Adventures in the Rocky Mountains

Adventures in the Rocky Mountains (Penguin Great Journeys, 2007)
by Isabella Bird
England, 1879

My own Rocky Mountains adventures having been limited to an infinitely less noteworthy occasion in which I once almost got snowed in at Denver International Airport for two weeks during a Boston-LAX layover, I first picked up Isabella Bird's late 19th century travelogue-in-letters (excerpted from her 1879 A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains) out of pure curiosity--looking for a change of pace from some heavy duty fiction I was reading at the time.  So imagine my surprise when less than 20 pages into the account of Bird's journey from San Francisco to the Colorado Territory in 1873, a stranger's anecdote about the Donner Party leads Bird to share a stomach-turning description of how the rescue party found "the German, holding a roasted human arm and hand, which he was greedily eating" (18).  Thanks a lot for the suggestion to read something lighter, Jill from Rhapsody in Books!  This grisly, "secondhand" moment aside, I should make clear that the rest of Bird's letters (written to her sister Henrietta in a style that's straightforward but animatedly attentive to local color) thankfully concentrate on what it was like for an intrepid single British lady to make her way through some wild and predominantly male-populated regions of  the U.S. West, mostly on horseback but occasionally by train, at a time of transition evident even to a foreigner.  There are many enthusiastic nature scenes for those who like that kind of stuff, some vivid accounts of local desperadoes who cross the plucky Bird's path, and--perhaps most interesting of all to this reader--a depressing analysis of one of the pressing public policy concerns of the time: "The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct.  They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and 'devilry' as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilisation.  The only difference between the savage and the civilised Indian is that the latter carries firearms and gets drunk on whisky" (93-94).  (www.penguinclassics.com)

Isabella Bird

Up for Grabs

My copy of this book, a very short read at 119 pages, is up for grabs to the first person who claims it via comment below.  Will ship worldwide.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower #2

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs) (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Marcel Proust [translated from the French by James Grieve]
France, 1919

Having left off my earlier post on/love letter to In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower with a nod to that extraordinarily lyrical scene where the narrator renders homage to the memory of Mme Swann sauntering along the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne one fine day in May, "at the glorious height of her own mellow and still-delectable summertime" (215), I thought it might be worthwhile to take an extended look at more of Proust on time and memory.  After all, that's one of the reasons we read the guy, right? Even though Part II begins with an off the cuff announcement by the narrator acknowledging his own dislocation in time due to the impact that painful memories of his happier days with Gilberte are having on his present day reality--"life being so unchronological, so anachronistic in its disordering of our days" (221)--one of the things that's so alluring about this parenthetical confession from an artistic standpoint is how it ties in with several other perspectives on time and memory and the literary representation of time and memory from various stages of the narrator's life.  Three examples of how this problem is creatively engaged in the text follow.

Going back to the early scene where his father essentially abandons encouraging him to pursue a diplomatic career so that young Marcel can take up a life in literature unimpeded by his family's opposition, for example, the narrator writes that this happy news nonetheless made him worry for two reasons.

The first was that, though I met each new day with the thought that I was now on the threshold of life, which still lay before me all unlived and was about to start the very next day, not only had my life in fact begun, but the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed.  The second, which was really only a variant of the first, was that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me feel so sad when I read them of them at Combray, sitting inside my wickerwork shelter (55).

I like this sequence for at least a couple of reasons, the first having to do with the somewhat unfortunate reminder that I was once so young myself that I surely considered myself on "the threshold of life" without realizing my life had already begun.  A nice--if bittersweet--touch, that!  I also appreciate it for the way that the adult narrator merges his then-youthful awakening to the concept of not living outside Time in a way that draws attention to the character's sentimental regard for the fate of the fictional characters encountered in his wickerwork shelter.  This conflation of a person's reading life with one's emotional life outside of literature is something I can rather pathetically relate to, of course, so suffice it to say that the writing really got my attention when the correspondance was extended to a larger concern with mortality in the lines that immediately follow.

Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm.  The same happens with Time.  To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.  At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old-people's home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past.  When my father said, "He's not a child anymore, he's not going to change his mind," etc., he suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness, as though I was not quite the senile inmate of the poorhouse, but one of those heroes dismissed by the writer in the final chapter with a turn of phrase that is cruel in its indifference: "He has taken to absenting himself less and less from the countryside.  He has eventually settled down there for good," etc. (55-56)

While any novel called In Search of Lost Time might be expected to deal such with themes, this treatment of time in a text organized in part as a written suspension of time has a lot to say about what's possible from a temporal standpoint when representing "reality" in literature.  This is one of the philosophical sides of Proust the thinker that really gets to me just as much as Proust the wordsmith or Proust the visually evocative portraitist of Mme Swann.

In a much later scene, at a time in which the love-hungry Marcel is now fixated on making the acquaintance of Albertine Simonet and the other young girls in flower in her inner circle of Balbec friends and companions, the looming shadows of mortality from the earlier episode seem to have dissipated in the salty seaside air.  Still, there's another striking analysis of how our attempts to try and fix a moment in time are often disturbed by the emotions of the moment.  In this passage, Marcel speaks of the various things that form the mundane build-up to his much-anticipated introduction to his future love interest at a party given by the painter Elstir:

Being obliged, in order to come eventually to a chat with Mlle Simonet, to follow a route that was not of my own design, which reached a first destination in front of Elstir, before leading me to on other groups of guests, to whom I was introduced, then along the buffet, where I was handed, and where I ate, strawberry tarts, while pausing to listen to music that had just begun to be played, I found myself giving to these various episodes the same importance as to my introduction to Mlle Simonet, which was only one among their sequence, and which I had by now completely forgotten had been, a few minutes before, the sole object of my presence there.  Does not the same happen, in busy everyday life, to our truest joys and greatest sorrows?  We stand among other people, and the woman we adore gives us the answer, favorable or fatal, that we have been awaiting for a year: we must go on chatting; ideas lead to other ideas, making a surface beneath which, rising only from time to time, barely perceptible, lies the knowledge, very deep but acute, that calamity has struck.  Or, if it is happiness rather than calamity, we may not remember till years later that the most momentous event of our emotional life happened in a way that gives us no time to pay attention to it, or even to be aware of it almost, during a fashionable reception, say, despite the fact that it was in expectation of some such event that we had gone to it (450-451).

In this snapshot of the "momentous" event that is about to take place for the narrator and of an event where the narrator's fate will largely be determined by forces beyond his control, we have--in contrast to the ethereal details we might expect from such an obvious romantic--a rather non-romantic description of the everyday moments that surround the high and low points in our lives.  The scene is almost pedestrian, in fact--except for the attention that is drawn to how we replay such moments in our memories, overlooking the details not having to do with fortune or calamity.  However, pointing out the way in which the scene feels true or false to the reader from a realistic perspective is only part of the equation as what takes place in our minds is just as much reality as what takes place in front of our eyes in many respects.  This, at least, is what I think Proust's narrator is getting at here when he writes about his introduction to Albertine and says that "the pleasure, of course, I did not experience till a little later, back at the hotel, when, having been alone for a while, I was myself again.  Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more in our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present" (451).

Studiously avoiding the fact that I don't really know where I'm going with all this nor know whether Proust has left us an Einstein-like general theory on time anywhere in his extended novel, I have to say that I'm finding reading In Search of Lost Time its own reward and writing about In Search of Lost Time at least partially rewarding in terms of publicly revisiting certain favorite scenes.  On that note, I'd like to bid farewell to this post on Proust on time and memory with a fragment from a scene that harkens back to an earlier such scene in Swann's Way.  For late in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, walking along a lane in the direction of Les Creuniers with the beautiful Andrée, the narrator discovers something that takes his mind off his plan to win himself a spot in Albertine's affections by showering her with praises to her friend and possible rival:

