Erec and Enide

I am having a relaxing vacation by the seashore in a place where the Internet is very spotty. Every time the fog comes in, the Internet goes out.

And when the time comes in, the fog usually comes with it. Very romantic but not good for telecommunications.

In any case, I am reading a prose translation of Chretien de Troyes and I share this from the story of Eric and Enide:

Now Erec was strong and well, cured and recovered. Now that Enide was very happy and had everything she desired, her great beauty returned to her; for her great distress had affected her so much that she was pale and wan. Now she was embraced and kissed, now she was blessed with all good things, now she had her joys and pleasures; for unadorned they lie in bed and each enfolds and kisses the other; nothing gives them so much joy. They have had so much pain and sorrow, he for her, and she for him, that now they have their satisfaction. Each vies in seeking to please the other. Of there further sport I must not speak. Now they have so welded their love and forgotten their grief that they scarcely remember it any more.

If you are married and reading this, you have your orders so get about it.

Slightly more regular posting next week.

The middlebrow's Proust continued

After the Swann in Love section, I'd go straight to the section immediately after it called "Place Names, the Name". It has a magnificent plot twist that you'll both see and not see and then, when it arrives, it is somehow thrilling even though you've come to expect it.

It's short section, the shortest section of any of the volumes of the novel. Ironically, it would have been much longer if it had been up to Proust but, because he self-published, this was all he could get for his money. It's better for being shorter. I know this is a terribly disrespectful thing to say, but À la recherche du temps perdu would have been even better if Proust had had a good editor forcing him to write shorter.

Unfortunately, all the stuff that would have been in section three of Volume 1, appears in the first part of Volume 2. There is a lot of good stuff there but there is also a lot that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. I'd skip that first section it tells of Marcel's fruitless pursuit of Gilberte and his interest in her parents. You don't need it to figure it out. By the way, many good editions come with a synopsis of events making this sort of skipping easier.

The place to go next is part 2 of Volume 2, also called Place Names, the Name. It tells the story of Marcel's visit to the seaside town of Balbec with his grandmother. It's magnificent.

Dante and fictionalized autobiography

Google says:

No results found for "Did Dante really love Beatrice?".

That astounds me. You'd think more people would have wondered about this. The simpler question, "Did Dante love Beatrice?" gets 55 hits, most of them duplicates, and the answer is yes in every single occasion.

I don't think her did. I think he used the the conventions of Provençal love poetry to write about love and that Beatrice was a handy peg to attach that love talk to. I suspect he gives us a hint of what he is really up to when he tells us of the incident in church when he supposedly looked upon Beatrice and others present imagined he was gazing at some other woman also in the line of his vision and that, this mistake made, he tells us that he decided to use this other woman as a screen for the love he really felt for Beatrice.

I think something more like the opposite is the case. Ask yourself this question then: Would it make any really profound difference if he played a double game and that his love was really for the first woman after all? I don't think it would.

Beatrice was the ideal screen, not least of all because she was dead.

I should say, by the way, that I am no Dante scholar and that I don't know of anyone else who has advanced this theory. I have zero authority and if you want to laugh in my face, go right ahead.

Why does this matter? If I am right, then Dante's La Vita Nuova is fiction and meant to be fiction. But it's not just a made up story but rather clever creative use of facts of the author's life to create a fictionalized autobiography. In other words, it is the first example of the type of writing that Proust later becomes famous for.

While I'm at it

An interesting passage  from Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent. I believe that title is a reference to Flaubert's narrative innovations.

Anyway, a little context. Our narrator has gotten tied up with a group of people writing their autobiographies. At one point she altered these by adding fictional events.

I was sure that nothing had happened in their lives and equally sure that Sir Quentin was pumping something artificial into their real lives instead of on paper. Presented fictionally, one could have done something with that poor material. But the inducing them to express themselves in life resulted in falsity.

What is truth? I could have realized these people with my fun and games with their life stories, while Sir Quentin was destroying them with his needling after frankness. When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

I haven't told you who Sir Quentin is but you can tell from the quote that he is a rival of some sort and that he is pushing for frankness and she is all for making stuff up. It seems to me that the line about "time is always redeemed" and "nothing is lost" is meant to recall Proust. At the same time, the line, "What is truth?" is meant to make us think of Pilate questioning Christ before having him crucified as recounted in John's Gospel.

What is truth in autobiography?

And that is all I have to say for now. Next week I'll give some more suggestions for the cheater's Proust.