Proust, Jenga, and a baleful smear.
So have a look at this catchy sentence, which Proust uses to open the second volume of his novel sequence.
My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of ( Read more... )
I loathe Henry James. Had to read his stuff at Oxford and hate it even beyond what I feel for Gower. I found even his statement of purpose in writing A Portrait of a Lady impenetrable. Something about "I want to make a perfect portrayal of an idiot naif in order to trick the reader into thinking she has depth"? At least that's what I thought he was saying. As it was, his prose freights down all possible meaning with so many layers of preciosity and diaphanous twinkling murk that I could not remember from one half-paragraph to the next which character was which. ruakh quotes approvingly from A Portrait above . . . a passage in which "the lady" waffle waffle waffle is then revealed to be Madame Merle. I remember reading that twice or 3 times trying to see where we had got away from describing the young lady that the novel is ostensibly about. I think I read the entire novel twice trying to make sufficient sense of it to write an essay about the damned thing should I be required to, and I deeply resent the time spent. I also to this day neither know nor care who is psychotic in that thing about 2 kids, a governess, and ghosts. My guess is that it's like most of D.H. Lawrence - you're supposed to infer (from the facts that the writer is an adult male and is being opaque) that either precocious lust or illicit sex is what is really happening. Well la-di-da. So effing what, kids think about and have sex. If that's what it's about, the story is boring. If that's not what it's about, what the fark happens in the story? Why would I want to read something where someone demonstrates his cleverness by being so damned boringly unclear?
I suspect there may be native/non-native issues here, too. That use of "intermissions" in the passage you quote catches me every time I read the passage. It's so unclear to me, it's basically a stumbling block, like having to step over a hole in the pavement. In other writers I would say he would have prepared for it and it would be clear in context, but not with James. That's how he writes. He says something unclear then refers back to it with a misleading word. Maybe if I'd grown up with the formulaic American use of language, where multiple meanings and use of synonyms are comparatively rare, I'd get his meaning. But I suspect not - an intermission is a break in a performance, to the American man in the street. And James is famous for having idolized the British literary tradition. I think he sucks at wordplay, perhaps intentionally (I'm reminded of the prologue to Wolfram's Parzifal, all about how the poet is a genius and the poem will therefore be extremely hard to understand. But that is worth reading.) Alternatively, maybe it's like Flannery O'Connor, who tortures her characters to show how angelic she is. And reveals all kinds of unpleasant biases along the way on which she never gets called because "that's the Southern gothic tradition" or "she was Catholic," but I haven't seen either the wanton cruelty or the bigotry in such evidence in other writers of either kind. She and James both seem to really be writing just to show how clever they are and by extension how foolish the reader is to be suckered by their prose.
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I think you (one) expect it to be "My mother [...], having done something, did something else." Which would be fine. But the first set of parenthetical commas is confusing, because it's actually "My mother [...] having done something, my father did something else." And I don't think you can pick that up on the first go.
I very much enjoyed your takedown of James, all of which I find convincing but which I'm afraid doesn't stop me enjoying the book. I'm just in the mood for something dense and chewy. Words like "intermissions" are part of the enjoyment for me; I find his vocabulary both unusual and exact, and you have to be exact if you're going to be unusual. But yeah, your reaction does make total sense, and I feel the same thing with other writers who are objectively little different. I do have a deep love of irony, and his mastery of it in this book helps alleviate the doughiness quite a lot (I'm told that late James is much more opaque and less fun).
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