Then, halfway down the little lane, I stood still, as the soft flutter of a childhood memory brushed my heart: I had just recognized, from the indentations of the shiny leaves overhanging the threshold, a hawthorn bush, which since the end of spring, alas, had been bare of all blossom.  A fragrance of forgotten months of Mary and long-lost Sunday afternoons, beliefs, and fallacies surrounded me.  I wished I could grasp it as it passed.  Andrée, seeing me pause, showed her charming gift of insight by letting me commune for a moment with the leaves of the little tree: I asked after its blossom, hawthorn flowers like blithe young girls, a little silly, flirtatious, and faithful.  "Those young ladies left long ago," said the leaves, possibly reflecting that, for someone who professed to be such a close friend, I was very uninformed about their habits.  I was a close friend, though one who, despite his promises, had lost touch with them for many years.  Yet, just as Gilberte had been my first sweetheart among the girls, they had been my first among the flowers.  "Yes, I know," I replied, "they go away about the middle of June.  But it's a pleasure to see the spot here where they lived.  My mother brought them up to see me in my bedroom at Combray, when I was ill.  And we used to meet in church on Saturday evenings during the month of Mary.  Are they allowed to go here too?"  "Of course!  My young ladies are actually much in demand at the nearest parish church, Saint-Denis-du-Désert."  "One can see them now, you mean?"  "No, no, not till the month of May next year."  "And can I be sure they'll be there?"  "Every year, without fail."  "I'm just not sure I can find my way back to this exact spot..."  "Of course you will!  My young ladies are so gay, they never stop laughing, except to sing hymns--you can't mistake them, you'll recognize their perfume from the end of the lane" (500).

So much to love here in this little conversation between man and hawthorn bush!  The rich prose, fragrant with poetry.  The wish to latch onto something tangible in the evanescent.  The commingling of an aesthetics of beauty with a sort of sensuous spirituality or mysticism.  The eternal faithfulness of old friends.  Proust is great at having his narrator reflect on time and memory through the lenses of novelists and darkroom photographers.  But he's even better when Marcel reflects on time and memory through the lens of his own life story.  Now approaching the 100-page mark in The Guermantes Way, I'm loving this novel like you wouldn't believe.  (www.penguinclassics.com)

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower #1

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower [À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs] (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Marcel Proust [translated from the French by James Grieve]
France, 1919

In the so-called "listless interlude" that forms the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time amid that which might more aptly be called an expanding universe of richly-textured memories, emotions, and dramatis personae orbiting Marcel's teenage years and thereabouts, our young narrator manages to fall in and out of love with Gilberte, to lose his virginity to a woman he doesn't care for, and to fall head over heels in love yet again--not quite reciprocated to this point--with future girlfriend Albertine: a  journey of initiation that chronicles the agonies and ecstasies of love from Paris to Balbec with astonishing humor, insight and detail.  Sheer bliss.  While there's just too much for me to talk about here to even know where to begin, I suppose there's no harm in sharing a grab bag of personal highlights with you tonight and returning for something maybe a little more structured later in the week.  To begin with, I continue to be an easy mark for the narrator's catty but ever-observant humor.  Writing about the union between the aristocratic Swann and the ex-courtesan Odette that had taken place against all expectations since the events in Swann's Way had transpired, the narrator tells us that "in general, marriages that degrade one of the partners are the worthiest of all, because they entail the sacrifice of a more or less flattering situation to a purely private satisfaction--and, of course, marrying for money must be excluded from the notion of a degrading match, as no couple of whom one partner has been sold to the other has ever failed to be admitted in the end to good society, given the weight of tradition, the done thing, and the need to avoid having double standards."  A typical (and not all that humorous) observation with a fair amount to say about the superficiality of the circles these characters move in, gender relations at that time in France, the pressures of conformity, and so on.  What takes this to the genius level on the comedic and the descriptive fronts, though, is the sentence or the dagger that follows with such impeccable timing: "In any case, the idea of engaging in one of those crossbreedings common to Mendelian experiments and Greek mythology, and of joining with a creature of a different race, an archduchess, or a good-time girl, someone of blue blood or no blood at all, might well have titillated the artist, if not the pervert, in Swann" (42).  A second thing I loved about In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is how, despite the almost ubiquitous humor and the biting observations that are also present as if for adult consumption, Proust manages to tenderly and realistically evoke that teenaged daydreamer's feeling that falling in love with just about any girl is not only possible but maybe even desirable.  While the text is nearly perfect at capturing the young protagonist's mood swings between boundless optimism and utter desperation in this regard, I particularly liked this passage where the narrator talks about those moments in his life "when I was not in love but wished I was"--a fragrant time when:

the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me--which, as has been seen, I could recognize in a distant glimpse of any passing stranger who was far enough away for the imprecision of her features not to impede that recognition--was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood, and for which every young girl I met, as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role, appeared eager to be auditioned.  In this play, whoever it was I cast as the new star or her understudy for this part of leading lady, the outline of the plot, the main scenes, and even the words to be spoken had long since taken the form of a definitive edition (469).

