Your Proust Excerpt for Today

So I am reading Marcel Proust's massive novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and I thought I would share a passage every once in a while as I make my way through the labyrinth of prose. This time I'm reading the old Moncrieff English translation and comparing it with the original from time to time. It's a pretty good translation, I think, although I have felt compelled to make a few changes below. Here is the end of the first volume (Swann's Way in English and Du côté de chez Swann in French), which I found particularly beautiful this time:

The contradiction that it is to seek in reality the paintings in one's memory, which would always lack the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being perceived by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, all the same and at the same moment, for the Avenue to be another. The places that we have known belong now only to the world of space on which we map them for greater convenience. They were only a thin slice in the middle of the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is nothing but the regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are fleeting, alas, as the years.

La contradiction que c'est de chercher dans la réalité les tableaux de la mémoire, auxquels manquerait toujours le charme qui leur vient de la mémoire même et de n'être pas perçus par les sens. La réalité que j'avais connue n'existait plus. Il suffisait que Mme Swann n'arrivât pas toute pareille au même moment, pour que l'Avenue fût autre. Les lieux que nous avons connus n'appartiennent pas qu'au monde de l'espace où nous les situons pour plus de facilité. Ils n'étaient qu'une mince tranche au milieu d'impressions contiguës qui formaient notre vie d'alors; le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant; et les maisons, les routes, les avenues, sont fugitives, hélas, comme les années.

Translation of Interview with Don DeLillo

You have probably heard about DeLillo's new book Cosmopolis. He is going to be in France, on a book tour I think, later this month (see Don DeLillo: la chute du golden-boy, from Radio-France, September 9). Furthermore, l'Express published an interview with DeLillo by François Busnel ( "Je n'ai pas de réponse littéraire au terrorisme") on September 11. I found this interview so interesting that I have translated it here. Since what DeLillo said is coming back into English by way of French, my rendering may be far away from what he actually said: please accept my apologies.

After September 11, 2001, it seems it was rather difficult for an American writer living in the United States to express himself freely and at length. Is this still the case two years later?

Yes. A wind of insanity has, in effect, blown over this country. It has become difficult not only to protest but even to speak. That said, to protest what? Against September 11, which was an attack against America? You protest against an idea or political system, not against an attack which is an ineluctable and unforeseeable fact. Hatred and confusion have reigned for a long time: how do you protest against a group of terrorists? You must admit it's a little absurd, right? The real question is not to know if one is against or for it, to protest or accept it, but to understand it. And it's difficult to make that be heard.

To understand what?

To understand what our place should be in the world. To understand what reasons could have led to these attacks on September 11. To understand how the American way of life influences thousands of lives in the world every day.

How do you react when people tell you that, in a way, you foresaw the events of September 11 in your novels?

I don't believe that writers are prophets. Sometimes we have a tendency to see things before they happen, or well before others understand them. But it's easy for a reader to find in a novel a passage that seems, in retrospect, prophetic to him, when it is obviously not. I don't want to create a literary theory about the world to come or to pose as a prophet: that would be absurd. Besides, some of my books have nothing to do with politics and are connect to the body or to language. I do not have a literary response to terrorism.

But if you take The Players, for example, which relates in particular a terrorist attack against the same towers of the World Trade Center...

If there is in my work a permanent reference to the World Trade Center, it's above all because I saw those towers being constructed, little by little, year after year, to the point where they ended up becoming the symbol of banality in this city of skyscrapers. This is an experience only New Yorkers can understand, perhaps, but literature can share it. Over the years, I ended up getting used to those two intruders, and I stopped having negative feelings against them. Then, one day, they fell.

How do you define the role of the writer?

I hate to be the spokesperson. For me, a writer should be someone who thinks "against": against the powers that be, against big business, against uncontrolled consumerism, against unceasing waste, against everyday cynicism... I do not apply this principle consciously. When I begin writing a book, I start from a character and a situation. Nothing more. Then, when the characters take on their own dimension, when the story falls into place, over the course of weeks and years, then things insist on being recognized, to come out. We are immersed today in a "culture" so powerful that it absorbs absolutely everything, including artists, who have a tendancy to become more and more impotent, as banal as disposable products. This intellectual and economic leveling out has something equally disturbing about it: everything ends up being fabricated to be consumed instantly and safely. So, when an artist tries to write against this system, I believe it's a salutary undertaking.

