How Terrence Malick Constructed To The Wonder

On Malick's filmmaking process

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

From Bilge Ebiri (Vulture):

Terrence Malick’s films have always been divisive, and To the Wonder, which hit theaters and video on demand last weekend, is proving more divisive than most. (Our own David Edelstein, for one, was not a fan.) The film is a lyrical, moody tale about a couple (played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko) who find themselves increasingly alienated from each other when they move from Paris to Oklahoma, where the man reconnects romantically with a woman from his past (Rachel McAdams). Built out of fragmentary moments, glimpses of memories, and occasionally even visions, overlaid with quietly ruminating voice-over, the film has struck some as a particularly Malick-y Terrence Malick film.

But regardless of the opinion on any of his individual works, there remains a fascination and curiosity about Malick’s filmmaking process, which has in recent years become even more distinct and unorthodox. Over the course of his career, Malick has put together a team of creative allies — including cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, production designer Jack Fisk, costume designer Jacqui West, and first assistant cameraman Erik Brown — who have been able to embrace a very organic style of filmmaking, one that’s often improvisatory in a way most filmmakers try to avoid. “When we sat down at first to discuss this film,” says producer Nicolas Gonda, “we didn’t talk about a script, but rather a way of working.”

While Lubezki himself notes, in this recent American Cinematographer interview, that he did insist on seeing a script, the producers and the actors were content to work mostly from Malick’s treatment and his own descriptions of the story. Malick wrote voraciously throughout preproduction, filming, and postproduction. Usually these pages consisted simply of characters’ internal thoughts. “At first, Terrence just told me the story,” says Kurylenko, who plays Marina. “Once we started shooting, I’d get ten or fifteen pages every morning describing the mood of my character.” Different actors would get different pages, each describing their own internal thoughts. “You never really walk through a scene with Terry. He wants everything to be spontaneous, without you having any time to overthink it.”

Nowhere in To the Wonder was this approach more evident than in the film’s early scenes in Paris and the island of Mont Saint-Michel (whose nickname, “le merveille,” French for “the wonder,” gives the film its title), off the northwest coast of France. Working in France with a reduced crew of about eight people and a shoot schedule of just a couple of days, Malick’s style was quicker and more impulsive than ever. Ever since they first worked together on 2005’s The New World, he and Lubezki have put together a set of unwritten “rules” that allow them to shoot quickly and freely; among them is the fact that they almost exclusively use natural or available light. They also often shoot handheld or with a Steadicam. (Lubezki was unable to accompany the crew to France, so he gave instructions to cameraman and Steadicam operator Joerg Widmer for these scenes.) “At this point, watching [Lubezski], Joerg, and Terry, it’s actually kind of funny, because even their body language is the same now,” says producer Sarah Green, whose collaboration with Malick also dates back to The New World. “They’re like a band that’s been playing together for years. The camera has to move and the focus puller has to adjust without Terry necessarily having to tell them what to frame — but they know what he will respond to.”

[...]

Although many of the actors never saw a script for To the Wonder, there was still a lot of dialogue shot for the film — much of it taken off Malick’s daily pages for the cast. “We wouldn’t have to read the lines literally,” Kurylenko says. “Terry leaves you free to say the lines or to not say them.” This, too, is a style of working the director has perfected over the years: He gives his actors dialogue to get them thinking about certain things, but then shoots the scene in a variety of ways, doing some takes without the dialogue or cutting it out in post. There were numerous arguments full of shouting and wounding dialogue filmed between Neil and Marina in the film’s Oklahoma scenes, most of which only exist in spectral fashion in the finished work — seen as glimpses and fragments. “The scenes in Oklahoma were incredibly dark,” Kurylenko says. “A lot darker than what was in the final film.” In editing, however, Malick discovered that such dialogue often had the effect of making the characters seem small, whereas he was going for something more elemental, almost mythic. In casting, producer Sarah Green recalls that Malick looked for actors who “really could stand in for the male and female of the species — who seemed iconic in that way.”

