Saint-Exupéry and tv

A friend recommended J. Wood's posts at Powell's, and now I love reading what he has to say after watching Lost. But he outdid himself with this wonderful literary analysis of The Little Prince (in reference to the episode of the same name):

A strange thing then occurs in the sixth chapter; the narrative voice changes to second-person. The audience was in the third-person objective position, and is all the sudden being addressed as if the audience were displaced into the subject of the story. The switch from objective to subjective space is interesting, and it changes back to third-person objective in the seventh chapter. This is just one of the elements the story shares with Lost; like the island characters' experience of cut-up time mirroring the audience experience of narrative time, or how the characters' search for pieces of the overall puzzle is carried over beyond the show proper into the broader experience of the audience; this short chapter mirrors that unstable position where the audience falls into the fiction. Like the fox says in The Little Prince, words are the source of misunderstandings.

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing and would really love for him to delve into more of Joyce's Ulysses (as he begins to discuss in this same post). Since next week's episode "316" is partially inspired by what's found on that page in the Vintage edition of Ulysses, he just might.

The miracle of reading

There have been petty complaints that David Markson has written the same book one too many times, but The Last Novel is a revelation. He could do this sort of thing forever and each time it would be new again. There are hundreds of worlds within this collection of carefully chosen lines. I always come away from his work with a vibrant sense of the endless possibilities of life and literature.

Turning from the last page back to the first launched me adrift in silent contemplation...because it's not only clever, but probing and compassionate as well.

Here are a few bits from the many on various aspects of reading:

     The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading.
     Announced Petronius.

     You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.
     Flaubert put it.

     The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson's parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on--and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.

     Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.
     Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.

     Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time--Finnegans Wake.
     Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.

     Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
     The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.

     I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head--it harmonises the soul.
     Said Laurence Sterne.

Moving towards life

From a conversation between Jim Sheridan and Annette Insdorf, included at the back of In America: A Portrait of the Film:

JS: If I think of an idea, I usually try to put it up against the X-ray that is James Joyce. He was the only one with a good father, like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

AI: Of course.

JS: A Jewish man walking around Dublin was the only good father figure in Irish literature before 1980! And in Joyce’s stories, the women were always in love with dead people: The Dead is essentially about that estrangement from the husband. And Molly Bloom is about the estrangement from the husband through the dead child. So, there was a kind of refusal by the women to engage on a loving or sexual level because of a death, which I always thought was probably like a psychological dramatization of the famine. So, I just stole a little bit from Joyce, and added the husband in love with the dead child. The attempt was to move the stone from the mouth of the grave, you know. To kind of get out of the death culture.

(I've loved this film since it first came out in 2002, but Sheridan's audio commentary is really wonderful as well--very rich.)

The armor of a dead man

From director Jim Sheridan’s forward to In America: A Portrait of the Film:

When I was doing my own story, I thought a lot about Bloom and his dead son, and the resonance throughout Ulysses, of Shakespeare, and of Hamlet in particular. And when I wondered if it was right to do such a personal story and cannibalize my own life, I remembered that the great Shakespeare had a child called Hamnet and that three years after his son’s death, he took out an old play and rewrote it.

And not only did he rewrite it, he went in the lonely isolation of backstage, he put on the armor of a dead man, and he clunked out on stage as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. That idea has always struck me as profound. A live man in dead man’s clothes talking to his dead son, alive, in front of him, on stage and asking for revenge. Shakespeare must have been tough, I thought, to keep the deep baritone of the ghost intact.

Finding a way into the Wake

One of the most interesting sections of Umberto Eco's Experiences in Translation is his discussion of the decisions James Joyce made in the French and Italian translations of Finnegans Wake. The Italian translation

is certainly not an example of 'faithful' translation. Yet many have written that, to understand Finnegans Wake, it would be a good idea to start with his Italian translation of it. Perhaps, or rather certainly because, on seeing the text wholly rethought in another language, one can understand its deep mechanisms, over and beyond the insistence on this or that play of quotations.

Setting aside the mind-boggling idea that Finnegans Wake can even be translated, the fact that Joyce undertook to take nearly 700 pages of "Finneganian" and basically rewrite it in other languages isn't simply a testimony to his genius, but is also a way for readers to enter into the text and find out how it works. For example:

Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate. Did they never sharee you ebro at skol, you antiabecedarian? It's just the same as if I was to go par examplum now in conservancy's cause out of telekinesis and proxenete you. For coxyt sake and is that what she is?

Eco explains the allusions in English and then examines how Joyce rendered it in Italian, illustrating how Joyce was more interested in linguistic playfulness to convey underlying themes than he was in "the letter of the original."