Would you also say, as in Mao II, that writers have many points in common with terrorists?

Things have evolved, making that comparison more complicated. In that novel, Mao II, the main character, a writer, is convinced, in effect, that his work is related to that of terrorists. When I wrote it, at the end of the 1980s, it was partly my belief. But is truly my opinion? Perhaps, sometimes. First of all, it's the opinion of a fictional hero. I recognize that today I have trouble understanding that character. What the terrorists have gained, he thinks, writers have lost. In other words, today's novels no longer have any impact on the collective consciousness, they no longer manage to shape the world, while terrorism is the only thing that can change a society. This is rather true: what novelist of our day creates an adjective derived from his name? No one. The last was Kafka: we say of a situation that it is Kafkaesque.

Can we speak of a DeLilloesque world?

I don't think so, and I hope not... Everything makes clear that it is the dictators and the terrorists who manage to alter consciousness, to influence spirits, to shape souls, to change societies. It is they who make the news. They have become the blacksmiths of our time. That's what Bill Gray, my hero, says in Mao II. And in a sense that's what came out of September 11: terrorism became the world's narrative mode. For two years, we have been in the era of terror and terrorism. It's what dictates the law of the world. Writing no longer plays a role, the writer no longer shapes consciousness. Is there a real connection between writers and terrorists? I wouldn't theorize... But that connection seems interesting to me and should be explored.

What was the impact of September 11 on writers, and on you in particular?

It's still too early to say exactly, but it was terrible. Terrible to live through... I'm not sure that it will have a real influence on our way of writing and thinking. When Kennedy was assassinated, in November 1963, I don't think people asked themselves if his death had an impact on fiction...

And yet it's true...

Yes. In effect I have written about that time, but it was about the end of a world. Everything changed with Kennedy's death: suddenly a great confusion was born, as well as a distrust of all future governments. The idea of a plot emerged and, with it, the consciousness that the people would never again be told the truth. All of this was quite new in American culture and certainly affected my way of writing... As for September 11, which is also a terrible trauma, we have to wait... It is young writers who will tell us, in five or ten years, what its true impact is. It is they who will write about September 11. If they don't do it, then perhaps I will.

In fact, American writers hardly seem inspired by this tragedy, while there is a great tradition in United States of novelists directly in contact with the great events of their time, such as Steinbeck, Hemingway, Mailer, Jones...

That's true, but Hemingway or Mailer wrote about wars in which they had taken part. September 11 has nothing to do with "a good war," as we say. For Hemingway, for example, war was an accumulation of wounds. It was a completely natural territory for him, as it was for all who were enlisted in the Marines and produced in effect great novels, since they were confronted by the event for three or four years. September 11 is completely different: it is not a war, it happened to us suddenly, no one has had the time to live it for a long time. You can't produce a novel from this experience in the same way one produces a novel from one's time in the army.

How do you perceive New York two years later?

Everything is different. In New York, September 11 is still present in everyone's mind, but no one talks about it openly. Nothing like the rest of the country, which seems not to think about any longer. Here, people wonder if they can still live in the city, they ask themselves about their safety and the safety of their children. It's there like the invisible residue of a terrible blast. I pass through Grand Central Station every day, and I see soldiers with guns and dogs sniffing suitcases at every turn. New York seems like the capital of a third-world country which is in a state of permanent alert. We live every day in a state of emergency. This lets up from time to time, but as soon as the kernel of bad news rises up, everything takes on terribly exaggerated proportions. I believe that everyone thinks that what happened to us could happen again tomorrow.

Has behavior changed in this city that you lampoon so severely?

The psychology has changed. The train stations and some big restaurants are deserted by people who seem them as obvious targets. On the other hand, everyone has gone back to their normal life, at least in appearance. In New York, beware of appearances! New Yorkers are quite different from other Americans. Here, we are better equipped to face adversity, because New York is a town where everyone is stressed out, where everything is always urgent. In spite of that, I don't know a single New Yorker who wants to leave the city, while a resident of Los Angeles wants to leave the city because of stress. It's a city without equal. Terrifying.

