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11 - A New Region of the World
- Edited by John T. Matthews, Boston University
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- Book:
- The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner
- Published online:
- 05 May 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 April 2015, pp 164-184
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Chapter 8 - Paris and the avant-garde
- from i. - The arts
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- By Hugues Azérad, Magdalene College, Cambridge
- Edited by Adam Watt, University of Exeter
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- Book:
- Marcel Proust in Context
- Published online:
- 05 November 2013
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2013, pp 59-66
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Summary
It does not require much imagination to picture Marcel Proust, absorbed by the creation of the Recherche, sipping his café au lait, and glancing at an article on the front page of the Figaro dated 20 February 1909, enigmatically entitled ‘Le Futurisme’. Its introit is preceded by a cautionary caption stipulating that the author, Marinetti, was the representative of the most advanced and mettlesome of all past and present ‘schools’. Proust reads on and becomes immersed in a swirl of garish images extolling the beauty of planes, locomotives and cars, before the young futurists start proclaiming the eleven commandments of their manifesto. Once past his initial surprise, he may have been laughing up his sleeve when hitting the fourth point: ‘We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’ Proust was yet to write the apocalyptic passages of Le Temps retrouvé, whose images are suffused with futurist overtones (no longer induced by imagination, but by the shock of the aerial bombings of the First World War). However, fifteen months earlier (19 November 1907), he had himself published an article ‘Impressions de route en automobile’ on the front page of the Figaro, in which he rendered the lived experience of speed and movement during motoring trips in Normandy. This hymn to the motorcar was unequivocal: a new world of perceptions and sensations was offered to the budding artist, revealing aspects of reality which had been previously hidden from view. Not only are nature and its processes metamorphosed by the speed of the motorcar, but time and space are intertwined in order to reverse the pre-modern perception of the world. Nature, architecture and spatial hierarchies are ‘metaphorized’ (metaphor being the trope for ‘transport’): ‘Now, between the propagating steeples below which one saw the light which at this distance seemed to smile, the town, following their momentum from below without being able to reach their heights, developed steadily by vertical increments the complicated but candid fugue of its rooftops’ (CSB, 64).
Chapter 9 - The novelistic tradition
- from i. - The arts
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- By Hugues Azérad, Magdalene College, Cambridge, Marion Schmid, University of Edinburgh
- Edited by Adam Watt, University of Exeter
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- Book:
- Marcel Proust in Context
- Published online:
- 05 November 2013
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2013, pp 67-74
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The publication of À la recherche du temps perdu between 1913 and 1927 constitutes both a summa of and a new departure for western literature. With its guiding theme of an artistic vocation, its sensitive portrayal of a sentimental education from childhood to maturity and its quest for deeper metaphysical truths beyond the confines of the material world, the novel aligns itself with a tradition of foundational texts that have shaped European literature for almost a thousand years. Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia with its allegory of a spiritual peregrination; the analytical novel in the tradition of Madame de Lafayette; the Bildungsroman in the style of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister – not to forget the great Russian novel with its complex narrative construction and epic portraits of society – are but some of the models that resonate in Proust's novel. The author's use of a first-person narrative, sharp characterization and satirical descriptions of upper-class society recall the Mémoires of Saint-Simon – a major influence on the Recherche – while his probing analysis of human nature and relationships evokes the nineteenth-century French personal novel of authors such as Benjamin Constant, Nerval and Chateaubriand. The novel's doubling up as a philosophical treatise and an aesthetic manifesto, finally, puts it in the lineage of essayistic works such as Montaigne's Essais and Pascal's Pensées while heralding the heightened self-reflexivity that characterizes modernist and postmodern fiction. Just how indebted the Recherche is to its literary predecessors and how readily its author engages in intertextual games and pastiches can be gleaned from the extensive literary references in the text, ranging from Homer, Saint-Simon and Racine to George Eliot, Balzac and Dostoyevsky. Proust's quasi-encyclopaedic knowledge of western literature across the ages and his subtlety and flair as a literary critic have enriched and nourished his novel, endowing it with an intertextual and generic complexity matched perhaps only by his fellow modernist James Joyce. As Jean-Yves Tadié comments, ‘À la recherche recapitulates the entire literary tradition, from the Bible to Flaubert and Tolstoy, and all literary genres.’
Édouard Glissant and the Test of Faulkner's Modernism
- from Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Condé
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- By Hugues Azérad, Magdalene College, Cambridge
- Edited by Martin Munro, Celia Britton
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- Book:
- American Creoles
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 09 June 2017
- Print publication:
- 25 May 2012, pp 197-215
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926 (1996), pp. 335–56Et qu'on devrait, qu'on pourrait, à nouveau mais totalement, commencer – d'une autre sorte d'humanité
Édouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), p. 299[And that we should, we could, begin again – completely, totally – a new type of humanity (Glissant, 2000: 218)]
Les paysages faulknériens s'altèrent d'une mauve fragrance, d'une puissance de mélancolie qui font que vous avez envie […] d'en revenir à peindre votre propre paysage, proche ou lointain.
Édouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), p. 148[Faulkner's landscapes are suffused with a fragrance of mauve, with a power of melancholy that makes you feel like painting your own countryside, whether near or far (Glissant, 2000: 106)]
In Faulkner, Mississippi, Glissant provides us with an innovative reading of an author whose work we thought we already knew almost inside out. Indeed, in 1996, compared with other great modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka and Musil, Faulkner was beginning to seem outdated, ‘unsaleable’ and even undesirable within the field of literary criticism. Faulkner's heyday was under New Criticism and at the time of the White House's anti-communist policies of the 1950s and 1960s (Schwartz, 1988), and only a small number of brilliant hardliners such as Philip Weinstein, Barbara Ladd, John Mathews, Richard Godden, André Bleikasten and Claude Romano, along with a few others, have continued to explore his work and open it up to the new critical trends of the 1990s (see in particular Mathews, 2004; Ladd, 2003; 2007; Loichot, 2003; Romano, 2005; Bleikasten, 2007; Weinstein, 1996; 2006; Chrétien, 2009). Despite these endeavours, Faulkner has not survived the theoretical turns of these last decades well. It would be too easy to explain this by pointing to the latent and atavistic racism of this ‘white Southerner’, along with the complexity and apparent decline of his style (the difficulty of the books which preceded Go Down Moses (1942) was considered to be an indisputable mark of quality by pro-modernist formalists, whereas the ratiocinations of his final novels betrayed, in their view, a delirious and paternalistic humanism).