Finally, in thinking about the narrative tension between the ideal and the real in love and how that frontier is constantly shifting in our memories and imaginations to the point that it's possible to confuse the real object of desire with its "emotional shadow" at times, I have to say that the end of the At Mme Swann's part of this novel--with its focus on Marcel's friendship with Mme Swann rather than his traumatizing break-up with her daughter Gilberte--touched me enormously.  Can a scene from a novel be considered poetic merely by virtue of the force of its words and the power of its images?  I'll let you decide.

From all sides now, through the liquid transparency and glossy luminosity of the shadow cast on her by the sunshade, Mme Swann was being recognized and greeted by the last of the late riders, who looked as though filmed at a canter against the white midday shimmer of the avenue, members of fashionable clubs, whose names--Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency, and many more--famous to the public mind, were to Mme Swann the familiar names of her friends.  So it is that the average life expectancy, the relative longevity, of memories being much greater for those that commemorate poetic sensation than for those left by the pains of love, the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded forever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria (217).

I'll have more to share from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in a day or two.  Not sure what I want to touch on next, but I'm not ready to say farewell to this volume just yet.  No, not yet.  (www.penguinclassics.com)

Marcel Proust

Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk

Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-Ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk (Penguin Classics, 2008)
by Black Hawk
USA, 1833

"If another prophet had come to our village in those days, and told us what has since taken place, none of our people would have believed him!  What! to be driven from our village and hunting grounds, and not even permitted to visit the graves of our forefathers, our relations, and friends?"

(Life of Black Hawk, 46)

In an effort to get my Native American studies reading project back on track with a more unmediated native voice this time around, I decided to take a look at the 1833 Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, which is said to have been "dictated by himself," interpreted or translated by Antoine LeClaire, and finally transcribed by newspaperman John B. Patterson--a collaborative venture that with its uncertain English verb tenses and jarring use of non-autochthonous abbreviations like viz. makes one wonder how unmediated it really is despite the author's alleged approval of the final text as read back to him before publication.  That cautionary note on the transmission of the Life of Black Hawk aside, though, perhaps one of the main reasons to read this oral history/"autobiography" of the elderly Sauk war leader (c. 1767-1838) is for the lasting novelty of what J. Gerald Kennedy calls attention to in his introduction to the work: "never before had an Indian addressed the reading public as the survivor of a war of extermination waged by American forces" (vii).  So what was on the recently defeated Black Hawk's mind?  During the course of nearly 100 pages of plainspoken prose, the proud warrior repeatedly attempts to characterize his military actions during the just concluded 1832 Black Hawk War as a defensive attempt to maintain traditional tribal lands in and around Rock Island in present day Illinois by claiming that they were stolen by, rather than ceded to, the U.S. in the so-called Treaty of St. Louis of 1804 (see Wikipedia image below for the area in question).  While it's not clear whom in particular Black Hawk hoped to reach or sway with this appeal to the American conscience, one of the things that's most interesting about all this is that the vanquished Sauk leader, forcibly resettled on the other side of the Mississippi in Iowa at war's end, seemed to want the U.S. reading public to understand his intentions despite his realization that the former days were gone in his acknowledgement that "the tomahawk is buried forever!" (98).  It's the land, always the land, that seems to claim his attention and to position itself in the foreground of his memory.  In any event, below you'll find three examples of Black Hawk's reflections on his former homeland from pages 56, 87, and 89-90 of his Life to give you at least a sliver of an idea of why the work that bears his name will likely have a continuing appeal for those interested in the "other side" of the history of this continent and of its peoples.  (www.penguinclassics.com)

Sauk lands (in yellow) "ceded"/stolen by the 1804 St. Louis Treaty

(author: Kmusser, courtesy of a Creative Commons license for the image)

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold.  The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil--but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it.  Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.

