One Definition of a Classic, and the Mark of Cain

A few extra days away from blogging (I hope, by the way, that those of you who were celebrating Thanksgiving in the US were able to do so happily and in good company and without too many of the distractions that pass for, and sometimes even become, 'the news')--a few extra days away from blogging and I lose my sense of direction, or am pulled in too many directions at once, which is almost the same thing.

But I just read a few lines by Italo Calvino (1923-1985) which express so clearly what I'd been hoping to express in some future post, that I can't resist quoting him for you here. The lines I'll quote are from the 1981 essay 'Why Read the Classics?', now the title essay in a posthumous compilation translated by Martin McLaughlin, and they form the ninth of Calvino's 14 definitions of 'a classic':

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

Calvino puts his finger on the strange commingling of (supposed) familiarity and unheard-of-ness that, for me, is so characteristic of my experience of 'classic' works of whatever era.

We're far removed from 'Read this--it's good for you', 'Read this--after all, I [or: your parents, your grandparents, everyone…] had to read it', or 'Read this--it's really quite well done'.

Gustave Doré, The Death of Abel

The elements of originality and surprise were in fact precisely what I had in mind when I mentioned Thomas Paine and the Bible at the end of my Jane Austen post of a couple of weeks ago. They may not be the best, or the most effective, examples for any given reader. But, as an experiment, I would invite you to read, as if for the first time, the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4:1-16, paying particular attention to what 'the mark of Cain' becomes in this account. Contrast this with what many--let's say non-readers, or pre-readers--know or believe they know about the mark of Cain. Even if the passage doesn't surprise you, you'll understand it as an example.

I'd appreciate hearing from you about this experiment, or about similar experiences you've had with other texts…

The Followed

Today's post has one and only one purpose: to introduce a concept. And a (blog) label. A concept and a label that didn't exist an hour ago.

Here's how it all began to take form. My intention, formed while sipping the first latte of the day, was to blog today about Marguerite Duras in general and (her screenplay for) Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour in particular. Duras, as regular readers of this blog may remember, is one of the writers I refer to collectively as 'the 26': a list of favorite writers that came together for me one day--in one moment, in fact--in 2009.

The 26 are for me an idiosyncratic mini-canon of authors for whom I have enormous esteem. I also have surprisingly clear and relatively unvarying feelings about who 'belongs' and who doesn't. There might be clerical (and other) errors, and changes that come with new experiences (I simply forgot to include Faulkner in the list, and in early 2009 I hadn't read Jo Nesbø yet) but there was at least no indecisiveness on my part: Balzac, a definite yes; Flaubert, no.

I'm very aware, however, that most of the 26 are what we used to call 'dead white European males'. (The only exceptions are Jane Austen, Duras, Thich Nhat Hanh and Ruth Rendell.) DWEMs tend to be included 'automatically' when we start formulating canons, and then the newly-formulated or -recognized canon (at least for some of us) brings up the whole DWEM issue in turn. Today I want to stress the 'D' term: 'dead'. Only two of the original 26 are alive: Thich Nhat Hanh (born 1926) and Ruth Rendell (born 1930). I'm very conscious of a sense that we have a different relationship to writers who are in some broad sense our contemporaries. And what has brought this home to me is not some sense of remoteness from authors of earlier eras but rather a sense that I needed to disclose or explain something about my closeness to Duras.

Marguerite Duras, who was born in 1914, died in 1996. For the last 20 years or so of her life, I followed her.

If I explain what I mean by that, it sounds like a watered-down paraphrase: 'I eagerly awaited each new publication, bought it at the earliest opportunity and read it immediately.' In reality, there was more passion in it. Note that I felt that the fact that I followed her was something that I had to disclose....

I had started reading Duras at some point in the early 1970s, reading with enthusiasm and admiration, reading books from her backlist--the Hiroshima screenplay, Moderato Cantabile, Lol. V Stein, L'amante anglaise--and towards the end of that time, something clicked for me and I had to read... well, of course, everything of hers I'd missed, but, even more passionately, every new volume as it appeared, starting, as I remember, with the screenplay Le camion.

