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On Reading Proust Like A Writer....and other bits
[Okay watching tv while writing this, so there are typos aplenty and it might sound off in places. Yes, I'm multi-tasking.]
About thirty some pages into Swann's Way, initial impressions? The narrator has an oddly Oedipal relationship with his parents and seems to be "in love" with his mother. That said this passage is beautifully written:
[the narrator, a small boy, has just given a letter to a servant to deliver to his mother, who is entertaining a neighbor named "Swann"]
I thought Swann would surely have laughed at the anguish I had just suffered if he had read my letter and guessed its purpose; yet, on the contrary, as I learned later, a similar anguish was the torment of long years of his life and no one, perhaps, could have understood me as well as he; in his case, the anguish that comes from feeling that the person you love is in a place of amusement where you are not, where you cannot join her, came to him through love, to which it is in some sense predestined, by which it will be hoarded, appropriated; but when, as in my case, this anguish enters us before love has made its appearance in our life, it drifts as it waits for it, vague and free, without a particular assignment, at the service of one feeling one day, of another the next, sometimes of filial tenderness or affection for a friend.
An interesting description of claustrophobic and somewhat suffocating love.
Another passage that plays with my head and caught my attention:
Whenever she saw in others an advantage , however small, that she did not have, she persuaded herself that it was not an advantage but a detriment and she pitied them so as not to envy them.
LOL! The language has a neat, academic tone, as if the protagonist is commenting on the events like one might at a cocktail party, the emotion down-played, yet there all the same. Also the sentence style much like Joyce conveys a stream of consciousness or flow as if we are inside someone's head - hence the detached tone, someone's flow of thoughts.
Reading Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way" at the same time as Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer" (*edited to add: Prose not to be confused with Proust. One is dead, French, and male - one is alive, female, American, and living in New York. One of the problems of doing kitchen sink posts is I indavertently end up confusing readers.) is an interesting experience. I find myself paying more attention to the author's style more than usual. And often pausing to re-read a sentence more than once. Marcel Proust's writing style - propells one forward, yet equally asks that you go back, re-read, ruminate on what he has written.
Francine Prose made a few interesting comments in Chapter One of Reading Like A Writer. The first point relates to well reading a masterpiece like Proust. She states how "a work of art can start you thinking about some esthetic or philosphical problem, it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction." Then, in regards to reading Proust - "It's like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps." Even though your novel is not Proust.
1. "Not long ago, a friend told me that her students had complained that reading masterpieces made them feel stupid. But I've always found that the better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might someday, become smarter." Would agree with this.
2. "I've also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I've always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it had meand I couldn't read for the years it might take to complete a novel."
Yes! Okay, I've had this debate with numerous people online and off, and I've always maintained that the reading while working on a novel can only improve it. Let me explain - the published authors I've run across who avoid reading while working on a novel are not authors whose work I'd want to imitate. Frex - John Jakes and John Maxim. Both interviewed by my father and both went on record stating they fear reading fiction while writing novels since it may interfer with their plot, they may discover their idea has been grabbed by someone else (sigh), or unduly influence them. Now does anyone remember any novels these people have written? Here's a list of writers who read while writing and state that they've learned from reading other's works: Stephen King, Dean Koontz, James Joyce, Maria Doria Russell, Elizabeth Bear, Francine Prose, Shakespear (yes, Shakespeare read other plays and freely borrowed from them), Margret Atwood, and Jane Austen (who often made fun of the books she read in her own).
I honestly do not understand people who write fiction but refuse to read it. It's like learning to dance or writing a song without listening to others. Bob Dylan, argueably one of the best songwriters out there, listens to a broad range of music, he borrowed sounds and styles from other artists to create his own interpretation. He did not stop listening to music while writing his songs for fear that he'd steal something from someone else. Same deal with acting, actors will study Brando, Dean, watch hours of others' performances, borrow things - James Marsters mentioned in interviews how he borrowed from people like Brando, Dean, Anthony Stewart Head, and others he worked with. Marlon Brando - a fantastic mimic, mimiced others styles. Boreanze enjoyed playing off of Denisof and Marsters - two actors who helped his own style. Or how about painters? Painters study other painters. You study how they drew, their technique, some students may even apprentice under a painter, copying their style for a while then eventually creating their own. Art, my friends, is not created in a vaccume. At least "good" art isn't. We borrow. We play homage to others. Look at film - Whedon plays homage to John Ford and Howard Hawkes. JJ Abrahms to Joss Whedon. We take an idea, a style, twist it about, play with it, and make it our own.
Prose goes on to state why people fear reading good works, and I've experienced what she describes - who hasn't?
"To be truthful, there are writers who will stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy I have found is to read another writer whose work is entirely different from the first, though not necessarily more like your own - a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art."
Hence the point of following a novel by say George RR Martin or Diana Gabaldan with one by Marcel Proust.