On our way down [the river, on a steamboat right after his surrender in 1832], I surveyed the country that had cost us so much trouble, anxiety, and blood, and that now caused me to be a prisoner of war.  I reflected upon the ingratitude of the whites, when I saw their fine houses, rich harvests, and every thing desirable around them; and recollected that all this land had been ours, for which me and my people had never received a dollar, and that the whites were not satisfied until they took our village and our grave-yards from us, and removed us across the Mississippi.

[On the surprisingly large number of inhabitants of the mountainous stretches of the Cumberland or National Road, observed by Black Hawk during his captivity tour before being relocated to his new home across the Mississippi]  I have often thought of them since my return to my own people; and am happy to think that they prefer living in their own country, to coming out to ours, and driving us from it, that they might live upon and enjoy it--as many of the whites have already done.  I think, with them, that wherever the Great Spirit places his people, they ought to be satisfied to remain, and thankful for what He has given them; and not drive others from the country He has given them, because it happens to be better than theirs!  This is contrary to our way of thinking; and from my intercourse with the whites, I have learned that one great principle of their religion is, "to do unto others as you wish them to do unto you!"  Those people in the mountains seem to act upon this principle, but the settlers on our frontiers and on our lands, seem never to think of it, if we are to judge by their actions.

Tu rostro mañana. 2 Baile y sueño

Tu rostro mañana.  2 Baile y sueño  (Debolsillo, 2010)
by Javier Marías
Spain, 2004

Javier Marías is such a gifted novelist that my greedy reading self is already beginning to lament the fact that there's only one volume left in Tu rostro mañana [Your Face Tomorrow] after Baile y sueño [Dance and Dream].  Couldn't this be a neverending story instead?  In volume 2 of this three-part, post-war on terror "spy saga," the savage beating of a near defenseless man in a nightclub restroom, administered by Tupra and witnessed by Deza, and the long-suppressed story of two Spanish Civil War atrocities, related to Deza by his father after years of keeping quiet on the matter, serve to foreground an increasing preoccupation with violence and victimization on the narrator's part.  Where this will lead to is anybody's guess at this point, but the theme is treated in such an unfailingly believable way that the disquieting ending--Tupra's defense of the Kray twins-style manipulation of fear in others and his wish to justify the use of violence to Deza by historical precedents dating back to the fall of Constantinople in 1453--seems to hint that the end justifies the means morality of the spy business and a shadowy new associate described as having the "pinta...de mafioso romano--quiero decir vaticano" (67) ["look of a Roman--or, rather, Vatican--mafioso" (49, in Margaret Jull Costa's translation)] may end up traumatizing poor Deza just as much as the failed marriage that he'd obviously like to piece back together if his estranged wife would only permit it.  That being said, it's the writing and the depth of the emotions brought to the surface by the narrative more than the unexpected plot developments that continue to wow me as time moves on--a lot of this due to Deza as narrator.  For whether skewering Berlusconi's Italy as the land of "brutales autoridades xenófobas pseudolombardas, aún más lerdas y soeces que las pseudomadrileñas despreciativas nuestras" (31) ["brutal, xenophobic, pseudo-Lombardic authorities, who are even coarser and more oafish than our own contemptuous, pseudo-madrileño ones" (13-14)], sharing a tender memory about separated wife Luisa's amused and genial laugh, or in recounting the extended speech by his father on the horrors of real life as opposed to fictive violence (see fragment below), Deza is one of the most recognizably human characters I've run into all year.  What do I mean by that?  I actually care about his fate--to the point that I'm a tiny bit concerned that Deza, like the singer in "Streets of Laredo" who figures in one of the more left field digressions in this digression-heavy novel, may already be a dead man walking (emotionally, ethically or otherwise) whose narrative is being brought to us borne aloft on the slipstream of fictional mortality.  In other words, way looking forward to volume 3's Veneno y sombra y adiós [Poison, Shadow, and Farewell].  (www.debolsillo.com)