As prompts for the actors, Malick shared representative works of art and literature. For Affleck, he suggested Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. (Affleck read Martin Heidegger on his own, having known that Malick had translated one of the German philosopher’s works as a grad student.) For Kurylenko, he also recommended Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — specifically, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot. “Those books were, in a way, his script,” she says. But he did more than give the actors the books; he suggested ways to approach the texts and characters to focus on. So, for example, he recommended that Kurylenko read The Idiot with a particular eye on two characters: the young and prideful Aglaya Yepanchin, and the fallen, tragic Nastassya Filippovna. “He wanted me to combine their influences — the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side. ‘For some reason, you only ever see that combination in Russian characters,’ he said to me.”

In fact, Malick will use existing works of art and literature as touch-points with virtually all of his cast and crew. “It enables them to have a common vernacular on set that’s not about technique, but emotion — a shared memory,” Gonda says. For example, with the producers, the director often referenced paintings. With camera operator Widmer, who is also an accomplished musician, the references were often musical. With his editing team, Malick often passed out books such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. But he would also reference other films: Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, with its heavy and unique use of voice-over, was a constant reference point. (At one point, the score for Truffaut’s film was used as part of a temp soundtrack.) Malick is also a huge fan of Jean-Luc Godard and often referenced Godard films such as Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, and Vivre Sa Vie, for their elliptical narrative and editing styles. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy
• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick
• Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven
• Terrence Malick: act of creation
• Paul Thomas Anderson: An Autocritique

Not-So-Dead Letters

New issue of American Book Review available to read online

Patrick Bixby introduces a new issue of American Book Review with a discussion of letters and correspondences:

Letters address our desire to speak with – or, at least, eavesdrop on – the dead. Reviewing the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett in the spring of 2009, J. M. Coetzee praised the editorial work that went into collecting, collating, and annotating the massive tome, but lamented the constraint placed on the editors by Beckett himself – that the letters would be “[reduced] to the passage only having bearing on [his] work.” The problem, according to Coetzee, is that “in the case of a great writer… every word that he pens can be read as having bearing on his work.” The reviewer thus anticipates a day “when, all legal restrictions having expired, the distinction between literary and private will be dropped and the entire archive will be thrown open.” So much for the Flaubertian wish that the artist might become inaccessible to posterity, leaving only his art. But Coetzee’s anticipation is entirely understandable, particularly given the provocative glimpses of Beckett’s friendships, love affairs, and personal difficulties offered in the volume, even if it is surprising coming from one of the most assiduously private authors of our time. Letters, perhaps especially the letters of a celebrated author, promise to reveal the subjectivity of their writer in a way that no other form does – even the most informal or artless correspondence may provide a glimpse of the living will of the absent, the dead. In the age of Facebook, it seems that we still desire, or desire all the more, what media theorists have come to call “prosthetic intimacy,” mediated access to the private lives of others, if only so that we can better appreciate their professional activities.

To be sure, Coetzee’s wish to access the entire archive of Beckett’s private correspondence speaks to motives that are both outdated and entirely contemporary: the aim of biographical criticism, of the sort that Flaubert scorned, to shed light on literary works by reference to the interests, experiences, and peculiarities of their author; and the effort of the so-called “new modernist studies” to understand literary texts in relation to the network of discursive and material practices associated with modernity. When I began working with Beckett’s correspondence as a graduate assistant in the late nineties, my classmates could wonder aloud, with Barthes’s announcement of the “death of the author” still ringing in their ears, whether there was any value in compiling such biographical materials. But with the expansion and reconfiguration of the field of modernist studies in this century, which was already underway at that earlier moment, a narrow focus on textuality and tradition has gradually given way to revived interest in the authorial figure – now as a site where various cultural traditions, social norms, political forces, collective affects, technological potentialities, and that most problematic of notions, “personal experiences,” converge. This is not to say that attention to literary letters has become, or should be, strictly “academic.” Coetzee announces a more general fascination with the lives of writers, with the intermeddling of the personal and the professional, as evinced in the enormous wealth of literary letters that have seen publication in recent years. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Blanchot and Beckett's Letters
• J. M. Coetzee on Beckett's Letters
• John Banville on Samuel Beckett's Letters
• Gabriel Josipovici reviews Beckett Letters 1941-1956

Beckett and Animals

A new collection of essays edited by Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals
Edited by Mary Bryden
University of Reading

20% discount if ordered before 28 February 2014
Order online at www.cambridge.org/beckett14
or enter the discount code beckett14 at the checkout