In Cosmopolis, you advance a Golden Rule for anyone visiting New York: avoid visual contact. Fiction or reality?

That's reality. Visual contact has become very dangerous here. If you walk down the street, you never look someone in the eye, you never know what can happen: a look can signify a whole range of emotions, from sex to violence. This is true especially in Manhattan, around 47th Street, the Diamond District, between 5th and 6th Avenue, neighborhoods with broad or narrow sidewallks. It's for this very reason that I call this city "Cosmopolis." It was different in the weeks after September 11: we all believed a different humanity was rising. But today, all has gone back to what it was before. In Cosmopolis, my hero, Eric Packer, crosses the city in a stretch limousine with tinted windows, precisely because it spares him from all visual contact.

Cosmopolis takes place in a single day, in April 2000... We wonder if you are going to write, ultimately, this novel on September 11, 2001...

One day perhaps... I began Cosmopolis before the attacks, then I had to stop, because it was impossible to write anything at that time. But I think the key date is that very one: April 2000, that is, the moment when the financial market collapsed, when recession took over from years of enormous growth. That was the end of a world. The 20th century truly ended then, in the tumult of this day in April 2000.

Savage Review

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes and Ariana French at Artnotes have already commented on this, but in case you missed it, you should read Blake Gopnik's venemous review (A Bad Impression: At the Corcoran Gallery, Seward Johnson's Travesty in Three Dimensions, September 12) in the Washington Post of the exhibit that was the subject of my post on September 4. While I cannot say I disagree with anything Gopnik says, the tone of the review is truly nasty (e.g., "The exhibition provides the most mind-numbing, head-spinning, belly-flipping experience you're likely to come across"). However, as I predicted, more popular reactions have been positive: see the reviews in The Hoya (Matthew Lewis, Corcoran Goes "Beyond" with Impressionist Art, September 12), the National Review (Meghan Keane, Unframed: A 3-D Leap at the Corcoran, September 12), the Saturday's Child section of the Washington Post (Janice L. Kaplan, A New Dimension Is Added to Fine Art, September 12), and Washington Parent (Susan Badder, You Are Invited! Going Beyond the Frame with Seward Johnson at the Corcoran Gallery). I still believe that the Corcoran is going to make a lot of money on this exhibit.

International Arts Weblog

Art Daily reported on a very interesting project called International Art Blog, which will be online until October 13, sponsored by the Centre of Attention in London. I spent some time surfing the site, featuring reports from bloggers in Berlin, Moscow, London, Tehran, New York, Los Angeles, Lyon, San Francisco, Chicago, Brooklyn, Milan, Tokyo. Interested yet? The way they describe their activity is as a "network of operatives . . . using the power of digital technology to survey the art scenes from across the world . . . to provide an alternative version of events and to challenge the hegemony of those who persist in setting our agenda." That freedom is one of the blogosphere's greatest strengths. I'll be reading.

American Cultural Imperialism

Yes, we are doing it again, trying to destroy a foreign culture and replace it with our own. Agence France-Presse reported today (carried by TV5 as Warner/Jeunet, des fiançailles franco-américaines qui sèment la discorde, September 12) on the standoff between French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the Centre National de la Cinématographie. Jeunet began shooting his new film Un long dimanche de fiançailles [A Long Sunday of Betrothal], based on the novel by Sébastien Japrisot (winner of the Prix Interallia in 1991; translated into English as A Very Long Engagement) and featuring Audrey Tautou (from Jeunet's very successful Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain; see also Jeunet's dossier spécial on this film), last month. (Jody Foster is also rumored to have a small part, according to ForeignFilms.com. This has been confirmed on Jeunet's Web site.) So far, the CNC refuses to authorize the film, an official stamp of approval without which no French film can receive any government funding or be supported by any of the national television networks. The reason is Jeunet's alliance with the enemy, the American film industry, in the shape of media juggernaut AOL Time Warner: "It is clear that Warner is investing lots of money in the movie," a CNC official is quoted as saying, through 2003 Productions, a subsidiary of Warner France. Jeunet has said that if the CNC refuses to change its mind, his film may be delayed or even canceled. It is unlikely that that will happen, however, since the CNC sees 2003 Productions as a "possible Trojan Horse of American cinema." French law stipulates that no company dominated by non-European financial interests can receive any government support, and Warner's putative control over 2003 Productions (Warner has invested 46 million euros, or $53 million, in the film) is tantamount to "attempted breaking and entering." (What the AFP article doesn't mention is that Warner owns the film rights to Japrisot's book; Jeunet cannot make the film without Warner.)

