Conversational Reading

Friday Quotes

This is my translation. El tunel, Ernesto Sabato (Seix Barral, 1948):

"My theory," he explained, "is as follows: in the 20th century, the political novel represents what the chivalry novel did in Cervantes's time. Moreover: I think you could make something equivalent to Don Quixote: a satire of political novels. Imagine an individual who has passed his life reading political novels and has become crazy with the belief that the world functions like a novel by Nicholas Blake or Ellery Queen. Imagine that at length this poor sap finally sets out to discover crimes and proceeds through life as would a detective from one of these novels. I think you could make something entertaining, tragic, symbolic, satirical, and beautiful."

The New Novel, Vivian Mercier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971):

Simultaneity is another aspect of time by which Joyce was greatly fascinated. One remembers the cloud that casts a chill over both Stephen and Bloom, who are separated by many miles of Dublin and many pages of Ulysses, or Stephen's being caught sight of from the mourners' coach as he is leaving Sandymount Strand, many pages after his seaside soliloquy is over. Above all, one remembers the "Wandering Rocks" episode, in which the doings of people all over Dublin are coordinated in relation to time. This was a dise of Joyce that Virginia Woolfe imitated meticulously in Mrs. Dalloway. . . .

But there is another kind of simultaneity, as Finnegans Wake reminds us. At every moment of that book, past, present, and future are simultaneously "present" or at any rate implicit. Proust's Marcel, in his moments of involuntary memory, sees the present invaded or occupied by the past, but he can still distinguish which is which; it is not so with the dreamer or the reader of Finnegans Wake.

Friday Quotes

From Jorge Luis Borges's "Prologue" to The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (University of Texas Press, 1964; republished by NYRB Classics, 2003):

There are pages, there are chapters in Marcel Proust that are unacceptable as inventions, and we unwittingly resign ourselves to them as we resign ourselves to the insipidity and the emptiness of each day. The adventure story, on the other hand, does not propose to transcribe reality: it is an artificial object, no part of which lacks justification. It must have a rigid plot if it is not to succumb to the mere sequential variety of The Golden Ass, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, or the Quixote. . . .

We hear sad murmurs that our century lacks the ability to devise interesting plots. But no one attempts to prove that if this century has any ascendancy over the preceding ones it lies in the quality of its plots. . . . I maintain that during no other era have there been novels with such admirable plots as The Turn of the Screw, The Trial, Voyage to the Center of the Earth, and the one you are about to read, which was written in Buenos Aires by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Friday Quotes

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, (London, 1972), p. 173 as quoted in Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, (Chicago, 1974) p. 13:

Perhaps it was our common sense of fun that first brought about our understanding. The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights. I have had good friends between whom and myself that bond was lacking, but they were never really intimate friends; and in that sense Henry James was perhaps the most intimate friend I ever had, though in many ways we were so different.

Friday Quotes

Via Alex Ross:

Al Pacino on the subject of playing Michael Corleone in The Godfather: "...the thing that I was after was to create some kind of enigma.... You see Michael in some of those scenes wrapped up in a kind of trance, as if his mind were completely filled with thoughts; that's what I was doing. I was actually listening to Stravinsky on the set, so I'd have that look."

Friday Quotes

Excerpted from the Harper's Index from the June 2007 issue of Harper's.

Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000

Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000

Number that sold more than 100,000: 483

The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross (FSG, 2007). pg. 246.

Besieged Leningrad heard the symphony on August 9, 1942, under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable. The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, and a severely depleted Leningrad Radio Orchestra began learning it. After a mere fifteen musicians showed up for the initial rehearsal, the commanding general ordered all competent musicians to report from the front lines. The players would break from the rehearsals to return to their duties, which sometimes included the digging of mass graves for victims of the siege. Three members of the orchestra died of starvation before the premiere took place. The opposing German general heard about the performance in advance and planned to disrupt it, but the Soviets preempted him by launching a bombardment of German positions--Operation Squall, it was called. An array of loudspeakers then broadcast the Leningrad into the silence of no-man's-land. Never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony become a tactical strike against German morale.