The animals that appear in Samuel Beckett's work are diverse and unpredictable. They serve as victim and persecutor, companion and adversary, disconcerting observers and objects oblivious to the human gaze. Bringing together an international array of Beckett specialists, this is the first full-length study to explore the significance of the animals that populate Beckett's prose, drama and poetry. Essays theorise a broad spectrum of animal manifestations while focusing on the roles that distinct animal forms play within Beckett's work, including horses, sheep, cats, dogs, bees, insects and others. Contributors situate close readings within a larger literary and cultural context, drawing on thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben, and on authors such as Flaubert, Kafka and Coetzee. The result is an incisive and provocative collection that traverses disciplinary boundaries, revealing how Beckett's creatures challenge conventional notions of species identity and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

Hardback £55.00 Discount price £44.00

Contents

List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations
Introduction, by Mary Bryden

Part I: Animality

1. Shane Weller, ‘Forms of Weakness: Animalisation in Kafka and Beckett’;
2. Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Beckett, Coetzee, and Animals’;
3. Mary Bryden, ‘The Beckettian Bestiary’;
4. David Wheatley, ‘”Quite Exceptionally Anthropoid”: Species Anxiety and Metamorphosis in Beckett's Humans and Other Animals’;
5. Naoya Mori, ‘”An Animal Inside”: Beckett/Leibniz’s Stone, Animal, Human and the Unborn’;
6. Ulrika Maude, ‘Pavlov's Dogs and Other Animals in Samuel Beckett’;
7. Yoshiyuki Inoue, ‘Little Animals in the Brain: Beckett's “porteurs de la mémoire”’.

Part II: The Specificity of Animals

8. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘”Think, Pig!”: Beckett's Animal Philosophies’;
9. Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Beckett's “Necessary” Cat(s)’;
10. Steven Connor, ‘Making Flies Mean Something’;
11. Joseph Anderton, ‘”Hooves!”: The Equine Presence in Beckett’;
12. Angela Moorjani, ‘The Dancing Bees in Samuel Beckett's Molloy: The Rapture of Unknowing’;
13. Chris Ackerley, ‘”Despised for Their Obviousness”: Samuel Beckett's Dogs’;
14. Julie Campbell, ‘Beckett and Sheep’;
15. Maximilian de Gaynesford, ‘”Eyes in Each Other's Eyes”: Beckett, Kleist, and the Fencing Bear’;
16. Brigitte Le Juez, ‘Words Without Acts: Beckett's Parrots’.

Index

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Who is Beckett's Godot?
• A Companion to Samuel Beckett
• University of Reading: Beckett Conference 2009

Texts in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

Online access to works by Flaubert, Diderot, Chateaubriand and others

W. G. Sebald

From The Public Domain Review (thank you to Ana Arp for the link):

At the time of his death in 2001 at the age of 57, the German writer W.G. Sebald was cited by many critics as a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was his book The Rings of Saturn, written in 1995 (translated into English in 1998), which went a long way to securing Sebald’s reputation as a writer pioneering a new kind of literary fiction. The book is exemplary of his strange and unique style: the hybridity of genres, the blurring of fact and fiction, the indistinct black and white photographs, and his meditation on the destructive nature of history, the human lives affected, and the restorative power of art.

The book is, on one level, a walking tour through the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, Sebald’s adopted home (he’d taught literature at the UEA there since 1970). The reader moves with the melancholic narrator from town to town, village to village, but in the process – through an astonishing network of associations, tangents, and apparent coincidences – one is led all over the world, into many different times, and many different lives. A ride on a miniature railway at Somerleyton Hall leads to 19th century China and the Taiping Rebellion; a chance meeting with a gardener to the bombing raids of the Second World War; a T.V. documentary on Roger Casement to Joseph Conrad, the Congo and colonial genocide; a browse through the Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room to a meditation on wartime statistics and the tragedies wrought by the two world wars. In and amongst these meandering connections recurring motifs of silk, obscuring mists, combustion and burning are woven throughout to create an intricately patterned whole.