Javier Marías

Deza's Father, Deza, and Cervantes

'Pero mira si han variado las cosas, y las actitudes: cuando se le declaró la Guerra a Hitler, y quizá no ha habido ocasión en que se hiciera más necesaria y justificable una guerra, el propio Churchill escribió al respecto que el mero hecho de haberse llegado a aquel punto y a aquel fracaso convertía a los responsables, por honrosos que fueran sus motivos, en culpables ante la Historia.  Se estaba refiriendo al Gobierno de su país y al de Francia, entiendes, y por extensión a sí mismo, aunque él bien habría querido que esa culpa y ese fracaso los hubieran alcanzado antes, cuando la situación no les era tan adversa ni habría sido tan cruento y grave librar esa posible guerra.  "En esta amarga historia de juicios erróneos efectuados por personas capaces y bienintencionadas...", así dijo.  Y ahora, ya ves, los mismos que se escandalizan por los batacazos de Tom y Jerry y de sus descendientes desatan guerras innecesarias, interesadas, sin ningún motivo honroso, evitando otros recursos si es que no torpedeándolos.  Y a diferencia de Churchill, ni siquiera se averguüenzan de ellas.  Ni siquiera las deploran.  Ni por supuesto se disculpan, hoy no existe eso en el mundo...  En nuestro país fueron ya los franquistas, los que crearon esa escuela.  Jamás se ha disculpado ni uno, y también ellos desencadenaron una guerra innecesaria.  La peor posible.  Eso sí, con la colaboración inmediata de muchos de sus contrincantes...  Qué exageración fue todo...'  Ahora noté que mi padre pensaba en voz alta, más que hablarme, y seguramente eran pensamientos que venía teniendo desde 1936 y quién sabía si a diario, de la misma o parecida manera en que no hay día o noche en que no se le representen a uno en algún instante la idea o la imagen de los muertos más próximos, por mucho que pase el tiempo desde que se despidió uno de ellos, o ellos de uno: 'Adiós, gracias; adiós, donaires; adiós, regocijados amigos; que yo me voy muriendo, y deseando veros presto contentos en la otra vida'.

(Tu rostro mañana.  2 Baile y sueño, 281-282)

'But look how things have changed, and attitudes too: when war was declared on Hitler, and it may be that there has never been an occasion when a war was more necessary or more justifiable, Churchill himself wrote that the mere fact of having come to that pass, to that state of failure, made those responsible, however honourable their motives, blameworthy before History.  He was referring to the governments of his own country and of France, you understand, and, by extension, to himself, although he would have preferred that state of blameworthiness and failure to have been reached at a much earlier stage, when the situation was less disadvantageous to them and when it would not have been so difficult or so bloody to fight that war.  "...this sad tale of wrong judgements formed by well-meaning and capable people...": that is how he described it.  And now, as you see, the same people who are scandalised by the rough and tumble of Tom and Jerry et al. unleash unnecessary, selfish wars, devoid of any honourable motives, and which sidestep all the other options, if they don't actually torpedo them.  And unlike Churchill, they are not even ashamed of them.  They're not even sorry.  Nor, of course, do they apologise, people just don't do that nowadays...  In Spain, the Francoists established that particular school of thought long ago.  They have never apologised, not one of them, and they, too, unleashed a totally unnecessary war.  The worst of all possible wars.  And with the immediate collaboration of many of their opponents...  It was absurd, all of it.'  I realised that now my father was thinking out loud, rather than talking to me, and these were doubtless thoughts he had been having since 1936 and, who knows, possibly every day, in much the same way as not a day or a night passes without our imagining at some point the idea or the image of our dearest dead ones, however much time has passed since we said goodbye to them or they to us: 'Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happily installed in the other life.'

(Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 2: Dance and Dream [translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa]: New Directions, 2008, 276-277)

More

Nicole (bibliographing)

