Je Me Souviens (Littérature Française) (French Edition)

What is untranslatable in Twain, she remarked, is precisely that which makes all those loudly juxtaposed elements deserving of attention,—the original caustic style, the idiomatic turn, the bizarre and often picturesque mixture of neologisms, patois and slang. Though the English language continues to serve as the basic mother tongue, it is now an aging wet nurse, whose breasts often go dry; quite frequently, it is found to be inadequate in the face of that extraordinary abundance of ideas, inventions and discoveries, on which the young nation prides itself.

There is more than a touch of the supercilious in the petulance with which she blames him for failing to get at the core of old Europe. Perhaps Twain suffered, at the hands of his French readers, the same kind of patronising, unimaginative mistreatment which blocked for decades the response of the American establishment to the richness of black culture. To the extent that strokes of humor depend on and exploit a wide range of very special, very singular sociolinguistic attitudes, they cannot but resist incorporation into other languages. But the French again have a way of compounding the difficulty which is all their own: As Eugene Forgues Jr.

He, for one, as he modestly explained, had to confine his ambition to mitigating the disfavor under which Twain labored in France. One of the most rewarding chapters deals with what he calls the discovery of the Far West, and offers a discussion, focussing on Twain, of American humor, which derives much of its wit and force from the anti-puritan spirit of Mencken and Parrington.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Michaud wrote, humor is nature getting its revenge on grace. In a country in which moral constraint and psychological suppression are ever present, it is a tool for emancipation, the safety-valve of self-control Each individual gives vent to his feelings without ostentation, abstains from complaining loudly, indulges in no violent outbursts.

Under a variety of guises, whether as moral rebellion keeping itself in check, or intimidated lyricism, or verbal acrobatics, humor is an egalitarian form of free examination. To this you must add an American passion for intense reactions, excitement, jokes, fun and eccentricity in general. Per se , humor is what might be called a catastrophic form of art, a deliberate quest for imbalance. Furthermore, this linking of American humor with democracy reads like a description a contrario of English humor, and prepares the stage for the judgment on which the discussion closes: To this day, Mark Twain has not been granted admission to the French pantheon of international classics.

In fact, his name was for a number of years associated as a sort of absolute negative model with a cleansing operation which the proliferation of depraved literary theories made mandatory. True, she wrote, no European writer has wallowed in those extreme forms of energetic bad taste, which Whitman and his devotees are eager to spread over the ruins of the ideal; but we have unfortunately observed in this country, over the last few years, a marked partiality for a variety of realism which is at the opposite pole from the natural and the true, a proneness to confuse muscles with genius There may be a point in introducing Whitman to these irresponsible eccentric explorers and rummagers.

Victor Hugo in his most shocking audacities and Mr. Baudelaire in his most poisonous compositions but feebly emulated. However, there is in her indictment of Whitman an animus far exceeding what one might expect in an expression of theoretical disagreement. While her reservations about Twain sounded somewhat patronizing, as though she were enacting a public role and performing a task silently entrusted to her by a self-defined community of fastidious readers, the almost frantic urgency of her attack on Whitman exposes her personal sense of outrage.

The first American poet to have claimed democracy as his exclusive theme had ended offering the most repugnant and revolting image of man! When Bentzon further noted in a later article that Whitman, in his strivings after formal originality, had broken the old molds out of spite, because he did not know how to use them creatively, 43 it became evident that moral degradation and aesthetic anarchy were conjoined for her, and forced on unbiassed observers of the American scene a realization of the magnitude of the challenge flung at the Old World.

The loose exuberance and inventiveness predicted by Tocqueville had come to life when Melville and Twain had burst upon the literary scene, eliciting from a handful of French critics a recognition of these, to them, troubling virtues. But to the extent that democratic literature was stripped of all inherited references, whether social or cultural, and pierced through to the most sensitive part of the individual self, it engaged the reader in an acutely personal act of reception, appraisal and response.

