A Piece of Monologue: Literature, Philosophy and the Arts: Edgar Allan Poe

16.5.14

Lydia Davis on Literary Influence

From an interview in The Quarterly Conversation

Lydia Davis

From an interview between Dan Gunn and the writer and translator Lydia Davis, published in The Quarterly Conversation:

Dan Gunn: Proust’s narrator deduces that, to convey the priority of sense-impressions over pre-formulated conclusions, he needs to write à la Dostoevsky. When I read your work I am, in fact, made to think less of Dostoevsky than of Kafka, and of the way in which the familiar becomes strange in his work—his story “Hands” for example, where his narrator’s two hands appear suddenly to be alien and potentially at war with one another. If one may provisionally call such writing “phenomenal,” do you feel that part of your own work which is “phenomenal” to be working within a tradition? Or is it rather something that you developed privately and intuitively?

Lydia Davis: I think influence is a complicated thing. I am influenced by a kind of writing because I am drawn to it, open to it. I am drawn to it because there is already an affinity between my own sensibility and sense of formal structure and those of the author I am reading or studying. I would not be influenced by a writer alien to me. I really see an ongoing process that starts in earliest childhood. The very first picture books and nursery rhymes have their effect, as do songs and the lyrics of songs. My sensibility as a child is affected by these and then my changing sensibility and sense of structure show in my writings, even the stories written as assignments in grade school. And of course the influences of interactions with family and friends and teachers continue to have their effect.

I certainly read Kafka very closely and constantly for a few years—though I was reading many others at the same time, of course, like Hawthorne, Melville, Evelyn Waugh, R.L. Stevenson, Malamud, Dickens, Mary McCarthy, Poe, Emily Dickinson, James, and slews of mysteries. Something drew me to Kafka’s work, and in turn I’m sure I absorbed something of his sensibility and style. Clearly something drew me to Kafka more than to James, for instance—the spareness, the humility (whether assumed or real, or a combination), the bizarre imagination. He was interested in the possibility of two hands suddenly alien to each other; James’s interests lay elsewhere. For years I found James hard to read; I found that his prose left me no breathing room. Now I admire him. But the affinity still is not there. [Read More]

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8.6.13

Odd Type Writers

Celia Blue Johnson on writers' habits

Gertrude Stein

Celia Blue Johnson shares research she has conducted for her new book, Odd Type Writers:

Poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller was very particular about his writing process. He worked mostly at night and hung red curtains in his study so sunlight never illuminated the room. If he grew tired, Schiller would dip his feet in cold water so that he could stay awake and write. His most peculiar habit, however, involved fruit. He kept a drawer full of rotten apples in his study. The spoiled food created a stench that Schiller's friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe found repugnant. However, according to Schiller's wife, he "could not live or work without" the awful aroma.

[...]

Gertrude Stein found inspiration in the driver's seat of her Model T Ford. Stein would wait in the car while her partner, Alice B. Toklas, ran errands. She jotted down poetry and prose on scraps of paper while busy Parisian traffic zipped by. Stein owned two Fords in her lifetime: the first she dubbed Auntie after a relative who "behaved fairly well most of the time if she was properly flattered," and the second, which lacked any bells and whistles, was named Godiva, after the naked heroine.

As a young writer Virginia Woolf preferred to stand while she wrote. Her desk was three and a half feet tall. Quentin Bell, Woolf's nephew, concluded that the habit was spurred by sibling rivalry. Woolf's sister Vanessa was an artist who painted at an easel. Bell noted, "This led Virginia to feel that her own pursuit might appear less arduous than that of her sister unless she set matters on a footing of equality." Eventually Woolf transitioned from standing to sitting.