Hiroshima mon amour

Hiroshima mon amour (Gallimard, 1997)
by Marguerite Duras
France, 1960

Having heard the 1959 Alain Resnais-directed film version of Hiroshima mon amour critiqued for being cold and/or impenetrable on multiple occasions over the years, I was pleased to discover that Duras' scénario, published the year after the motion picture's debut at Cannes, is poetic and affecting instead--not at all cold nor impenetrable to my way of thinking.  Set in Hiroshima in 1957 and focused on the adulterous fling between a French woman ("Elle") and a Japanese man ("Lui") who meet while la Française is there shooting a film about peace, the screenplay has a sweeping emotional and temporal arc that shifts back and forth between postwar Japan and wartime France and dares to compare the ravages of war with the romantic loss and oblivion of memory that often accompany us during war and peace.  Watching the emotionally shellshocked lovers seek to prolong a connection that they know will be impossible to maintain--unless another war breaks out, as one of them grumpily suggests near the end--one begins to sense that they are stand-ins not only for those who didn't survive the war but those who aren't able to connect with others in a lasting way even in times of peace.  While all I've said to this point might make it seem as if the work would have to be heavyhanded, Duras manages to avoid that somehow through a deft combination of visuals (both the shots from the film that accompany the script and the detailed cinematographic instructions that accompany--and interact with--the dialogue) and a sure hand in conveying the interiority of her characters' thought processes and memories.  And although my rusty French leaves me convinced that I would absolutely benefit from a reread of this work at a more leisurely pace, it doesn't exactly take a genius to appreciate Duras' many subtleties (e.g. three versions of proposed dialogue from Lui in a key exchange near the end of Partie III, versions that Resnais apparently chose to run in succession in the film), the appendix on the movie that adds another layer of complexity to what's to be found in the script (SUR LA PHRASE: "ET PUIS, IL EST MORT": "Riva ne parle plus elle-mème quand cette image apparait.  Donner un signe extérieur de sa douleur serait dégrader cette douleur" [ON THE SENTENCE: "AND THEN, HE DIED": "[Emmanuelle] Riva [the actress who plays Elle] herself doesn't speak any longer when this image appears.  To give an exterior sign of her anguish would be to debase this anguish"] (628), and the unexpected but touching Casablanca allusion amid the proliferation of images of mushroom clouds and parades protesting the wailing of the "100 000 cadavres envolés de HIROSHIMA" ["100,000 cadavers carried away at HIROSHIMA"] (584).  A fine intro for what I hope will be a satisfying long-term relationship between Marguerite Duras and me.  (www.gallimard.fr/ecoutezlire/quarto.htm)

Marguerite Duras

I read Hiroshima mon amour as part of the July stop for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong 2011.  See her blog here for other posts on the film and print versions of the title.  Oddly enough, I couldn't locate a standalone version of the usually easy-to-find screenplay at any of the three foreign language bookstores I checked in Cambridge and NYC during the last month.  Weird.  Luckily for me, my library had a copy of the deluxe 1,764 page Duras: Romans, cinéma, théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993 (Gallimard, 1997) in which Hiroshima appears on pages 533-643.

Borges, a Character in a Novel by Sabato

Just had to share this with those of you who participated in and/or otherwise remember the Jorge Luis Borges group reads we did last year and those who, like Amateur Reader, Roberto Bolaño and me, profess more than a passing interest in the "extraordinary riches" of Argentinean literature.  So I was reading Ernesto Sabato's 1961 Sobre héroes y tumbas [On Heroes and Tombs, here translated by Helen R. Lane in what I believe is an out of print 1981 edition put out by David R. Godine] the other day when the following previously nondescript Buenos Aires description really grabbed my attention:

They were walking down the Calle Perú; grabbing Martín by the arm, Bruno pointed a man out to him who was walking in front of them, leaning on a cane.

"Borges."

Now, although I had read somewhere that Borges made a cameo in the novel, I had somehow managed to forget that was coming by the time I got to this point almost a couple of hundred pages in.  What followed was classic, though, and worth the wait for the increasingly unflattering portrait of Borges that initially emerges:

When they drew closer, Bruno said hello to him.  Martín found himself shaking a tiny hand, with scarcely any bones or strength in it.  The features of the man's face seemed to have been sketched in and then to have been half rubbed out with an eraser.  Borges mumbled something, acknowledging the introduction.

"Martín's a friend of Alejandra Vidal Olmos's," Bruno said.

"Caramba, caramba...Alejandra...that's fine."

He raised his eyebrows, observed Martín with watery blue eyes and an abstract cordiality addressed to no one in particular, his mind obviously elsewhere.

Bruno asked him what he was writing.

