Nutshell, Process and � When it comes to readi…
Nutshell, Process and �
When it comes to reading, there are two states of need for me. I have come to know them as �Kafka� and �Proust�. The first is for brevity, condensation; facing up to things by cramming them into allusive nutshells. The second is, as you might have guessed, for expansion. Proust reckoned that ideas succeed griefs, and that in the process of succession a little joy is released. So his one novel, which began as a piece of literary criticism, enacts and analyses the process as seen in the life and loves of someone called Marcel. He gets us to feel the process. Hence the need for one and a quarter million words.
This does not mean I read these two authors when the need hits, but my choice of reading, if that is what I need, which it isn�t most of the time, can be divided into these two categories. Of the two books I�m reading now, Gert Hofmann�s Luck can go under the heading “Kafka”, while Joyce Hackett�s Disturbance of the Inner Ear can go under “Proust”.
As I�m reading both types, it�s obviously a superficial division. Underneath it all, Kafka and Proust are actually very similar. Compare these two passages, one from Kafka�s Diaries on October 18th, 1921:
�It is entirely conceivable that life�s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons. �
And this from Proust�s preface to Against Saint-Beuve, the critical study that transmogrified into the novel:
�What the intellect gives us back under the name of the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of our lives, as soon as it is dead, embodies and conceals itself in some material object. Unless we meet with that object it remains captive there, captive for ever. We recognise it through the object, we summon it, and it is released.�
Maybe this explains why both writers have remained with me, because they summons important things. When my own light goes out, there is this outer light. So what happens when this outer light goes out in its turn? Lately, this has seemed to be the case. This is the real opposition. What is the need now? Not Kafka or Proust, but Kafka, Proust and �what?
Here is Beckett�s very late work Stirrings Still. This summons something. Life�s splendour anyone?
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Zadie’s Kafka
- Kafka’s Last Love
- Kafka again
- 2 for 1 Today’s Guardian has a "buy one, get on…
- Moz Reads Proust