In his late twenties, James Joyce wore a white coat while he worked. He'd put it on, climb into bed, and compose his work with a blue pencil. His sister Eileen noted that the coat "gave a kind of white light" that helped him see the page. Joyce battled eye diseases throughout his life. As his sight worsened, the resourceful author magnified his entire creative process, writing intricate sentences with colored crayons on large pieces of cardboard. [Read More]

Those interested in writer routines and eccentricities might also be tempted by Mason Currey's fascinating collection, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

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8.11.12

Notes on Thomas Bernhard's Correction

Edwin Turner presents his reflections on Bernhard's novel

Thomas Bernhard

Edwin Turner (Biblioklept) presents 'Three Notes on Thomas Bernhard’s Novel Correction (Plot, Prose, and a Riff)'. Here is a snippet:

Correction reminded me often of Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Correction reminded me often of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, although Correction obviously came first, and Sebald clearly cited Bernhard as an influence.

At some of its rantier points, Correction reminded me of Notes from Underground. [Read More]

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27.9.12

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova

A new title from Contra Mundum Press

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova

From Contra Mundum Press:

Translated by Tim Wilkinson for the very first time into English from the original Hungarian, this publication, which has already received an award from the Petofi Literary Museum, may prove to be one of the most momentous releases of the decade.

Szentkuthy is hailed by many as the Hungarian equivalent of Joyce, Proust, and Musil and, to date, his works have been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Marginalia on Casanova is the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic ten volume St. Orpheus Breviary which, as Csaba Sík noted, “represents the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.”

Marginalia on Casanova is the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, Miklós Szentkuthy’s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. As Szentkuthy’s Virgil, St. Orpheus is an omniscient poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, and mentalité.

Through St. Orpheus’s method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, mutual difference and essential similarity. “Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions,” says Szentkuthy, “is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems.”

Marginalia on Casanova relives the spiritualization of the main protagonist’s sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life and more his intellectual mission, the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova’s memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy’s very own philosophy of love.

Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.

Featuring an introduction by Zéno Bianu , an afterword by Maria Tompa, the literary executor of the Szentkuthy Estate, and an original cover design by noted Hungarian artist István Orosz.

About the Author & Translator

Miklós Szentkuthy (1908-1988) is the author of masterpieces such as Prae, the St. Orpheus Breviary, Testament of the Muses, and Towards the One and Only Metaphor, and is recognized as one of the most significant and prolific Hungarian writers of the 20th century. Szentkuthy composed an oeuvre both imposing and complex, centered on the conflict between art and life, or the aspiration for holiness and eroticism. In addition to his many novels, essays, short stories, and memoire-interviews, he also translated numerous texts into Hungarian including Joyce’s Ulysses, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and works by Twain, Poe, and many others.

Tim Wilkinson has translated a number of substantial works on Hungarian history and culture including Éva Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765-1800 (1997), Domokos Kosáry, Hungary and International Politics in 1848-1849 (2003), and others. In the literary field, he has translated works by Imre Kertész and many other contemporary prose writers. The US edition of his tr. of Fatelessness was awarded the PEN American Center’s PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (2005). His tr. of Kertesz’s Fiasco is a finalist for Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award (2012).

Excerpts and Information:

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012).
ISBN 9780983697244.
20 USD, 16 GBP, 14 €.
Bookstores can order through Ingram. Otherwise, copies can be acquired through local retailers or via Amazon and similar sites worldwide.

For a review, desk copy, or interview request, write to: info@contramundum.net

Website

Contra Mundum Press

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18.7.12

Franz Kafka's Torture Machine

Art sculpture based on the harrow of Kafka's In the Penal Colony

Photograph: Marina Galperina/ANIMALNewYork

From ANIMALNewYork:

So here’s the Harrow IRL. It was originally created for an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1975. The exhibition riffed off Michel Carroughe’s essay “The Bachelor Machines,” which tied the torture device to some others by fancied in fiction and art by Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and Marcel Duchamp.

It’s an impressive machine. Kunsthalle Bern curator Harald Szeemann wants you to recognize what the machines stand for — “the omnipotence of eroticism and its negation, for death and immortality, for torture and Disneyland, for fall and resurrection.” [Read More]