Shut up, Proust! Chapter 6: The Fortune Cookie Game

[hannahchan]

I am so close to finishing this bad boy, but I have at least a couple more tirades left in me, and I want to try to get them out before I reach that magical Page 444. And I think the time has finally come to let cher Marcel speak for himself. Because he does it so eloquently. And yet…

Okay, take this bit from “Place Names: The Name”:

A moment

Comments

[jazzometer]

Well, most of us only walk; a bunch of us jog, fewer still go on real runs, and even fewer run marathons. Proust runs marathons.

The cruel truth of the matter is, you need Proust and he doesn't need you. That's why you're reading him in the first place. I think you should move onto Beckett's prose after this -- did you see the New Yorker piece on him?

It includes this:

Watt considers the range of possibilities in a given situation and tries to determine what, if anything, duty requires of him. Beckett’s third-person narrator flaunts the same indiscriminate facticity. Thus Watt’s surmise on the activities of Mr. Knott:

"Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door . . . "

Think Beckett can’t go on? He can go on. In this case, for another thirty lines.

You and Proust need to hug it out, I think.

Georges Sand (have you seen the Delacroix painting?), Colette, and Aphra Behn.

[hannahchan]

Heh. I was thinking I'd try Ulysses after this, but Beckett sounds like a good choice, too! Of course, by then I will be 89 years old and stark raving mad, but... blogging will still be cool then, right? (Uh, was it ever?)