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- > Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.
100%, and just to give an example, she finds good art is excreted (her words - perfectly chosen) rather than created, and I think her example was how the immaculate constructions of somebody like Flaubert lose a certain impact and potency, precisely because they betrays some sort of methodological process. And this cannot yield Truth.
To me, reading this now, that sort of analysis struck me rather as very much dated, and an example of that flippant iconoclasm of modern literary criticism, basically, of the hippies.
Because, really, who is she to throw Flaubert so casually under the bus? (im joking) Mme bovary is perfect, in a way a classical music composition is perfect, it is the oppressive knowledge that perfection can be willed into the world and it's the artist who has the task to will it in the world, no matter the devotion and commitment required. Causally dismissing this, is at its base adolescent posturing (like the hippies). But more importantly, and this is why I say "dated", is that we now, after 60-80 years very much have witnessed what sort of art we get when creating art should be more akin to some physiological evacuation. It's just no good, and it's being rejected more and more.
- This is to our disadvantage. Semicolons are useful because they allow for the long, patient, elaboration of complex ideas in a single sentence. In fiction, in particular, they can also function akin to a jumpcut in cinema, or like montage editing. Many of the incredible scenes in a book like Flaubert's Mme Bovary get their feel from the way he slams units of prose together with semicolons rather than the trudge of periods and short sentences. The same is true of Proust, or Nabokov, or Hemingway, who was way more profligate with semicolons than the meme-ish idea of his prose which has become popular (he was mocked for his use of them in The Sun Also Rises for example).
Unfortunate, really. Everything now is supposed to be distilled into these short and clippy sentences and paragraphs. Like newspaper prose. Modern prose fiction is often so anodyne and lifeless; a semicolon, with the freedom to smash things together in fun ways, would do most some good.
- There is the book that the linked review is covering, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert by NYRB publishing, which covers a lot of his life.
Another is Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence from 1993, which is a selection of letters between Flaubert and George Sand.
If you can read french, the Rouen collection is probably the most complete, but there are other french collections. If you're just looking to start with Flaubert in general you can start with Mme. Bovary, rightly regarded as one of the best novels ever. Flaubert's control over his sentences, the breathtaking style, is incredible to read.
- René Girard – The One By Whome Scandal Comes
The Platonist ontology of imitation and the philosophical and psychological conception that, following Aristotle, limits imitation to external behaviors, to ways of acting or speaking, must therefore be rejected. In both cases, the essential point is evaded. Modern romantic philosophy despises imitation, and the nearer one comes to the present the more pronounced this scorn becomes. Oddly, it is based on the supposed inability of imitators to challenge their models. Mimeticism is supposed to be a renunciation of true individuality, with the result that the individual is beaten down by “others” and forced to yield to the common opinion.
Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.
When we imitate others, as it is usually said, we are being unfaithful to ourselves. The outstanding characteristic of imitators is not violence; it is passivity, herd behavior. This is what I call the romantic lie, which in the twentieth century was most famously described by Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time, the “inauthentic” self is identical with the “they” (das Man) of collective irresponsibility. Passive and conformist imitation abandons the struggle to affirm one’s true personality. It is opposed to the authentic self of the philosopher himself, who has no fear of going to war against adversaries who are worthy of him, in the Heracleitean spirit of pólemos—the violence that is “father of all and king of all.” Struggle and conflict are seen as proofs of authenticity, of a will to power in the Nietzschean sense of the term.
I maintain that passion and desire are never authentic in the Heideggerean sense. They do not emerge from the depths of our being; we always borrow them from others. Far from seeing conflict as a sign of mastery, as Heidegger does, we must see it as exactly the opposite, a confirmation of the mimetic nature of our desires.
Individualists, as all of us imagine ourselves to be, have the impression that they no longer imitate anyone once they have forcibly overcome their model. Far from being incompatible with imitation, Heracleitean violence is an idealized version of mimetic rivalry. A more penetrating critical eye detects in it the romantic lie of which I just spoke.
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René Girard – Deceit, Desire & the Novel
In The Past Recaptured Proust emphasizes that self-centeredness is a barrier to novelistic creation. Proustian self-centeredness gives rise to imitation and makes us live outside ourselves. This self-centeredness is other-centeredness as well; it is not one-sided egotism; it is an impulse in two contradictory directions which always ends by tearing the individual apart. To triumph over self-centeredness is to get away from oneself and make contact with others but in another sense it also implies a greater intimacy with oneself and a withdrawal from others. A self-centered person thinks he is choosing himself but in fact he shuts himself out as much as others. Victory over self-centeredness allows us to probe deeply into the Self and at the same time yields a better knowledge of Others. At a certain depth there is no difference between our own secret and the secret of Others. Everything is revealed to the novelist when he penetrates this Self, a truer Self than that which each of us displays. This Self imitates constantly, on its knees before the mediator.
This profound Self is also a universal Self. The dialectic of metaphysical pride alone can help us understand and accept Proust's attempt to reconcile the particular and universal. In the context of the romantic's mechanical opposition between Self and Others, such an attempt would be absurd.
This logical absurdity no doubt struck Proust and he occasionally gives up his attempt at reconciliation and slips back into the cliches of twentieth-century romanticism. In a few isolated passages of The Past Recaptured he declares that the work of art must permit us to grasp our "difef rences" and makes us delight in our "originality."
These scattered passages are the result of Proust's lack of a theoretic vocabulary. But the attempt at logical coherence is quickly swept away by inspiration. Proust knew that in describing his own youth he was describing ours as well. He knew that the true artist no longer has to choose between himself and Others. Because it is born of renunciation, great novelistic art loses nothing and regains everything.
But this renunciation is very painful. The novelist can write his novel only if he recognizes that his mediator is a person like himself. Marcel, for example, has to give up considering his beloved a monstrous divinity and seeing himself in the role of an eternal victim. He has to recognize that his beloved's lies are similar to his own.
This victory over a self-centeredness which is other-centered, this renunciation of fascination and hatred, is the crowning moment of novelistic creation. Therefore it can be found in all the great novelists. Every novelist sees his similarity to the fascinating Other through the voice of his hero. Mme de la Fayette recognizes her similarity to the women for whom love has been their undoing. Stendhal, the enemy of hypocrites, recognizes at the end of The Red and the Black that he is also a hypocrite. Dostoyevsky, in the conclusion of Crime and Punishment, gives up seeing himself alternately as a superhuman and as a subhuman. The novelist recognizes that he is guilty of the sin of which he is accusing his mediator. The curse which Oedipus hurls at Others falls on his own head.
This is the meaning of Flaubert's famous cry: "Mme Bovary, c'est moil" Flaubert first conceived Mme Bovary as that despicable Other whom he had sworn to deal with.
- Mme. Bovary. First it just was an exercise to show to my wife how _descriptions_ are _action_. I was trying to improved her everyday writing, you know, memos from work, informal/formal letters. I'm reading French just a little as English. So we are doing this... _exercises_ based upon an Spanish translate. And there it was. Just like I used to be remember it: fabrics that suddenly becomes a living creature embracing Emma B. nee Rouault, feelings that forms heavy lakes falling upon her, light that is light and sound and it taste like aluminum. Sorry to inform: is not a novel about couples, not even about a couple, not even about Emma. It's all about how you can tell a thing, whatever thing, not thinking about it as static dead thing but a living, fiery, not a few times menacing, whatever.