The other point of reading others works is it can help you figure out how to do something. Fix something. Prose suggests Isaak Babel for violent scenes - which ahem, I'm struggling with writing in my own novel at the moment, making me want to go out and grab a book by Isaak Babel, damn Prose. Wasted time on net last night looking for a free short story to read.
3. Prose comments on how much trouble her students have in reading a simple short story, that they were too busy forming critical opinions of the work, as opposed to paying attention to the words the writer uses. "They had been encouraged to form strong, critical and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers' origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to re-write the classics into the more acceptable forms that the authors might have discovered had they only shared their young critics' level of insight, tolerance, and awareness." While it is great to analyze a work of art, to think about it critically, to do so to the extent that the work disappears and all that remains is the critique in our mind, we lose the art. I saw this a lot with analysis of tv shows, films, and books online. People stopped enjoying it. They were caught up in defending or prosecuting it for being "too white", "racist", "politically incorrect", "misogynistic", etc - and I've done it as well. I think sometimes there is such a thing as being "too critical".
Prose gets around this problem by changing how she teaches her reading course, focusing instead on how the book is written as opposed to what it means or its relevant themes. She focuses on what the writer does brilliantly. How they use a strand of dialogue or a bit of description to get across a point. I did something similar with Joss Whedon's BTVS - analyzing in my head how the writer used dialogue to distinguish characters, to describe who they were yet at the same time propell the plot and action. I'm not saying one should not be a critical reader, just that there is such a thing as going overboard.
Half-watching tv at the moment. Bones was surprisingly good tonight. And reading an article in the newest "New Yorker" on Bill Clinton, who fascinates me. I honestly think he may be the only living US President I'd like to meet and chat with.
About thirty some pages into Swann's Way, initial impressions? The narrator has an oddly Oedipal relationship with his parents and seems to be "in love" with his mother. That said this passage is beautifully written:
[the narrator, a small boy, has just given a letter to a servant to deliver to his mother, who is entertaining a neighbor named "Swann"]
I thought Swann would surely have laughed at the anguish I had just suffered if he had read my letter and guessed its purpose; yet, on the contrary, as I learned later, a similar anguish was the torment of long years of his life and no one, perhaps, could have understood me as well as he; in his case, the anguish that comes from feeling that the person you love is in a place of amusement where you are not, where you cannot join her, came to him through love, to which it is in some sense predestined, by which it will be hoarded, appropriated; but when, as in my case, this anguish enters us before love has made its appearance in our life, it drifts as it waits for it, vague and free, without a particular assignment, at the service of one feeling one day, of another the next, sometimes of filial tenderness or affection for a friend.
An interesting description of claustrophobic and somewhat suffocating love.
Another passage that plays with my head and caught my attention:
Whenever she saw in others an advantage , however small, that she did not have, she persuaded herself that it was not an advantage but a detriment and she pitied them so as not to envy them.
LOL! The language has a neat, academic tone, as if the protagonist is commenting on the events like one might at a cocktail party, the emotion down-played, yet there all the same. Also the sentence style much like Joyce conveys a stream of consciousness or flow as if we are inside someone's head - hence the detached tone, someone's flow of thoughts.
Reading Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way" at the same time as Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer" (*edited to add: Prose not to be confused with Proust. One is dead, French, and male - one is alive, female, American, and living in New York. One of the problems of doing kitchen sink posts is I indavertently end up confusing readers.) is an interesting experience. I find myself paying more attention to the author's style more than usual. And often pausing to re-read a sentence more than once. Marcel Proust's writing style - propells one forward, yet equally asks that you go back, re-read, ruminate on what he has written.
Francine Prose made a few interesting comments in Chapter One of Reading Like A Writer. The first point relates to well reading a masterpiece like Proust. She states how "a work of art can start you thinking about some esthetic or philosphical problem, it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction." Then, in regards to reading Proust - "It's like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps." Even though your novel is not Proust.
1. "Not long ago, a friend told me that her students had complained that reading masterpieces made them feel stupid. But I've always found that the better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might someday, become smarter." Would agree with this.
2. "I've also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I've always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it had meand I couldn't read for the years it might take to complete a novel."
Yes! Okay, I've had this debate with numerous people online and off, and I've always maintained that the reading while working on a novel can only improve it. Let me explain - the published authors I've run across who avoid reading while working on a novel are not authors whose work I'd want to imitate. Frex - John Jakes and John Maxim. Both interviewed by my father and both went on record stating they fear reading fiction while writing novels since it may interfer with their plot, they may discover their idea has been grabbed by someone else (sigh), or unduly influence them. Now does anyone remember any novels these people have written? Here's a list of writers who read while writing and state that they've learned from reading other's works: Stephen King, Dean Koontz, James Joyce, Maria Doria Russell, Elizabeth Bear, Francine Prose, Shakespear (yes, Shakespeare read other plays and freely borrowed from them), Margret Atwood, and Jane Austen (who often made fun of the books she read in her own).
