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I'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. ( Listening to Spainish Guitare )
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.
( About Albertine, who apparently appears in the second volumn of In Search of Lost Time and the divine alchemy of the novel )
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.
( Description of Way by Swann's literally. )
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. ( Listening to Spainish Guitare )
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.
( About Albertine, who apparently appears in the second volumn of In Search of Lost Time and the divine alchemy of the novel )
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.
( Description of Way by Swann's literally. )