Is this sort of reaction hyperbolic? That may be, but AFP also cites figures that American cinema makes up only 60% of the French market right now, as opposed to the rest of Europe, where the average is 80%. Charges of cultural imperialism may seem exaggerated, but try to imagine this happening to us in the United States: the majority of films available to you are in a foreign language and you have to watch them with subtitles or dubbing. We wouldn't be happy either.

In Memoriam September 11

Of course, it was a day of reflection here in Washington, with a memorial Mass celebrated by the students at my school. If anyone out there has forgotten why the United States has done what it has done, you might want to review some pictures of what happened in New York and Washington. Those images still haunt me, as does the memory of little sixth-graders and older kids, too, asking me if their parents (who work at the White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon, everywhere in Washington) are dead, as do the constant flights of military helicopters and jets over my house for the past two years.

Requiescant in pace. WE WILL NOT FORGET

Please consider making a contribution to the Memorial for the Pentagon victims, which will cost about $12 million in private funds, with no money coming from the government. Contributions can be sent by mail to:

The Pentagon Memorial Fund
P.O. Box 6285
Arlington, Virginia 22206

Now How Much Would You Pay?

The blogosphere had the August 27 story of a stolen Leonardo painting covered, so I did not post anything about it. As readers surely recall, the Madonna with the Yarnwinder (see images at left and below) was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle (on the Queensberry Estate, near Dumfries, Scotland), one of the homes of the Duke of Buccleuch. The latest theory put forward by the police focuses on an Irish gang that may have had no idea of the painting's possible value (see the post and update from Cronaca). At the time, several news articles made some obscure references to doubts about the painting's authenticity. For example, the article in The Telegraph (Castle Gang Snatches £25m Leonardo, August 28) quotes art critic Brian Sewell as saying that "the work had an 'unpleasant surface' that was not by Leonardo, but was probably finished in the master's studio by an assistant." Again as quoted by Cronaca, a report from the London Times (subscription required) cited art historian Martin Kemp of the University of Oxford who "confirmed that following recent x-ray research, he believed [the] Madonna with the Yarnwinder was a 'prime original'."

As it turns out, the London Times published another article ("Stolen Leonardo 'is really a cheap and clumsy copy'," September 10, available only to subscribers) claiming that "the thieves who thought they had stolen a Leonardo last month from a castle in Scotland may instead have the work of a minor artist." The information in that article was reported by Agence France-Presse and carried by Le Monde (Le Léonard de Vinci volé en Ecosse serait une copie selon des experts, September 10). (The London Times story was also covered by CBC News and The Australian.) Contrary to the assertions of Professor Kemp from Oxford, Renaissance specialist Jacques Franck at UCLA (I don't find him listed among the faculty of the Art History Department at UCLA; I believe he is a consultant with the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies, which is associated with UCLA), states, "The anatomy is bad, the composition is bad, the proportion of the limbs is bad." Rather than being worth 50 million euros, Professor Franck alleges that the painting is one of many copies of Leonardo's work done in the 16th century and should be valued at only 140,000 euros: "There are many errors in anatomy and execution: a master like Leonardo would not even accept the work of such a bad student." Professor James Beck of the University of California also expressed "serious doubts" (I think this may actually be the James Beck at Columbia). Prof. Dr. Frank Zöllner, director of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the University of Leipzig, emphasized the differences between this Madonna and paintings with 100% secure attributions to Leonardo: "This painting was not made by the hand of an expert in oil painting." Scholars of art history (and music history) are used to the presence of unresolved conflicts in attribution, situations in which respected authorities cling to opposing positions. Can the world of people who buy and sell valuable historical art handle it? If the Duke recovers his painting, will he still consider it to be the pride of his gallery?