Among the many lives of the past encountered is a myriad array of literary figures. Collected together in this post are the major (public domain) texts of which, and through which, Sebald speaks – accompanied by extracts in which the texts are mentioned. The list begins and ends with the great polymath Thomas Browne, an appropriate framing as the work of this 17th century Norfolk native has a presence which permeates the whole book. Indeed, in the way he effortlessly moves through different histories and voices, it is perhaps in Browne’s concept of the ‘Eternal Present’ which Sebald can be seen to operate, in this mysterious community of the living and the dead. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• W. G. Sebald reads Austerlitz
• Will Self and Others on W. G. Sebald
• Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm

Christopher Ricks on Lydia Davis

From an article in the Times Literary Supplement

Lydia Davis (Source)

From Christopher Ricks (TLS):

Lydia Davis was born in 1947 in Northampton, Massachusetts. Among her volumes of fiction there is a novel, The End of the Story (1995). The beginning of the story – of the stories – is now taken by her and her publishers to be Break It Down (1986), followed by Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001), and Varieties of Disturbance (2007). These constitute The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, more than 700 pages, 200 writings, the shortest a sentence or even less, the longest about forty pages. Writings, because just how to characterize them is to the point (at first, anyway), and has its power to intrigue. They fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts, or in the Beckett idiom, textes? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations? This last, in the double sense of T. S. Eliot’s first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, where “observations” are the claims both of the perceptive eye and of the wise mind, both the remarkings and the remarks. Lydia Davis herself, in an interview: “I am very curious about strangers I observe – as in a bus line”. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lydia Davis Wins Booker International Prize 2013
• Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary
• Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations
• Lydia Davis on very short stories
• Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations

That Other Word: Episode 10

A free online podcast discussing literature and translation

An announcement from That Other Word:

That Other Word is a podcast run jointly by Daniel Medin (Center for Writers and Translators, Paris) and Scott Esposito (Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco).

Each episode features a discussion between Daniel and Scott on recent noteworthy literature in translation, and then an in-depth interview with writers, translators, editors, and publishers. The podcast hopes to celebrate and explore various and under-appreciated aspects of translation, not only into and out of English, but other languages as well.

Prompted by the forthcoming publication of Italo Calvino’s Letters 1941-1985, hosts Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito embark on a discussion of literary lives and letters. They touch upon the marvelous correspondences of Thomas Bernhard and William Gaddis, and look forward to the lectures collected in Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature. Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Years of Insight, technically the final volume in a biographical trilogy, represents a welcome addition to English-language Kafka scholarship. Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, a grotesque and haunting semi-autobiographical tale of the Second World War, returns after many years out of print. The introduction closes with a plea from the hosts to Anglophone publishers not to ignore biographies produced elsewhere: Michel Winock’s Flaubert and Madame de Staël, among many others, they argue, deserve a broader readership.

Daniel Medin is then joined by Esther Kinsky, a poet and translator from Polish, Russian, and English into German. Her speciality is Polish literature from the First World War to the 1960’s, and she offers wonderful introductions to some of her favorite writers of that period, including Zygmunt Haupt, who lived in the United States and continued to write in Polish even though his own children did not speak the language, Wiesław Myśliwski, whose Stone Upon Stone recently appeared in English, and Joanna Bator, whose poetic works Kinsky is currently translating. During their conversation, Kinsky and Medin discuss the lives and work of these writers, consider what has kept Eastern European (and particularly Hungarian) poetry and fiction so robust, and discuss the revival of reportage as a genre in Poland. Esther Kinsky also shares an enchanting story about what prompted her to become a translator, muses on the relationship between translating and writing, and mentions her own newest book of prose, whose German title (Fremdsprechen) she roughly translates as “talking something into foreignness.”

Podcast

Listen to Episode 10 on That Other Word website.

Links

The American University of Paris: Center for Writers and Translators
Center for Writers and Translators: Facebook
Center for Writers and Translators: Twitter

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• That Other Word: Free Literature Podcast
• That Other Word: Episode 7
• That Other Word: Episode 8
• That Other Word: Episode 9
• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• Sylph Editions at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

Nabokov and Flaubert's Early Writing Attempts

Excerpt from an article in The New Yorker

Vladimir Nabokov

From Benjamin Lytal (New Yorker) (link via 3:AM Magazine): ‘A first novel is like spring lamb, tender and pink. Athenas that leap from the writer’s head armor-clad—Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” say—may not count. Better to find a novel that requires indulgence—Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise” or Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Débuts, even from much tougher writers, allow the reader to enjoy a guilty sense of paternalism: you protect débuts like Naipaul’s droll “Miguel Street,” or James’s thin “Daisy Miller,” or Coetzee’s compacted, miserable “Dusklands,” from the full force of your regular expectations.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Plummer plays Vladimir Nabokov on Kafka
• Vladimir Nabokov: Literary Psychologist
• New Nabokov editions from Penguin
• Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov
• Lydia Davis on Madame Bovary and Vladimir Nabokov
• Posy Simmonds on Gustave Flaubert

