Sunday, January 27, 2013
Beckett triche avec Proust et s'autoportraitise
SAMUEL BECKETT – PROUST and Three Dialogues
with Georges Duthuit – 1931-1999
The first thing
I have to say is that this English original version of this text is a relief
from stress and anxiety because the French translation of it published by
Editions de Minuit in Paris, and sole French translation available, is
extremely poor and the two main mistakes I had sensed when reading it are
confirmed as gross mistakes. Page 31 we find the “dungeon” in which involuntary memory casts and hides all
real events that occurred to a person and that remain secret, unconscious till
one day voluntary memory and habit, the two tyrants that impose onto anyone’s
life a day-to-day normalized behaviour and an official socially acceptable fake
history of oneself, are suspended for a short moment by some exceptional event
that could be anything finding an echo in one of these deep involuntary memory
records, or a bout of fever or unconsciousness that could bring the unconscious
back up. This dungeon is translated by “donjon” which is a castle tower in the
Middle Ages. A typical and primitive mistake that yet does not prevent the
translator to make the “diver” (p. 32) be “un plongeur” diving down into the
involuntary memory that resides in this castle tower. The proper translation
should have been “oubliette” or “chamber de torture.” Just before the
translator had meddled with a common phrase in English and completely messed up
the meaning. Beckett writes: “Curiosity is the safeguard, not the death, of the
cat, whether in skirts or on all fours.” And that becomes: “La curiosité
entraine la sauvegarde et non la mort de
la chatte, qu’elle soit en jupons ou à quatre pattes.” Thus the cat becomes a
pussy cat and she mixes up with another phrase: “curiosity kills the pussy
(cat)” which is deeply erotic if not obscene which by the way makes the
narrator be a woman. She had completely misinterpreted the skirts of the cat
curiosity kills. I would have suggested a translation that uses the
corresponding French expression that has nothing to do with cats or pussy cats,
something like that: “La curiosité
est un bien vilain défaut, mais tellement utile parfois, qu’elle chasse le
jupon ou qu’elle coure à quatre pattes.” And sure
enough then curiosity is not turned into a female, though she is feminine by
grammatical gender, the narrator is not turned into a female neither but the
object of this curiosity is either a woman or the other choice is that
curiosity is on all fours like a hunting dog or a police dog looking for some
corpse or body. That kind of innuendo is in perfect agreement with the English
text in which the sexual element is absolutely marginal though of course
Beckett thought of it but he managed to keep it marginal.
Thus henceforth
and thence I do not recommend the only French translation of this text on the
French market and what’s more it was done and published for the first time
after Samuel Beckett’s death, otherwise it would have been checked by the boss
and we know he was a very good bilingual writer.
But this book
has a lot more interest.
The first thing
is that, though it was ordered as an academic study of Proust, though Samuel
Beckett was in direct touch with the top French university institution at the
time of this order, the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm, this is not,
and by far, an academic study of Proust. It is a brilliant piece of pure
literature whose object and subject at the same time is Proust’s works.
The second
remark is that Beckett is trying to be Joycean I guess and his sentences are
never ending, his paragraphs cover pages upon pages. This style is of course
very difficult to follow on an academic document, but it is very good style for
literature. Some pages contain what will make Beckett famous, the style of his
dramatic trilogy that was to come at the time more than twenty years later.
Page 56 the sentence starting “Thus these rare moments . . .” and ending “. . .
the corrosion of his heart.” Is an intricate succession of parallel double
elements. I count six, hence twelve elements, with one triplet included in the
last but one element (the eleventh element): “. . . of his love or hate
or jealousy (interchangeable
terms) . . .” This is good style and this style is always present and makes the
reading difficult because such stylish elements are metaphorical or ,parabolic,
and in this present case we have a full Catholic parable in the twelve (the
apostles) elements, the six (Solomon’s wisdom number) pairs and of course the
nearly closing trinity (God himself). We could probably easily identify sub
groups with a quartet for the crucifixion and an octet for the second coming
and resurrection.
The main idea
Beckett states is that we live and experience all kinds of events, and all of
them will be stored in our involuntary memory’s dungeon. On the other hand, in
order to be able to live in society we have to stick to what our (but is it
ours since it corresponds to “the Old Testament of the individual,” p. 32)
voluntary memory and a set of habits that keep us in time with social life. And
the basic point is that this time is not time, is not the time of the deeper
memory, of the dungeon, the real time of the real self of a person. This public
time that follows the hands of the clock is artificial and prevents us from
living in the real primeval duration of the world because that’s the only
natural dimension of the passing of an existence. And the official time means
death since it also means birth, and that is so biblical, the alpha and the
omega, the stepping out of time when getting into eternal life that has to be
timeless, according to Saint Augustine
Then you understand
Beckett declaring that “If this mystical experience communicates an
extratemporel essence, it follows that the communicant is for the moment and
extratemporal being. Consequently the Proustian solution consists . . . in the
negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time.
Death is dead because Time is dead . . . Time is not recovered, it is
obliterated.” (p. 75)
In fact the
essay is centred on this time dimension. But Beckett might be misled too. When
he quotes Proust saying: “I understood the meaning of death, of love and
vocation, of the joys of the spirit and the utility of pain,” He makes an
important mistake to take the narrator of the books as being Proust. He does
not identify who spoke and he does not wonder what the autonomy of the
character (even if it is the first person narrator of the book, even if he were
to be called Marcel Proust in that novel) from the author. Even, when an author
writes his memoirs, his confessions, his direct intellectual speculations we
are dealing with what the author through the character he creates for the
occasion who can be a doppelganger of the author, is saying, and not the
author. It could be as if God and his creature were the same thing and Adam
would represent if not be God in his full nature.
That leads him
into sliding into an easy exercise, to my mind a useless exercise: to compare
Proust’s style with various 19th century schools of writing in
France with an additional mention of and reference to Dante and the name
attributed to his character Des Esseintes, “Alfred Lord Baudelaire” (p. 80). This
mixture of Alfred de Musset, Lord Byron and Baudelaire is a personification of
the “’ineluctable gangrene of Romanticism.” (p. 80, reference not provided by
Beckett) that he attributes to Proust himself.
It is far more
important to study the real style of Proust than to try to put a label on him
by comparing him to others. I guess it is Beckett’s naivety of his youth.
Proust is unique, like Beckett. But labelling can be very useful to create a
smoke screen hiding what the author does not want the audience to see. That’s
exactly what happened with Beckett’s dramatic trilogy. The smoke screen of
“Theatre of the Absurd” has so far prevented professional critics and academics
from digging into the text and finding out the real meaning IN THE TEXT AND THE TEXT ONLY. I
should publish a study on that subject in the journal Théâtres du Monde in Avignon ,
France
The very end of
this text dealing with music is interesting but Proust’s ideas expressed by his
characters – so is it Proust’s vision? – are surprising. Music is seen as “the
Idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena.” (p. 92) This is true provided
you disembody music from all instruments. But this also produces the rejection
of opera because the voice cannot be disembodied and “by definition, opera is a
hideous corruption of this most immaterial of all the arts: the words of a
libretto are to the musical phrase that they particularize what the Vendôme
Column, for example, is to the ideal perpendicular.” (p. 92) The least we can
say is that this is slightly schematic and a comparison, or a metaphor, does
not prove anything. Since the example is from Paris
it would have been a lot more symbolic to use the Eiffel Tower
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 7:17 AM 