Somewhere along the course charted by Tocqueville, a reversal of emphases, foreseeable and yet fairly traumatic, had taken place: Through that directness, an immediacy of communication with the reader could be established, which only a few writers of exceptional intensity, like Swift, or Rousseau, or Dostoievsky, had in the past been able to achieve within the existing framework of conventions. Increasingly, the American writers whom literate Frenchmen would be tempted to read would assert their individuality over and above their representativeness, and no more so than Whitman, whose tantalizing blend of physicality, idealism and artistic freedom was to set off in France the most discordant assortment of responses imaginable.

For two decades, and despite the growing reputation of Whitman as a literary figure, only a handful of his poems found their way into French periodicals. This curious discrepancy affected the very nature of his influence, lending it a diffuse quality and causing it to be felt as an atmosphere rather than as a shaping force. Undoubtedly, there was a touch of paradox in the reverence bestowed on the good gray poet, or on the shaggy celebrator of democracy, by those fastidious young men who shied away from bad manners, indulged in clannishness and prided themselves on their distrust of bourgeois realism, but the paradox resolved itself into a common passionate quest for freedom.

Through his rejection of literary conventions, and his use of a startlingly unfettered language, Whitman appeared as the archetypal liberator. French symbolists did not learn from him how to write Whitmanese in French, but they were encouraged to invent new forms of expression that would be consonant with the genius of their own language. Perhaps one of the advantages of being a foreign writer is that he is structurally protected against the anxiety of influence. Rarely had the morbus biographicus infected a book so fatally. Not once did he suggest that Whitman, like any other mortal, offered traits and suffered from limitations which were not entirely admirable.

In the mythologizing process, the hero had to be divested of all unseemly flaws. As early as , Bazalgette vented his furor at a German scholar, Nordau, who had intimated in his book, Degeneracy , that Whitman suffered from sexual inversion:. How can he fasten such loathsome slanders and grotesque accusations on to the name of the great noble and venerable Whitman, that large renovating soul which future ages—the offspring of his own mind—will set on an equal footing with Shelley, Emerson or Schiller?

O good Old Gray Poet, who could ever have imagined that a university doctor, full of the pretention of scientific lore, would question not only your glory and your healthy life-throbbing poems, but the very greatness and purity of your being? The mourners congregated on a vast tract of land usually occupied by travelling circuses and fenced in for the occasion.

Three pavilions had been erected on it: Among the crowd of three thousand and five hundred people attending the funeral were poets, savants, New York journalists, political men from Washington, oystermen from his native district, stage-drivers, negroes, former mistresses and cameradoes, medical nurses or doctors from the Civil War, parents of wounded or killed soldiers and of course homosexuals: Everybody remembered seeing Walt Whitman and Peter Connelly sitting on the curb and eating water-melons.

So, on the occasion of this celebration, or rather funeral, big heaps of water-melons had been provided for the public. However, a major difference remained between Bazalgette, or his followers, and Gide: Literature, as he conceived of it at its fullest and most inspiring, was a two-way process: There was nothing for Gide to do but to translate the poems anew. For the first time in France, Whitman stood revealed to a public which extended beyond the boundaries of the Paris intelligentsia. Even such eminently vital figures as William Carlos Williams or Allen Ginsberg did not reach out, at least on their own terms, to French readers, and have remained to this day the subject of an essentially academic discourse.

In , Europe , the periodical which had commemorated the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass , brought out a special number on the literature of the United States. Sandburg, Masters, Stevens, Williams, McLeish, Cummings, Lowenfels, Malcolm Cowley, Ogden Nash, are presented in that order, as if their individual productions could somehow be averaged out and taken in charge by the same vague label.

What is missing is a sense of the directions in which the more imaginative among them had been experimenting, sometimes at the cost of the very notion of an identifiable prosody. The sound of this voice came to me as if it were my own voice speaking, with such precision, such truth and strength, even in the splendor, that I knew there could not be other poetry.

What Whitman has told us we still do not know completely, but he has shown us the way, as Rimbaud did with the same words: You, planks and posts of wharves! You rows of houses! There cannot be any other poetry now, because the explosion of consciousness and language, which Walt whitman and his fellow-men have set in, is still lasting. As a result the ideological pressure could become so intense that the concern with art and its irreducible autonomy all but vanished.

