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shadowkatI've linked the two because I read an essay regarding Proust and the novel by Milan Kundera on the way to the Spainish Guitar Festival and then portions of Swann's Way on the subway ride home. By the by - it is not easy to read Proust when two people are having a heated debate about the ethical conduct of their mathematics teacher right next to you.
The Guitare Festival was basically two hours of classical guitare music performed for free at Julliard to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of its Pre-College Guitare Department.
The performers were: Antigoni Goni - a Greek guitarist, who is professor of Guitar at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, artist in residence for San Francisco Peformances and formerly Chairman of the Guitare Dept. at the Julliard Pre-College Disision. She has CD's produced around the world. The other female guitarist was a faculty member of the Pre-College Division, Tali Roth who has been hailed by Classical Guitar magazine as an extraordinary champber and solo musician. She's performed on live television, on stage in NY Off-Broadway musical production of The Odyssey for international dignitaries. Antigoni - a lovely woman in the most beautiful outfit I've seen - it was a dress and a pants suit - made of silk gossamer fabric. When she stood it was a lovely turquoise and lavender dress that was light and flowing, from a high Elizabethan bodice, when she sat, the folds of the gossamer dress parted to reveal turquise pants. The ladies I sat with, a woman from China, and a gal from Astoria, Queens by way of Massachustus, who wrote plays in her spare time, equally lusted after Antigoni's outfit. Then Antigoni began to play and I felt as if someone were magically removing all the sewage from my psyche. Sifting it out and replacing it with soothing water scented with lavendar. My lids felt heavy and for a while I just drifted with the music, floating on the Mediterrean, drifting on the soft vibrations of chords, carefully plucked. She stopped between pieces to re-tune and tighten strings of the guitare in order to create a slightly different sound. One of the guys next to me, also part of the group, who played steel guitar in his spare time explained how she did it during the intermission. I understood part of this due to the fact that I'd attempted to teach myself acoustic guitare in college - even owned a guitare much like the one Antigone was playing, with the nylon strings. But I lacked the patience, talent, drive and discipline - also as the folks around me, who'd tried it agreed - guitare is bloody painful on the digits. You need to build up calluses on your fingertips. Those strings will cut into them. You also need a certain amount of strength to press and hold the chords.
Guitare music may be my favorite of the classical instrumentals. Particularly Spainish. It has a lyrical and folksy quality that outside of the violin, I don't often hear. Course I haven't listened to classical guitare in a while - no CD's of it. Used to own, years and years ago, a record of classical guitare music. Sometimes I really miss records and record players.
The pieces she played were by Manos Hadjidakis - Gioconda's Smile, Dusan Bogdanovic - Hymn to the Muse, Ernesto Nazerth - Five Dances, and Augustin Barrios Mangore - Une Sueno en la floresta.
Tali Roth - was very different, a tall blond woman who wore a long gold gown and played with an orchestra behind her. The orchestra was made up of students. Her choices were by Joaquin Rodrigo, whom I've heard before, and entitled Concierto de Aranjuez. In contrast to Antigone, Roth played as if she were in a frenzy. Her hands flew over the strings. She did not pluck. And I felt myself sit up in my seat, entranced, as if I were watching a tango or a Sergio Leone film. The soft strum of the violins in the background, with the lonely piping of a stray flute. Beautiful. Different. Jumping from the Mediterrean to the arid climes of Mexico.
Afterwards, I felt sleepy. Relaxed. And calm. I definitely need to find a CD of classical guitare music.
On the subway ride to and from the concert - I finished an article in this week's New Yorker entitled What is a Novelist? or How Great Writers Are Made. by Milan Kundera Milan Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. He's a Czech novelist.
On page 42 of the mag, second page of the article, Kundera starts talking about Proust and the novels In Search of Lost Time - He states he came to the novels through a Czech poet that he admired and adored called Ivan Blatny - who kept repeating the line "Albertinko, ty" or "Albertine, you" - in one of his poems - it was an allusion to Proust's Albertine. "That name," writes Kundera, "became for me, as an adolescent, the most captivating of all female names." So he plunges into the novels and discovers Albertine in the secound volume where she becomes entangled with his poet's version.
Then Kundera reads Proust's biography - and discovers that "Albertine was inspired by a man, a man Proust was in love with."
Here's what Kundera writes regarding it: " But what are they talking about! No matter who inspired her, man or woman, Albertine is Albertine, and that's that! A novel is the product of an alchemy that turns a woman into a man, a man into a woman, sludge into gold, an anecodte into drama! That divine alchemy is what makes for the power of every novelist, the secret, the splendor of his art!"
He continues to rage about how the biography robbed him of his image of Albertine. Then ends the rampage on this line, which struck me as interesting: " They killed my Albertine. And I recall Flaubert (the writer of Madame Bovery) words: 'The artist must make posterity believe he never lived.' Understand the meaning of that line: what the novelist seeks to protect above all is not himself; it is Albertine..."