REVIEW: The Rivals at the Shakespeare Theatre

The most famous play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) is probably School for Scandal, from 1777. However, his debut as a playwright in 1775 is one that most authors experience only in their dreams: after the disastrous opening of his first play, The Rivals, Sheridan rewrote and recast it to create a lasting success. In fact, one of Sheridan’s characters in this play, Mrs. Malaprop, gave her name to create the word for a type of error in speech which she exemplifies to great hilarity. From the French mal à propos (inopportune or ill-timed), a malaprop or malapropism is "the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one that sounds similar." This production at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Keith Baxter, will be presented through October 19. If you want to see a piece of theater history for yourself, you will have no better opportunity to see it done well by an excellent and exceedingly funny cast of actors and artistic team.

At the curtain call, the final bow is reserved for the two most important characters of the play, not either pair of young lovers finally united in the ultimate scene, but the blustering blowhard father Sir Anthony Absolute (David Sabin) and the "old weather-beaten she-dragon" herself, Mrs. Malaprop (Nancy Robinette). Any number of bad choices by actors could render these roles flat, vicious, and unsympathetic, nothing more than a mean-hearted old know-it-all and a ridiculous harpy who "misapprehends" her vocabulary. The secret to the success of Mr. Sabin and Ms. Robinette in this production lies in their creation of characters we genuinely like in spite of their personal foibles, which are considerable. Mr. Sabin hits exactly the right tone in Sir Anthony’s rabid barking tantrums, and Ms. Robinette puts on airs of speech ("she’s quite the queen of the dictionary") and gesture with virtuosic accuracy. These are satires of a certain class of upwardly mobile gentry that could have come right from Molière in the previous century, and they are presented and dissected with surgical precision.

As you can learn in an interview with the director, Baxter’s concept for the play was to "evoke a Gainsborough or Reynolds painting." Indeed, in one of the sets, the portrait put on the wall as Sir Anthony Absolute’s wife is a detail from the portrait of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan by Thomas Gainsborough (see image in post on September 8). Baxter says that he and set designer Simon Higlett wanted a historically accurate production, with "the sort of set and scene changes that the play would have had when it was first produced." This was impossible because the Lansburgh theater, which is an intimate and beautiful place to see live theater, has no flys. They surmounted these problems with a set of massive, neoclassical exteriors and interiors and a company of servants that create the sense of a well-appointed Georgian home. Furthermore, Baxter believed that the play can work only in its original time period, leading to a traditional production that J. Wynn Rousuck has called a "purist’s dream."

Baxter told the cast at the first rehearsal (see the transcript of his remarks) that Sheridan had created the first "romantic leading man with a sunny disposition" in Captain Jack Absolute (played so well by Hank Stratton) and Austen heroines, before Jane Austen had written any books, in Julia (Noel True) and Miss Lydia Languish (Tessa Auberjonois). The latter is a sort of female version of Don Quixote who, like the women in Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules, has read too many novels and expects her life to follow the plots of her favorite sentimental books. There are also members of other classes to ridicule, including the country bumpkin Bob Acres (Tom Story) and the bankrupt noble who instructs him in how to duel with honor, Sir Lucius O’Trigger (Floyd King). At the bottom of the social ladder are the cunning servants, Fag (Daniel Breaker), David (Edward Gero), and Lucy (Jenna Sokolowski). Rather than the all-knowing domestics who educate their masters in nobility whom we find in Beaumarchais and Italian comedy, these servants exhibit the same vices as those they serve, vanity, cowardice, and avarice, respectively. Every part in this production was well cast, and each actor plays his or her role ably.

By way of a conclusion, one thing that Weblogs create is a network of associations. Chance seems to draw things together in my mind from day to day, and because I am writing about these ideas on a daily (almost!) basis, I think I see things I would not otherwise. I have walked through the entry hall of the Lansburgh theater several times and never really noticed, until last night, the large cupronickel statue in the middle of the room. It is a somewhat stylized but still representational portrayal of King Lear (image to left above), and the sculptor is J. Seward Johnson, whose upcoming show at the Corcoran was the subject of my post on September 4.