Outside Literature: Lars Iyer on Exodus

Tim Smyth talks to Iyer about his latest novel

Lars Iyer, Exodus

From The Quarterly Conversation:

Since the appearance of his novel, Spurious, in 2011, Lars Iyer has made a challenging and vigorous contribution to our sense of the importance of literature and thought in our vexed cultural moment. The intellectual anguish and inventive bickering of his two UK philosophy professors sees him steer a middle course between Mercier and Camier and Withnail and I. His combination of almost-total bleakness and bracing humour enables him to dip perilously close to despair, only to escape at the last minute.

With the sequel to Spurious, Dogma, Iyer confirmed his importance as part of an “enclave outside literature,” whose work extends the territory outside the contemporary canon to new and challenging distances. This novel extended W.’s and Lars’s itinerary across America, with little more than Plymouth Gin and the word omoi for company. As the humour deepens, so too does the despair, recalling both the Thomas Bernhard of Frost and Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show.

The final instalment of Iyer’s trilogy, Exodus, is the funniest, most hopeful, most despairing, and most gin-soaked episode of the three. Despite the impossibility of true endings, it is a final instalment—and a satisfying one at that. I talked to Lars, via email, over the course of nearly two months, during which we talked about hot tubs, the Bible, endings, and the collapsing borders of literature. [Read the Interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Walking with Walser

New reviews from The Quarterly Conversation

K. Thomas Kahn reviews Robert Walser's A Little Ramble: In the Spirit of Robert Walser (translated by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky) and Elfriede Jelinek's Her Not All Her (translated by Damion Searls) in The Quarterly Conversation:

What is “a writer’s writer”? Although the phrase is often used both haphazardly and problematically, there is something inherently useful about it when discussing the enduring legacy of certain authors. The OED attributes the first use of the term “a writer’s writer” to Orwell, who uses this description when writing about Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is particularly fitting, perhaps, as Julian Barnes—in his London Review of Books review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary—brings Davis’s own discussion of Hopkins’s work to bear on what Barnes refers to as Davis’s status as “a writer’s writer’s writer.”

Recently, too, J. M. Coetzee’s assessment of Gerald Murnane’s work in The New York Review of Books raises this question of inspiration and influence: as Coetzee himself is often described as “a writer’s writer,” does his praise of Murnane’s literary output cast Murnane into the realm of “a writer’s writer’s writer”? To be sure, while the term “a writer’s writer” is often ascribed to “difficult” prose, such as Proust’s and Beckett’s, it’s usually used to emphasize their influence on other writers and artists.

Swiss-born modernist Robert Walser is perhaps the most unsung of these influential “writer’s writers,” and two recent collaborative texts underscore his ability to speak across artistic mediums. A Little Ramble: In the Spirit of Robert Walser, to be published in April by New Directions, includes short microscript pieces by Walser himself, as well as essays, creative writing, and art objects ranging from installation pieces to etchings, all of which speak to Walser’s own microscripts. This collection stems from a series of exhibitions curated by the late Donald Young in Chicago from December 2011 to October 2012, who, in his introduction, explains how he “became more and more interested in the connection between [Walser’s] writings and certain contemporary artists.” Another text, Austrian writer and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s dramatic monologue Her Not All Her, with intercalated images by Thomas Newbolt, is collaborative in that Jelinek asserts in her subtitle that she is writing the piece “On/With Robert Walser.” In his afterward, Reto Sorg notes how Jelinek’s own text mixes with those of Walser: “It is almost impossible to tell when any given utterance has Jelinek speaking directly or when she is quoting texts by or about Walser, since the voices and languages intertwine, overlap, and blend together.” Indeed, the very title of Jelinek’s piece (in German, er nicht als er) is itself “formed out of the sounds of Robert Walser’s name.”