It was as if the democratic saint could only be glorified at the expense of his literary achievement. I am not referring here to the tales set in the Northern wilderness, like White Fang or The Call of the Wild , though their popularity with young readers may have helped in a first stage. With his more adult, and more political, novels, London captivated the fancy of his admirers through a combination of acute class consciousness and romantic despair. No fewer than three prefaces for as many editions were composed betwwen and At a time when, at least in France, the psychological novel seemed doomed to a fatal decline because it could not hope to better the achievement of Proust and move beyond its refinement, the coarseness and simplicities of American writers who, like London, were less than accomplished craftsmen, appeared a reasonable price to pay for the surge of vitality flooding their works.

One is predicated on static forms of organization, the other on rhythmical effects. But it still awaits its proper intellectual style. When he tried to identify the virtues shared by these arch American writers, he did not, to say the least, shun oversimplification: Only this sort of guilty fascination for the hard-boiled and the simple-minded can account for the success and prestige enjoyed in France by Erskine Caldwell, who for a long time vied with Faulkner for the honor of being held to be the greatest Southern writer alive. Nor do I believe that other attempts to come to terms with American literature along the same lines would stand a better chance of producing convincing results.

The debate instigated by Tocqueville between aristocratic literature and democratic literature was vitiated from the outset by a failure to realize that absence of tradition should under no circumstances be equated with absence of wit. It simply makes no sense to assume that American literature at its most characteristic must lack intellectual sophistication because it takes its start from unpromising cultural premises.

Indeed one might as well, and perhaps with better reasons, claim that awareness of a cultural predicament sharpens the most creative minds and stirs them to original and complex expression. As early as , in his famous discourse on the American Scholar, he addressed himself to the problem of defining the structures which mediate between the self and others in a country freed from inherited standards like the United States.

His answer, as every one knows, was to negate the necessity of mediation, and to predicate an ontological identity between all partakers of the Oversoul:.

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The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the person he addresses, until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers;—that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music, this is myself. Their comments are often allusive, compact, or take the form of anecdotes, as is fitting for minds engaged in a private process of assimilation.

At one point, he considered translating Walden , but when his plan aborted, he strongly urged a friend to read the excerpts available in French which had been published in a small periodical, La Renaissance Latine , and he did so out of a conviction which was wholly Emersonian. His first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours , with its studied melancholy title, drifts elegantly from sketch to sketch, but borrows from Emerson more often than from any other source for the radiating light of its epigraphs. Two of them are lifted from the essay on History, one from the essay on the Poet and one from the essay on Love.

But again, an awareness of the common fund to which all men have access, and of its availability to each and everyone of them under varying forms precluded any embarrassment. As Proust himself remarked in an extended metaphor which has the freshness of personal experience,.

However, as we streak ahead on our own course in response to that inner instinct, there are moments when we look briefly, on our right or on our left, at a new book by Francis Jammes or Maeterlinck, at an unfamiliar page by Joubert or Emerson; the reminiscences that we find in them, as if by anticipation, of the very same idea, of the very same feeling, of the very same artistic effect that we are just then busy expressing, please us like so many amiable road signs informing us that we did not take the wrong turn; or perhaps, as we rest for a while in a wood, we receive confirmation of our route through the flight nearby of kindred birds, which speed on their way without even seeing us.

A dispensable message, perhaps. Not quite useless, though. Proust seems to have sensed the problem in a note in which the aesthetics of Ruskin and those of Emerson are briefly contrasted. Not only Emerson, but Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, and more recently Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, did in a very real sense invent new genres in the act of formalizing the originality of their experience.

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The efforts of the post-modernist writers to reach out to a non-representational type of literature seem to me perfectly consonant with the principles of democratic art; they try to capitalize on the semiotic possibilities of language, just as the practitioners of the tall tale a hundred and fifty years ago tried to capitalize on its semantic flexibility. The only obligation placed on the democratic writer is that he must every monent, as Emerson so forcefully intimated, break into new, untried forms out of an ultimate faith in, and fidelity to, himself.