I honestly do not understand people who write fiction but refuse to read it. It's like learning to dance or writing a song without listening to others. Bob Dylan, argueably one of the best songwriters out there, listens to a broad range of music, he borrowed sounds and styles from other artists to create his own interpretation. He did not stop listening to music while writing his songs for fear that he'd steal something from someone else. Same deal with acting, actors will study Brando, Dean, watch hours of others' performances, borrow things - James Marsters mentioned in interviews how he borrowed from people like Brando, Dean, Anthony Stewart Head, and others he worked with. Marlon Brando - a fantastic mimic, mimiced others styles. Boreanze enjoyed playing off of Denisof and Marsters - two actors who helped his own style. Or how about painters? Painters study other painters. You study how they drew, their technique, some students may even apprentice under a painter, copying their style for a while then eventually creating their own. Art, my friends, is not created in a vaccume. At least "good" art isn't. We borrow. We play homage to others. Look at film - Whedon plays homage to John Ford and Howard Hawkes. JJ Abrahms to Joss Whedon. We take an idea, a style, twist it about, play with it, and make it our own.
Prose goes on to state why people fear reading good works, and I've experienced what she describes - who hasn't?
"To be truthful, there are writers who will stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy I have found is to read another writer whose work is entirely different from the first, though not necessarily more like your own - a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art."
Hence the point of following a novel by say George RR Martin or Diana Gabaldan with one by Marcel Proust.
The other point of reading others works is it can help you figure out how to do something. Fix something. Prose suggests Isaak Babel for violent scenes - which ahem, I'm struggling with writing in my own novel at the moment, making me want to go out and grab a book by Isaak Babel, damn Prose. Wasted time on net last night looking for a free short story to read.
3. Prose comments on how much trouble her students have in reading a simple short story, that they were too busy forming critical opinions of the work, as opposed to paying attention to the words the writer uses. "They had been encouraged to form strong, critical and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers' origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to re-write the classics into the more acceptable forms that the authors might have discovered had they only shared their young critics' level of insight, tolerance, and awareness." While it is great to analyze a work of art, to think about it critically, to do so to the extent that the work disappears and all that remains is the critique in our mind, we lose the art. I saw this a lot with analysis of tv shows, films, and books online. People stopped enjoying it. They were caught up in defending or prosecuting it for being "too white", "racist", "politically incorrect", "misogynistic", etc - and I've done it as well. I think sometimes there is such a thing as being "too critical".
Prose gets around this problem by changing how she teaches her reading course, focusing instead on how the book is written as opposed to what it means or its relevant themes. She focuses on what the writer does brilliantly. How they use a strand of dialogue or a bit of description to get across a point. I did something similar with Joss Whedon's BTVS - analyzing in my head how the writer used dialogue to distinguish characters, to describe who they were yet at the same time propell the plot and action. I'm not saying one should not be a critical reader, just that there is such a thing as going overboard.
Half-watching tv at the moment. Bones was surprisingly good tonight. And reading an article in the newest "New Yorker" on Bill Clinton, who fascinates me. I honestly think he may be the only living US President I'd like to meet and chat with.
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The bit on other writers was by Francine Prose. (not to be confused with Proust).
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You're obviously on the 'Pro' part of your reading list. ;-)
TCH
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Re good writers: as you'll know, I'm an enthusiastic advocate of reading great books - just for the sheer pleasure they give. reading proust makes me want to write not becuase I think I can do it as well as him, but because he makes me think that the act of writing is an amazing thing.
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And falls into the trap we are warned about in fiction writing courses regarding writing first person pov - which is the narrator comes across as either thinking too much of themselves or too little. In Proust's case it feels at the moment as a combination of both, which is sort of interesting and I'm not unconvinced not deliberate.
Great books or rather books that have been proven to be great due to their longevity - demonstrate how someone does something well. Proust breaks numerous writing rules - long run-on sentences that go one for a paragraph not to mention no paragraph breaks. Yet it works. Because he clearly understands them. There is of course, the question of how much of the language and writing is truly Proust and not the translator. A question that comes up any time I read a translation - I blame this on my English professors who refused to let me write my thesis on Gaberial Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude because I did not know Spainish and could not read the original. How - they asked - can you possibly interpret authorial intent when you are reading a translation? And translations do differ. I checked Davis version against a prior one - and she picks different words. Also will translate some of the text literally. Her use of language I preferred to the other translation, but I wonder - how close is it to the original French? Also French has different rules than English - different ways of using words. English can be more stingy with word choice than French. Or rather what works in French can sound silly in English and vice versa if the translation is exact. In some respects, French is a prettier more romantic sounding language than English, more fluid, more poetic. English has harsher sounds. It's a question I've asked myself reading Arturo Perez-Reverte as well.