I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that Duras in the 1970s was still perceived as at least marginally avant-garde. The great popular success of The Lover (1984) was still to come; there were even in France virtually no rack-sized paperback editions of her work. She wasn't a classic then.

And the fact that I followed her then, and for so many years thereafter, sets her apart from most of the rest of the 26. Let's risk overstating the obvious: for almost 20 years I 'went where she went'; I never lost sight of her. I didn't literally stalk her; we never met; indeed, I probably continue to have far less interest in the details of her private life (which have filled many books, both her own and others') than do the majority of her readers.

Still, when I came up with 'the Followed' as a term to designate collectively the writers whom I have read or still read in this way, I heard in that term a hint of Vince Kincaid's following of his ex-wife Miranda (in yesterday's excerpt from A Kiss Before You Leave Me) more clearly than the sense in which we speak of followers on Twitter. I want to underscore in 'the Followed' an association with the love you never quite outgrow, and such a love totally out of the context of regularization by corporations (e.g., Twitter) or groups (e.g., the totality of the 'fanbase' of a particular writer).

What writers have you 'followed' in this sense? How did it turn out?

From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 2.1 - The Artist, the Model - Striking a Pose

Beryl Bainbridge's novel about Samuel Johnson, According to Queeney, is the source of a second epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. (For the first, and more general remarks about Bainbridge, According to Queeney, and the real-life characters who appear in it, see here.) By the time I came to this passage in my first reading of Queeney I was so much in the habit of smiling indulgently or ironically over what Bainbridge's Johnson did and said (that's the explanation most charitable to me, at least), that I misread it. That's what I believe today, at any rate. I'll explain.

Johnson is of course best known to readers of our time as the subject of James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), considered by many the greatest biography ever written in English. It's a 'classic', part of our or 'our' cultural heritage, one of the 'great books'.

When Boswell is first mentioned in Bainbridge's novel, the future great book is but a gleam in its young author's eye. And Johnson, in this scene, shows little faith in Boswell's ability to capture Johnson's likeness in words:

"[Boswell's account of our conversation] will not be accurate, for man's compulsion is to replicate himself. Think of painting--one has only to examine a portrait to see in the sitter a resemblance to the artist."

Ten years ago, I smiled ironically (and wrongly, I believe) at the skepticism Johnson (Bainbridge's character) expresses about Boswell's accuracy as a verbal portraitist; today, I think, I can better entertain a 'straight' reading of the passage. I used to set more store by Boswell; today I'm more conscious of the tension between Boswell's Johnson and Hester Thrale's--i.e., between the classic, 'great books', canonical version of Johnson on one hand, and Johnson as captured by the other chronicler, who was at one time categorized by some simply as his 'mistress' but whose own writings about him and her era form an alternative account increasingly appreciated in our own time.

What first recommended these lines to me as an epigraph, though, was their introduction of the notion of involuntary self-portraiture, the muddying of distinctions between artist and model, portraitist and 'sitter'. When we first see Miranda posing for Jack, their conversation takes off from his sense that her place is to be nude, his to be clothed; hers to pose, his to depict. While he sketches (and lectures) her, she gives free reign to her imagination... inadvertently planting the seeds for one of his first 'sensations': some fifty pages later, we find him--them--at work on a diptych entitled 'His and Hers', in which artist and model appear to switch roles: in the second panel, he is portrayed as her model, nudity and all. Their differences, their dissymmetry, are by no means dissolved or even suspended: the less expected of the two panels is still an elaborate joke or stunt, and his exhibitionism cannot be cast as a simple corrective. Of course, his career and their relationship are still in the early stages.

But what about the claim made by Bainbridge's Johnson, that the portraitist transforms the sitter, in the sense that portraiture is always to some extent self-portraiture? There may well be some truth to this. Perhaps the (male, let's say) portraitist skews the portrait in his own direction--whereas the (female, let's say) model guides the development of the artist in a less predefined way. This is, at least, one possibility.