I conceive of the utility of the concept to describe the change in mood and assumptions which characterizes romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Though it jars my Old World sense of proportions and thwarts my desire for continuities, I am fascinated by its principled heterogeneity, and by the daring, casual and yet not really arrogant self-sufficiency of its individual units: This, however, does not alleviate the task of the responsible critic, who must at the same time loosen his concepts to cope with the incessant flux of creation and sharpen his categories to make it intelligible.

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Poe, Melville and Faulkner. I am well aware that there is a major paradox about assigning democratic qualities to the three of them, and indeed I would not want to press my claim with equal firmness for each. I think however that there is a small, but meaningful, common denominator to the exceptionally sympathetic response which they have been able, as American writers, to elicit from their French admirers. But there is an ever-present Fate, which stands erect behind all these creatures, so different and so alike at the same time, much as Death waits behind the door of an hospital ward for incurable patients.

Contemporary art, Malraux went on to explain, has turned its back on the permanent angular solidity of objects; a painting by Picasso has almost ceased to be a picture, to become a mere signal, a trace left by the passage of a tensely preoccupied genius. Faulkner belongs to the same category of artists. Isolated from other men by a compulsive inner vision, he tells his reader of some universal predicament, of which individual perverseness and the decay of Southern society are only terrifying emblems.

Despite an accumulation of heterogeneous details which turn some of his tales into a display of paraphernalia, Poe is the least circumstantial of American writers. Baudelaire recognized in him a sister-soul victimized by a brutish society, a rebel who refused to pander to the vulgarity of his public, and a cursed poet, torn between a fascination for perverseness and the claims of supernal beauty. Giono was a man of the South, worshipping the dry light of Provence, and to that extent he resembled Camus, whose vision had been shaped by the brightness of sand and rock along the Algerian shore.

Unlike Camus, however, Giono never left his native province, preferring to depend on imagination his own and that of the writers he loved, for the climactic meetings of his life. With two friends, he began in to work on a translation of Moby Dick , which he had recently discovered at the time, very few French people even knew about the book.

When the job was completed three years later, he decided that he would write a preface for it, and he started entering comments or remarks in his Notebooks like so many stepping stones to the future text. The preface that he had in mind gathered to itself miscellaneous elements which were, so to speak, floating about, and developed into full-fledged narrative fiction. But the title, both graceful and casual which he chose for his novelette, Pour Saluer Melville , continues to testify to that freakish birth.

But it is also a witty, almost frolicsome, and yet deeply romantic meditation on the magnetic chain which binds the artist to his public no less tightly than the public to the artist. The plot is based on the trip that Melville took in to help promote the sale of White Jacket in England.

Je Me Souviens ! Avec La Biographie de L'Auteur by Cesarie Farrenc (Paperback / softback, 2016)

While travelling on a stage coach bound for Exeter, he meets a beautiful young woman, Adelina White, who turns out to be a secret agent for the Irish cause. With compulsive brusqueness, Melville begins circling around the issue which has been engrossing his mind. You seem to be occupied by a personal passion. Just imagine some one who would in the end take his sword or his harpoon and engage in a fight with God himself!

And that person, seeing Him in the fullness of His glory, having knowledge of all His mysteries, being aware of the farthest reach of His force at its most delirious, but not forgetting, never forgetting the wounds by which this god has been pleased to lacerate him, that person would nevertheless assault Him and hurl a harpoon.

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The situation is not unlike that of D. Lawrence responding with startling freshness to the American writers whom he chose to present, shortly after the end of World War I, in his pioneering book, Studies in Classic American Literature. See details for additional description. Skip to main content. We're sorry, something went wrong. See all 3 brand new listings. About this product Description Je me souviens! Les oeuvres faisant partie de cette collection ont ete numerisees par la BnF et sont presentes sur Gallica, sa bibliotheque numerique.

En entreprenant de redonner vie a ces ouvrages au travers d'une collection de livres reimprimes a la demande, us leur donns la possibilite de rencontrer un public elargi et participons a la transmission de connaissances et de savoirs parfois difficilement accessibles. Nous avons cherche a concilier la reproduction fidele d'un livre ancien a partir de sa version numerisee avec le souci d'un confort de lecture optimal. Nous esperons que les ouvrages de cette uvelle collection vous apporteront entiere satisfaction. Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.

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