Texts like these demonstrate not only Walser’s effect on the literary and aesthetic work in world literature half a century after his death but also his status as a niche author, a seeming prerequisite for any “writer’s writer.” Although Hermann Hesse has famously remarked that if Walser “had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place,” his continued status as a marginal “writer’s writer” also causes a sense of protection and adoration to be aroused in his admirers; as one of Walser’s major English-language translators, Christopher Middleton, puts it: “Robert Walser was known only to a happy few, and his writing has a resistant purity which will keep any larger public, I hope, at bay forever.” Similar strains of idolizing homage and protective insulation are found in both A Little Ramble and Her Not All Her. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald on Robert Walser
• J. M. Coetzee on Robert Walser
• Robert Walser, The Microscripts
• Robert Walser, Selected Stories
• Robert Walser, The Walk
• Elfriede Jelinek, Her Not All Her

Posy Simmonds on Gustave Flaubert

British newspaper cartoonist and illustrator on her love of Flaubert's work

From Culturetheque IFRU (link via Espen Terjesen): 'Posy Simmonds is a British newspaper cartoonist, and writer and illustrator of children's books. She's been associated for a long time with The Guardian, for which she has drawn the cartoons Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, both later published as books. She lives in London.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Gustave Flaubert's Personal Effects
• Lydia Davis on Madame Bovary and Vladimir Nabokov
• Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Gustave Flaubert's Personal Effects

An illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Illustration: Joanna Neborsky. Source. (Click image to enlarge)

Joanna Neborsky has illustrated a list of the objects found in Gustave Flaubert's home 12 days after he died. The original list was compiled by M. Lemoel on May 20, 1880. You can read the complete list on The Paris Review website. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Writers' Rooms: Iain Sinclair
• Writers' Rooms: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Writers' Rooms: Siri Hustvedt

David Denby on Fyodor Dostoyevsky

'Can Dostoevsky still kick you in the gut?'

Source

David Denby writes about Fyodor Dostoyevsky for The New Yorker blog Page Turner:

Many people would say that Dostoevsky’s short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. (Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856.) Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” perhaps Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and half of Woody Allen’s work wouldn’t have been the same without the existence of this ornery, unstable, unmanageable text—the fictional confession of a spiteful modern Hamlet, an inhabitant of St. Petersburg, “that most abstract and pre-meditated city,” and a man unable to act and also unable to stop humiliating himself and embarrassing others. A self-regarding, truculent, miserable, paralyzed man. As I began reading “Notes” again recently (in Andrew R. MacAndrew’s translation for Signet Classics), I wondered if it had been overwhelmed by the books and movies that it has influenced. I wondered if “Notes” would seem like a dim echo, whether it still had the shock value that I remember from long ago. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time
• Life of a Dostoyevsky Translator
• Diurnal vs. Nocturnal Writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?

The Making of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

Aashish Kaul unravels some of the themes behind Sebald's novel

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

An extract from Aashish Kaul's recent article in The Quarterly Conversation:

Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was already in his fiftieth year, and his third decade of residence in East Anglia, when he began to write of the walk he had taken two years before in the Suffolk country to dispel, he tells us, the strange emptiness which had come to fill him suddenly. Ironically enough, however, the walk soon became distressing as he took in, with ever-growing uneasiness, the traces of destruction reaching far back into the past that locked his gaze wherever he turned. Such was his horror upon return, he would have us believe, that, in due course, he had to be rushed to a hospital in a state of near paralysis. But once there, what the body had lost the mind gained, and before long it was soaring higher and higher with each tilt of the wings to view from above that Suffolk expanse, which, like the Borgesian Aleph, had now shrunk to a single spot, rightly so, devoid of all sensation. And yet, all the eye saw as the mind inscribed the words in its own cell was a colorless patch of sky framed in a window with a black mesh. In time, unable to hold his curiosity any longer, the writer went crawling like Gregor Samsa up to the window, from where peering down at the now utterly alien place, buildings and carparks rose up like fields of rubble or immense boulders to meet him. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald, Across Land and Water
• W. G. Sebald as Academic
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• James Wood on Sebald's Austerlitz

Lydia Davis on Madame Bovary and Vladimir Nabokov

Writer and translator talks about Madame Bovary, Nabokov's Marginalia, and Translation

Author and translator Lydia Davis discusses how she used Nabokov's margin notes from his edition of Madame Bovary to aid her own translation. She also discusses in-depth translation choices that she made. A full audio recording of this event can be heard at the Center for the Art of Translation website (link via 3:AM Magazine) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lydia Davis on very short stories
• Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations
• Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary

Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary

From an article in The Paris Review

Photograph by Mathi09

Biblioklept has posted a quote from Lydia Davis' recent essay in The Paris Review, 'Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary': 'The quality and nature of a translation (let’s say from the French) depends on at least three things: the translator’s knowledge of French language, history, and culture; his or her conception of the task of the translation; and his or her ability to write well in English. These three variables have subsets that can recombine infinitely, which is why one work can have such widely differing translations.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot at Station Hill
• Lydia Davis on very short stories
• Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

Literary Friendships

Biographical connections between writers, poets and philosophers

Accredited Online Colleges has compiled a list of '11 Literary Friendships we can learn from', including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson [Read More]

Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel

French theorist's lectures explore the writing process

Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel

Columbia University Press are publishing a new book from the French critical theorist Roland Barthes. Entitled The Preparation of the Novel, it comprises a collection of lectures which 'move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel' (link via Conversational Reading):

Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way.

Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust.

This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing. [Read more]

Publisher's website: Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980), Columbia University Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
• Neil Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies
• Michael Wood on Roland Barthes
• Reading on Roland Barthes on Reading
• Roland Barthes on Cafés
• In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author
• An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments

Banville: Franz Kafka's other trial

John Banville on Kafka, Felice Bauer and Elias Canetti

Kafka and Felice Bauer. Photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS

In an article for The Guardian, novelist John Banville revisits Franz Kafka's distinctive novel, The Trial, and, with reference to short stories, letters and diary entries, discusses the themes that have made it a contemporary classic:

The artist, says Kafka, is the one who has nothing to say. By which he means that art, true art, carries no message, has no opinion, does not attempt to coerce or persuade, but simply – simply! – bears witness. Ironically, we find this dictum particularly hard to accept in the case of his own work, which comes to us with all the numinous weight and opacity of a secret testament, the codes of which we seem required to decrypt. The Trial, we feel, cannot be merely the simple story of a man, Josef K, who gets caught up in a judicial process – the book's German title is Der Prozeß – that will lead with nightmarish inevitability to his execution. Surely it is at least an allegory of fallen man's predicament, of his state of enduring and irredeemable guilt in a world from which all hope has been expunged. Yet the book has its direct sources in the mundane though extreme circumstances of Kafka's own life, and specifically in what Elias Canetti calls Kafka's "other trial".

It is surprising at first to learn that Flaubert was Kafka's favourite writer, yet Kafka, as a moment's reflection will show, was every bit as strong a realist as the author of Madame Bovary or (the master's work that Kafka most admired) L'Éducation sentimentale. Poor Max Brod, the friend whom Kafka on his deathbed enjoined to burn his unpublished manuscripts, has been scoffed at for his determination to present Kafka as a religious writer, but the misapprehension is understandable. The Trial, The Castle and especially the stories, feel like religious parables – the chapter in The Trial called "In the Cathedral" might be a passage from one of the more obscure books of the Bible, or a gnomic exercise out of the Talmud. [Read more]

John Banville, 'Rereading: John Banville on Kafka's other trial'

guardian.co.uk, 14 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka's The Trial
• Introducing... Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (Folio Society)
• Writers' Autographs

Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

A survey of distinguished authors and thinkers

I have always been fascinated by the daily rituals and routines that govern people's everyday lives. Daily Routines has compiled a wide and varied selection of such rituals, taken from interviews and biographies of some of the world's most distinguished writers and thinkers. It makes for fascinating reading - even if browsing the daily routines of others leaves little time for our own:

Paul Auster:

The usual. I got up in the morning. I read the paper. I drank a pot of tea. And then I went over to the little apartment I have in the neighborhood and worked for about six hours. After that, I had to do some business. My mother died two years ago, and there was one last thing to take care of concerning her estate—a kind of insurance bond I had to sign off on. So, I went to a notary public to have the papers stamped, then mailed them to the lawyer. I came back home. I read my daughter’s final report card. And then I went upstairs and paid a lot of bills. A typical day, I suppose. A mix of working on the book and dealing with a lot of boring, practical stuff. [Read More]

Will Self:

Rituals. Smoking--pipes, cigars, special brands, accessories, the whole bollocks. Coffee, tea, strange infusions--I have a stove on my desk. Fetishising typewriters, pens, etc. Overall, though, I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer. [Read More]