In case that makes no sense, which it doesn't unless you know who Albertine is - he revists Proust in the next passage of his essay, entitled "Marcel Proust's Verdict" - which he states and I'll transcribe it in full for those on my flist reading Proust at the moment and those who are or attempting to become novelists:
In In Search of Lost Time, Proust is absolutely clear:'In this novel...there is not one incident that is not fictional...not one character a clef.' However tightly bound to the life of its author, Proust's novel stands, without question, at the opposite pole from autiobiography; there is in it no autobiographical intention; he wrote it not in order to talk about his life but to show his readers their own lives. "Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth." Those lines of Proust's define not only the meaing of the Proustian novel; they define the meaning of the very art of the novel."
I think this is true of most art, great art, in that what we see in it is often what it tells us about ourselves. How it reflects much like a magic mirror might an unseen truth. People have told me that reading Proust changed their lives - I think what Kundera states above explains to a degree what they mean by that - how a novel or work of art can in fact change, save, or even affect us on a spiritual level.
There's a passage from Proust's By Way of Swann's or Swann's Way that I'd like to share with you, which in some ways encapsulates this:
[The narrator is describing the experience of reading a book he's recently picked up. It's on page 86 and the narrator has just told us how he's acquired a book recommended by a friend.]
" After this central belief, which moved incessantly during my reading from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part for those afternoons contained more dramatic events than does often, an entire lifetime. These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not "real", as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot life. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate. What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seem to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as migh a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain nautral phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change.) "
In short a novel or piece of art can affect us more than a real experience, for it is an experience lived in the mind, the imagination. It can change you. You can experience a piece of artwork and leave it, different. Because you have spent a moment inside a point of view you may or may not have imagined or looked in the mirror and saw something reflected back that you did not know existed. According to Kundera, that is what a novelist does - creates a work that provides the reader with a window into the reader's own soul.
There's other passages I'd love to share from both the article and Swann's Way - I've only made it to page 140, partly because I feel this overwhelming need to inhale the words on the page and discuss every ten pages in my lj. That would slow anyone down. By the way - pages 137-140 explain the titles of the volumes. He goes into detail about what by way of Swann's is and by way of Germantes. If you skimmed them, go back and re-read. Quite important thematically speaking.
Here's a sampling: " For in the environs of Combray there were two "ways" which one could go for a walk, in such opposite directions that in fact we left our house by different doors when we wanted to go one way or the other: the Meseglise-la-Vineuse way, which we also called the way by SWann's because we passed in front of M.Swann's estate when we went in that direction, and the Guermantes way. About Meseglise-la-Vineuse, to tell the truth, I never knew anything but the "way"..." Very important passage.
The Guitare Festival was basically two hours of classical guitare music performed for free at Julliard to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of its Pre-College Guitare Department.
The performers were: Antigoni Goni - a Greek guitarist, who is professor of Guitar at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, artist in residence for San Francisco Peformances and formerly Chairman of the Guitare Dept. at the Julliard Pre-College Disision. She has CD's produced around the world. The other female guitarist was a faculty member of the Pre-College Division, Tali Roth who has been hailed by Classical Guitar magazine as an extraordinary champber and solo musician. She's performed on live television, on stage in NY Off-Broadway musical production of The Odyssey for international dignitaries. Antigoni - a lovely woman in the most beautiful outfit I've seen - it was a dress and a pants suit - made of silk gossamer fabric. When she stood it was a lovely turquoise and lavender dress that was light and flowing, from a high Elizabethan bodice, when she sat, the folds of the gossamer dress parted to reveal turquise pants. The ladies I sat with, a woman from China, and a gal from Astoria, Queens by way of Massachustus, who wrote plays in her spare time, equally lusted after Antigoni's outfit. Then Antigoni began to play and I felt as if someone were magically removing all the sewage from my psyche. Sifting it out and replacing it with soothing water scented with lavendar. My lids felt heavy and for a while I just drifted with the music, floating on the Mediterrean, drifting on the soft vibrations of chords, carefully plucked. She stopped between pieces to re-tune and tighten strings of the guitare in order to create a slightly different sound. One of the guys next to me, also part of the group, who played steel guitar in his spare time explained how she did it during the intermission. I understood part of this due to the fact that I'd attempted to teach myself acoustic guitare in college - even owned a guitare much like the one Antigone was playing, with the nylon strings. But I lacked the patience, talent, drive and discipline - also as the folks around me, who'd tried it agreed - guitare is bloody painful on the digits. You need to build up calluses on your fingertips. Those strings will cut into them. You also need a certain amount of strength to press and hold the chords.
Guitare music may be my favorite of the classical instrumentals. Particularly Spainish. It has a lyrical and folksy quality that outside of the violin, I don't often hear. Course I haven't listened to classical guitare in a while - no CD's of it. Used to own, years and years ago, a record of classical guitare music. Sometimes I really miss records and record players.
