"....He has familiarized me with that tremulous ennui which almost any spectacle induced in him; no one before Huysmans could, if not exemplify this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities, at least convince me in human terms of its absolute inevitability and the uselessness of trying to find loopholes for myself. How grateful I am to him for letting me know, without caring about the effect such revelations produced, everything that affects him, that occupies him in the hours of greatest anxiety, everything external to his anxiety, for not pathetically "singing" his distress like too many poets, but for enumerating patiently, in the darkness, some quite involuntary reasons he still found for being, and for being--to whose advantage he never really knew--a writer!"
(I am reading Nadja on my break between part 1 and part 2 of War and Peace. I thought it looked like a "fun read," but it turns out to be one of the most difficult books I've ever tried to comprehend. Perhaps it's hard because it's a "surrealist romance," or maybe the French to English translation is responsible. All I know is I have to read almost every paragraph as many as five times over, which I never usually have to do, even sentences, and look up words, and references - Huysmans, for example).
i can only begin to tell you how relieved i was/am to hear you speak of struggling to digest nadja. i dont know if you remember but when you first asked me about it i'd told you it was above my comfort level. and i, unlike you, did not have the patience to endure the necessary sidenoting. i am glad to know i can call on you for a summary of its story though. there definitely were brief excerpts from within it that i greatly enjoyed and found intensely romantic.
ReplyDeleteWell so far I've only read approx six pages, and it is just the narrator musing the question "who am I" in relation to the ways that various artists and writers that he admires have communicated their individuality.
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