Gustave Flaubert:

Days were as unvaried as the notes of the cuckoo. Flaubert, a man of nocturnal habits, usually awoke at 10 a.m. and announced the event with his bell cord. Only then did people dare speak above a whisper. His valet, Narcisse, straightaway brought him water, filled his pipe, drew the curtains, and delivered the morning mail. Conversation with Mother, which took place in clouds of tobacco smoke particularly noxious to the migraine sufferer, preceded a very hot bath and a long, careful toilette involving the regular application of a tonic reputed to arrest hair loss. At 11 a.m. he entered the dining room, where Mme Flaubert; Liline; her English governess, Isabel Hutton; and very often Uncle Parain would have gathered. Unable to work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or what passed for such in the Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal consisted of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. The family then lounged on the terrace, unless foul weather kept them indoors, or climbed a steep path through woods behind their espaliered kitchen garden to a glade dubbed La Mercure after the statue of Mercury that once stood there. Shaded by chestnut trees, near their hillside orchard, they would argue, joke, gossip, and watch vessels sail up and down the river. Another site of open-air refreshment was the eighteenth-century pavilion. After dinner, which generally lasted from seven to nine, dusk often found them there, looking out at moonlight flecking the water and fisherman casting their hoop nets for eel. [Read More]

Franz Kafka:

Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka's writing day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 AM until 2:30 PM. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11 PM (as Begley points out, the letter- and diary-writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then "depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o'clock, once even till six in the morning." Then "every imaginable effort to go to sleep," as he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse. [Read More]

J. M. Coetzee:

"Coetzee," says the writer Rian Malan, "is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. [Read More]

Immanuel Kant:

[...] After getting up, Kant would drink one or two cups of tea -- weak tea. With that, he smoked a pipe of tobacco. The time he needed for smoking it "was devoted to meditation." Apparently, Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on. He then prepared his lectures and worked on his books until 7:00. His lectures began at 7:00, and they would last until 11:00. With the lectures finished, he worked again on his writings until lunch. Go out to lunch, take a walk, and spend the rest of the afternoon with his friend Green. After going home, he would do some more light work and read. [Read More]

Karl Marx:

His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British Museum reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne [Read More]

Philip Roth:

When I came to visit, it was a late-winter morning, and the snow was piled high around the studio. Roth was wearing a blue Shetland sweater, green corduroy pants. Often there is tweed. He dresses like a graduate student of the late fifties. He led me to the back room. There was a team photograph of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. There were free weights, a lifting bench, and an exercise mat. He had quintuple-bypass surgery eleven years ago and is determined to keep in shape. He stays out here all day and into the evening: no telephone, no fax. Nothing gets in. In the late afternoons, he takes long walks, often trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that's possessing him.

"I live alone, there's no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with," Roth said. "My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don't have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don't have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning--this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens--and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. [Read More]

Joyce Carol Oates:

I try to write in the morning very intensely, from 8:30 to 1 p.m. When I'm traveling, I can work from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Alone, I don't sleep that well. I get a lot of work done in hotel rooms. The one solace for loneliness is work. I hand write and then I type. I don't have a word processor. I write slowly. [Read More]

More examples:

• Daily Routines: How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days

Foucault on Writing and Death

An excerpt from the essay, 'What is an Author?'

As part of his highly influential 1979 essay, 'What is an Author?', French theorist Michel Foucault reflects on the symbiosis of writing and death in literature:

[...] The second theme is even more familiar: it is the kinship between writing and death. This relationship inverts the age-old conception of Greek narrative or epic, which was designed to guarantee the immortality of a hero. The hero accepted an early death because his life, consecrated and magnified by death, passed into immortality; and the narrative redeemed his acceptance of death. In a different sense, Arabic stories, and The Arabian Nights in particular, had as their motivation, their theme and pretext, this strategy for defeating death. Storytellers continued their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence. This conception of a spoken or written narrative as a protection against death has been transformed by our culture. Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author. Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka are obvious examples of this reversal. In addition, we find the link between writing and death manifested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing. While all of this is familiar in philosophy, as in literary criticism, I am not certain that the consequences derived from the disappearance or death of the author have been fully explored or that the importance of this event has been appreciated. To be specific, it seems to me that the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change. [...]

Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?'

Screen, vol. 20, no. 1 (1979)