else might you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot?) The Oxford Companion to Wine calls it a ‘non-specific tasting term, used particularly for red wines, to indicate those textural attributes, such as smoothness, that produce tactile sensations on the surface of the oral cavity’. There is similar mouthfeel about translation. Its general development over the last century and more has been away from smoothness and towards authenticity, away from a reorganising interpretativeness which aims for the flow of English prose, towards a close-reading fidelity – enjoy those tannins! – which seeks to echo the original language.

Lydia Davis in Flaubert-time

Emily Stokes lunches with Lydia Davis for the FT (site registration required).

"L.M."

Back in Cayman, which means among other good things that I am back in the land of wireless internet! I find myself really discombobulated when I don't have regular email access, especially when I'm still trying to make appointments and see people (it's different on a true vacation); I look forward to a return to regular blogging, too, as it's one of the main ways I keep myself on an even keel....

Yesterday morning I had one more bookstore splurge - I had forgotten to pick up my copy of The Bacchae at my office the day before, so I went to McNally Jackson (plausibly the best bookstore in Manhattan, and only a couple blocks away from where I was staying) and bought a Penguin Euripides but also couldn't resist a few other things: True Grit, which I have been meaning to read for ages, and The Blind Side and also a book that I devoured in mesmerized fascination over the course of the later afternoon and early evening and that I heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in the topic, Randy Frost and Gail Steketee's Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.

My New York subway reading (mass-market paperback is the convenient size!) was John Twelve Hawks' The Dark River, which I found goofy but which I had almost finished by the time it dawned on me how fed up I had become with it, so I read the last of it anyway (but it is not really my cup of tea - wish I did not waste my time with stuff like this!).

Two much better books occupied my attention during today's travels: Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? (several major implausibilities, including the fact that multiple characters have the exact same verse-remembering habits and repertoire and the mother's farfetched superpowers, but very enjoyable regardless) and Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (at times I resisted its allure, but it's undoubtedly a remarkably compelling story).

Catching up on old New Yorkers at G.'s place, I liked Ian Frazier's Talk of the Town piece on marginalia in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library:

Nabokov’s handwriting (in English) was small and fluid and precise; in books that he took exception to, such as a translation of “Madame Bovary” by Eleanor Marx Aveling, his correcting marginalia climbed all over the paragraphs like the tendrils of a strangler fig.

A time of stagnation

From Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art:

The feeling of control that accompanies the act of locking oneself up to write, the pride in having unsuspected resources, reinforces the notion that creating has set one in a world apart. It is strengthening, both despite and because of its ability to isolate. When Mondrian or Flaubert discusses the relationship of their straight line or perfect phrase to a sense of ontological security, they are splitting the world between the rigid (with its connotations of self-discipline, rigor, and control) and the arabesque, the overly lyrical I -- all things that might well lead them out of their invulnerable worlds. To these artists, but also to those individuals whose bouts with obsession will traverse this book, there is a real terror involved in the unrestricted, the potentially mutable.
...
Do not show your passion, but sublimate it into style. We are reminded of Hobbes's proclamation: madness is a matter of "too much appearing passion." It is not the actual emotion itself that is unsettling to Flaubert, but the temptation to be dragged down by it and the sickly need to exhibit it to others. The heart must never speak and the artist must assume a god-like self-sufficiency; it is the only way he will be protected from the danger of others. The same detachment that Flaubert requires of his narrators, he mercilessly exacts from himself. He is willing to renounce all human contact for the price of peace of mind.
...
The simultaneous cowering from and craving for the void, for a time of stagnation, is a constant in the monomaniacal imagination. Many of the characters in this book are attracted and repelled by free time, drawn to and squelched by obsessive activity. Movement, while it fends off the demons of introspection and provides temporary relief from anxiety, does not satisfy the soul's craving for a higher order; it is a mere temporary solution. Idleness, however, richer in existential possibilities, can breed an intolerable sense of dread.

The cracked cauldron

More Madame Bovary:

He was unable to see, this man so full of experience, the variety of feelings hidden within the same expressions. Since libertine or venal lips had murmured similar phrases, he only faintly believed in the candor of Emma’s; he thought one should beware of exaggerated declarations which only serve to cloak a tepid love; as though the abundance of one’s soul did not sometimes overflow with empty metaphors, since no one ever has been able to give the exact measure of his needs, his concepts, or his sorrows. The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes to set a bear dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies.

Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres: comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies ã faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

I am reminded of an aphorism that Harold Bloom used to utter regularly during the seminar on Shakespeare I took with him at Yale in the mid-90s (a famous pronouncement of Nietzsche's):

That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts; there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Bovarysme

C’était la première fois qu’Emma s’entendait dire ces choses; et son orgueil, comme quelqu’un qui se délasse dans une étuve, sétirait mollement et tout entier à la chaleur de ce langage.

It was the first time that Emma had heard such words addressed to her, and her pride unfolded languidly in the warmth of this language, like someone stretching in a hot bath.

Up close and personal

It is not quite Wednesday yet, but close enough that I will simply say that Ed Park is doing a reading and Q&A at Columbia TODAY (203 Mathematics, 8pm, Wednesday, Sept. 30) - alas, I will not be able to attend, having entered a true DAVIDSONIAN VORTEX whose whirling elements include an as-yet-unwritten lecture on the middle section of Madame Bovary, the final revisions to the Explosionist sequel (due on FRIDAY) and a big race on Sunday (ARGHHHH, I see they have got all complicated on us, not least involving an earlier cut-off for same-day race-packet pickup - 7am rather than 7:45; it is clearly no longer realistic to leave NYC at 5am and hope to get there in time to get set up the morning of...).


!@#$%!

Nonpareil arabesques

From Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary:

Large dishes of yellow cream, that trembled with the least shake of the table, had designed on their smooth surface the initials of the newly wedded pair in nonpareil arabesques. A confectioner of Yvetot had been entrusted with the pies and candies. As he had only just started out in the neighborhood, he had taken a lot of trouble, and at dessert he himself brought in a wedding cake that provoked loud cries of wonderment. At its base there was a square of blue cardboard, representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all round, and in the niches constellations of gilt paper stars; then on the second level was a dungeon of Savoy cake, surrounded by many fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of oranges; and finally, on the upper platform a green field with rocks set in lakes of jam, nutshell boats, and a small Cupid balancing himself in a chocolate swing whose two uprights ended in real roses for balls at the top.