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Friday Quotes

Leonid Grossman, as quoted in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. M.M. Bakhtin (University of Minnesota, 1984), pp. 41-2:

Dostoevsky himself pointed out this compositional vehicle [of a musical type--M.B.] and once drew an analogy between his structural system and the musical theory of "modulations" or counter-positions. He was writing at the time a short novel of three chapters, each with a different content, but internally unified. The first chapter was a monologue, polemical, and philosophical; the second was a dramatic episode, which prepared the way for the catastrophic denouement in the third chapter. Could these chapters be published separately? asks the author. After all, they echo one another internally, in the them different but inseparable motifs sound, and while this does permit an organic shift of tonalities it does not permit a mechanistic severing of one from the other. This makes it possible to decode the brief but highly significant reference Dostoevsky made in a letter to his brother on the subject of the forthcoming publication of Notes from Underground in the Journal Time: "The tale is divided into three chapters. . . . the first chapter is perhaps one-and-a-half printer's sheets in length. . . . Is it really possible to print it separately? People will laugh at it, and all the more so since without the two remaining (main) chapters it loses all its juice. You know with a modulation is in music. It's exactly the same thing here. The first chapter is apparently idle chatter; but suddenly this chatter is resolved, in the last two chapters, by an unexpected catastrophe."

The Dialogic Imagination. M.M. Bakhtin (University of Texas Press, 1981), pg. 15:

In ancient literature [i.e., the epic], it is memory , and not knowledge, that serves as the source and power for the creative impulse. That is how it was, it is impossible to change it: the tradition of the past is sacred. There is as yet no consciousness of the possible relativity of any past.

The novel, by contrast, is determined by experience, knowledge, and practice (the future).

Friday Quotes

Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), pg. 217:

One essential difference exists between the Proustian and the Joycean methods of approaching their characters. Joyce takes a complete and absolute character, od-known, Joyce-known, then breaks it up into fragments and scatters these fragments over the space-time of his book. The good rereader gathers these puzzle pieces and gradually puts them together. On the other hand, Proust contends that a character, a personality, is never known as an absolute but always as a comparative one. He does not chip it up but shows it as it exists through the notions about it of other characters. And he hopes, after having given a series of these prisms and shadows, to combine them into an artistic reality.

Friday Quotes

The Irresponsible Self by James Wood (Picador, 2005), pg. 27:

It is a shame that many readers never get to [Don Quixote's] stupendous second book, which is both funnier and more affecting than its first. A rough analysis of the action in the second book might go like this: Jesus Christ is wandering around first-century Palestine trying to convince people that he is the true Messiah. it is a difficult task, because John the Baptist, instead of preparing the way for the Messiah, has claimed that he is the true Messiah, and has gone and got himself appropriately crucified on Calvary. Since many people have heard of John's death and resurrection, Jesus finds himself being skeptically tested by his audience: can he perform this and that miracle? Moreover, when Jesus hears that John has been crucified on Calvary, he decides to prove his authenticity by changing his plans: he will not now be crucified on Calvary but will instead travel to Rome to be eaten by lions. Tired, disillusioned, deeply saddened by the unexpected explosion of his greatest dreams, he sets out for Rome with his dearest disciple and right-hand man, Peter. But Peter, taking pity on him, gets together with some of the disciples and convinces Jesus that he should give up this Messiah lark, and should retire to somewhere nice, like Sorrento. Jesus meekly obeys, arrives in Sorrento, and immediately falls sick and dies, though not before renouncing all claims to divinity and announcing his convinced atheism.

Friday Quotes

The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth, footnote to page 301:

Finnegans Wake (Compass Books ed., 1959), pp. 534, 542. The novel was first published in 1939, though fragments of Work in Progress appeared throughout the preceding decade. If I dropped the point here I could no doubt leave some readers convinced that I have read Finnegans Wake. But I must confess that I have not; I do read in it, from time to time, with great delight until boredom sets in. Will someone, by the way, someone who has read this unreadable work, tell me whether that first "m" in the first "brimgem" is a typographical error? You don't know? Or care? We are in trouble, you and I.