The pieces she played were by Manos Hadjidakis - Gioconda's Smile, Dusan Bogdanovic - Hymn to the Muse, Ernesto Nazerth - Five Dances, and Augustin Barrios Mangore - Une Sueno en la floresta.
Tali Roth - was very different, a tall blond woman who wore a long gold gown and played with an orchestra behind her. The orchestra was made up of students. Her choices were by Joaquin Rodrigo, whom I've heard before, and entitled Concierto de Aranjuez. In contrast to Antigone, Roth played as if she were in a frenzy. Her hands flew over the strings. She did not pluck. And I felt myself sit up in my seat, entranced, as if I were watching a tango or a Sergio Leone film. The soft strum of the violins in the background, with the lonely piping of a stray flute. Beautiful. Different. Jumping from the Mediterrean to the arid climes of Mexico.
Afterwards, I felt sleepy. Relaxed. And calm. I definitely need to find a CD of classical guitare music.
On the subway ride to and from the concert - I finished an article in this week's New Yorker entitled What is a Novelist? or How Great Writers Are Made. by Milan Kundera Milan Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. He's a Czech novelist.
On page 42 of the mag, second page of the article, Kundera starts talking about Proust and the novels In Search of Lost Time - He states he came to the novels through a Czech poet that he admired and adored called Ivan Blatny - who kept repeating the line "Albertinko, ty" or "Albertine, you" - in one of his poems - it was an allusion to Proust's Albertine. "That name," writes Kundera, "became for me, as an adolescent, the most captivating of all female names." So he plunges into the novels and discovers Albertine in the secound volume where she becomes entangled with his poet's version.
Then Kundera reads Proust's biography - and discovers that "Albertine was inspired by a man, a man Proust was in love with."
Here's what Kundera writes regarding it: " But what are they talking about! No matter who inspired her, man or woman, Albertine is Albertine, and that's that! A novel is the product of an alchemy that turns a woman into a man, a man into a woman, sludge into gold, an anecodte into drama! That divine alchemy is what makes for the power of every novelist, the secret, the splendor of his art!"
He continues to rage about how the biography robbed him of his image of Albertine. Then ends the rampage on this line, which struck me as interesting: " They killed my Albertine. And I recall Flaubert (the writer of Madame Bovery) words: 'The artist must make posterity believe he never lived.' Understand the meaning of that line: what the novelist seeks to protect above all is not himself; it is Albertine..."
In case that makes no sense, which it doesn't unless you know who Albertine is - he revists Proust in the next passage of his essay, entitled "Marcel Proust's Verdict" - which he states and I'll transcribe it in full for those on my flist reading Proust at the moment and those who are or attempting to become novelists:
In In Search of Lost Time, Proust is absolutely clear:'In this novel...there is not one incident that is not fictional...not one character a clef.' However tightly bound to the life of its author, Proust's novel stands, without question, at the opposite pole from autiobiography; there is in it no autobiographical intention; he wrote it not in order to talk about his life but to show his readers their own lives. "Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth." Those lines of Proust's define not only the meaing of the Proustian novel; they define the meaning of the very art of the novel."
I think this is true of most art, great art, in that what we see in it is often what it tells us about ourselves. How it reflects much like a magic mirror might an unseen truth. People have told me that reading Proust changed their lives - I think what Kundera states above explains to a degree what they mean by that - how a novel or work of art can in fact change, save, or even affect us on a spiritual level.
There's a passage from Proust's By Way of Swann's or Swann's Way that I'd like to share with you, which in some ways encapsulates this:
[The narrator is describing the experience of reading a book he's recently picked up. It's on page 86 and the narrator has just told us how he's acquired a book recommended by a friend.]
" After this central belief, which moved incessantly during my reading from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part for those afternoons contained more dramatic events than does often, an entire lifetime. These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not "real", as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot life. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate. What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seem to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as migh a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain nautral phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change.) "
In short a novel or piece of art can affect us more than a real experience, for it is an experience lived in the mind, the imagination. It can change you. You can experience a piece of artwork and leave it, different. Because you have spent a moment inside a point of view you may or may not have imagined or looked in the mirror and saw something reflected back that you did not know existed. According to Kundera, that is what a novelist does - creates a work that provides the reader with a window into the reader's own soul.
There's other passages I'd love to share from both the article and Swann's Way - I've only made it to page 140, partly because I feel this overwhelming need to inhale the words on the page and discuss every ten pages in my lj. That would slow anyone down. By the way - pages 137-140 explain the titles of the volumes. He goes into detail about what by way of Swann's is and by way of Germantes. If you skimmed them, go back and re-read. Quite important thematically speaking.
Here's a sampling: " For in the environs of Combray there were two "ways" which one could go for a walk, in such opposite directions that in fact we left our house by different doors when we wanted to go one way or the other: the Meseglise-la-Vineuse way, which we also called the way by SWann's because we passed in front of M.Swann's estate when we went in that direction, and the Guermantes way. About Meseglise-la-Vineuse, to tell the truth, I never knew anything but the "way"..." Very important passage.