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In Public Books, Hannah Weaver on Proust’s interpolations:
If memory is contained in a medieval manuscript, as Proust posits in these passages, then interpolation becomes a particularly apt metaphor for the involuntary memories, or “transposed sensations,” critical to the finding of lost time. The famous taste of the madeleine, the less famous stumble on uneven flagstones, the even less famous stiff napkin dabbing the mouth and tinkle of a spoon on a saucer all interpolate the narrator’s present day and bring the past surging back through the network of memory they invoke through their sensory echoes. The instability and variety inherent in these moments of interpolation produce not just art, but a new kind of time, a paradoxically extratemporal “time in the pure state” where past, present, and future collapse into one another. Proust reaches for eternity through the wormhole of interpolation, just as had the fourteenth-century scribe of the Egerton Brut.
[We can really only think about one thing at any given moment. So many of the basic techniques of art, and so much of art itself, is an attempt to get around that, to produce multiple impressions at once. No one can really take a painting in all at once, but artists make paintings that fit within a field of vision, as if that somehow makes it possible. A lot of music aims to be one continuous moment in which everything happens, with rhythm indicating not the passage of time but the division of the continuous and unified now. Even the simplest metaphors, like “Juliet is the sun,” slam two things together in the hope that they will be experienced as one thing. It is not so much that past, present, and future collapse into one another as that—as I think was true before the beginning of time, and will be true again after the end—there is only present.
If I could I’d have the readers of this newsletter read every excerpt at the same time. —Steve]
In the Times, Carlos Lozada on reading the Kent Family Chronicles, which John Jakes wrote to celebrate the bicentennial of the United States:
When I first read these books, I paid little attention to the family business; the Kents might as well have been blacksmiths instead of wordsmiths. Now I know that they could have been nothing other than writers and publishers, devoted to inquiry. In a country forever reconsidering its story, they were the ones producing new editions.
That “inestimable value” of words and writers comes up repeatedly. One Kent dines with Samuel Clemens; another stands with Walt Whitman as a bar brawl looks to break out. On the eve of the Civil War, a Kent interviews Abraham Lincoln for the Union newspaper, and the president discusses the influence on the nation of books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Impending Crisis of the South by Hinton Helper. “They always say it’s the politicians who cause trouble for common folk,” Lincoln muses, “but I sometimes wonder if it isn’t our authors who set off the firecrackers first.”
[Is the affliction I think of as “Forrest Gump (1994) disease” widespread in other nations, or is it peculiar to Americans, as many things are? I suppose any attempt at historical fiction without a historical sense must inevitably devolve into that sort of thing, as if history were a series of random events that your teachers happened to mention while you were at school and paying attention. —Steve]
In Fence Digital, Tanner Stening on recent novels by poets:
The features of millennial culture—angst, art, identity; or, more accurately, angst about art and identity—come through loud and clear. But the debut novel is rarely a site of mastery—let alone of materials that more than hint at its own impossibility. Instead, the poet-novelist takes to the loose-fitting form of the Künstlerroman, the “artist’s novel,” and inflects it further with the sentence-level devices of poetry—a prose often inflated with what Hazlitt once called “common-place ornaments” or “pleasing excrescences” aimed solely at “captivating the reader.” For several of these poets, the tendency is much the same. Deeper truths about their subjects elude, as the tradeoff becomes one of insight for a kind of purple discursivity. To my mind, the results fit with what Brittney Allen describes as the “millennial midlife crisis novel,” only the crisis is forever unresolvable and, worse, self-defeating. Here is how Aria Aber’s debut Good Girl (January) begins: “I had been lifted out of the low-income district of hopelessness and sent to one of the best schools in the country, and yet here I was, my mother was dead, soon the city would be covered in snow again, and I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.”
[F. Scott Fitzgerald hardest hit. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
When can we finally read Sylvia Plath?
Various motivations for reading in public
Grace on a Poem by John Burroughs and waiting
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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