"Well, caramba...," he mumbled, smiling a half-guilty, half-wicked smile, with that air that Argentine peasants assume, an air of modest irony, a mixture of secret arrogance and apparent diffidence, every time someone admires one of their horses or their ability to do fine leatherwork.  "Caramba...well, in a word...trying to write a page or two that's something more than a scribble, eh, eh?..."

And he mumbled something else, accompanied by a series of clownish facial tics.

And as they walked on toward Rinaldini's, Bruno imagined Méndez saying sarcastically: A lecturer for snooty women's clubs!  But everything was much more complicated than Méndez thought (171).

Sabato's apparent comedic malevolence aside, what makes these details so delicious to me--so Argentinean, if you will, within the context of Argentinean literature as a whole--is that this unexpected description of a chance encounter with Borges then segueways into a discussion of what Argentine identity and letters are all about.  Introducing Borges as a character isn't a cheap stunt or a sideshow act:

"They say he's not very Argentine," Martín ventured to remark.

"What else could he be but Argentine?  He's a typical national product.  Even his so-called Europeanism is national.  A European is not Europeanist: he's simply European."

"Do you think he's a great writer?"

Bruno pondered the question for some time.

"I don't know.  What I'm certain of is that his prose is the most remarkable of any being written in Spanish today.  But his style is too precious for him to be a great writer.  Can you imagine Tolstoy trying to dazzle his readers with an adverb when it's the question of the life or death of one of his characters?  But not everything in Borges's works is Byzantine: far from it.  There's something Argentine in his best things: a certain nostalgia, a certain metaphysical sadness..."

He walked along in silence for a time.

"The fact is that people say all sorts of ridiculous things about what Argentine literature ought to be.  The important thing is for it to be profound.  All the rest is just an added fillip.  And if it isn't profound it's useless to introduce gauchos or colorful picaresque rascals into the picture.  The most representative writer in Elizabethan England was Shakespeare.  Yet many of his works don't even have an English setting" (172).

After a pause in which Bruno makes fun of those who would deny Argentina's European roots and yet touches on the situation in which Latin Americans find themselves to be the inhabitants of a "different, violent continent," the discussion of Borges opens the door for a rant on the notion of originality in literature.  Love this talky book stuff:

"So critics want total and absolute originality, do they?  Such a thing doesn't exist.  Neither in art nor in anything else.  Everything is built on what has gone before.  Nothing that is human is perfectly pure and pristine.  The Greek gods too were hybrids and were infected (so to speak) with Oriental and Egyptian religions.  There's a little passage in The Mill on the Floss in which a woman tries on a hat in front of a mirror: and it's Proust.  What I mean to say is, it's the seed of Proust.  All the rest is simply a process of development.  One touched with genius, cancerous almost, but in the final analysis simply a process of development.  The same thing is true of one of Melville's stories, called Bertleby or Bartleby or something like that.  When I read it I was impressed by its Kafkaesque atmosphere.  And that's the way it always is.  We're Argentines, for example, even when we reject our own country, as Borges frequently does.  Especially when he repudiates it with real fury, the way Unamuno repudiates Spain; the way violent atheists put bombs in a church, that being their way of believing in God.  The true atheists are those who are indifferent, those who are cynics.  And what we might call an atheistic attitude toward this native land of ours is to be found among cosmopolitans, individuals who live no differently here than they would in Paris or London--they live in a country as though it were a hotel.  But let's be fair: Borges is not one of them.  I think that in a certain way his heart aches for his country, despite the fact that he doesn't have the sensitivity or the generosity, of course, for it to ache for his country the way the heart of a day laborer in the fields or a worker in a meat-freezing plant does.  And that explains his lack of grandeur, his inability to understand and feel the whole of the country, including all its deep-rooted, complex rottenness.  When we read Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy on the other hand we feel that total understanding of the human soul" (173).

One brief Roberto Arlt commentary, another extended Borges discussion, and about fifty pages later, young protagonist Martín will feel the full brunt of the complex rottenness of the country when he's a witness to the carnage of the 1955 aerial bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo.  Can't wait to get back to the rest of Sobre héroes y tumbas which, despite some ups and downs from a tonal standpoint, is giving me the sense that Sabato's playing for keeps.  Not bad for a back-up book, eh, eh?