----> Link to the story
Since I read this on my Kindle, I had no idea in what context the story took place (because the novel doesn't come with the handy-dandy "teaser" on the back cover). At first, I imagined it to be some sort of ramble about a character in a book, as the narrator was creating stories in her mind. That was rather inspirational I must admit, although it was completely wrong. And so, I googled it and the All Knowing One linked me to Pol Culture:
"The narrator is a passenger on a commuter train. At first, she is absorbed in her newspaper, but she finds herself distracted by the faces of the other passengers."
Well then! And so, I reread the story- and it seemed to make more sense! Even though, honestly, I still don't understand all of it. I got lost in some parts of it.
" [...] so many crimes aren't your crime; your crime was cheap; only the retribution solemn; for now the church door opens, the hard wooden pew receives her; on the brown tiles she kneels; every day, winter, summer, dusk, dawn (here she's at it) prays."
"I was heading her over the waterfall, straight for madness, when, like a flock of dream sheep, she turns t'other way and runs between my fingers."
"Have I read you right? But the human face--the human face at the top of the fullest sheet of print holds more, withholds more."
She expands on the term "to read a person" by actually comparing it to a sheet of print.
"Hang still, then, quiver, life, soul, spirit, whatever you are of Minnie Marsh--I, too, on my flower--the hawk over the down--alone, or what were the worth of life?"
She refers to her concept of Minnie Marsh- she wants to dwell on it, or what is life worth?
"There I've hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they'd disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story's to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travellers and a whole grove of aspidistra."
"How the mud goes round in the mind--what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and again through the eyes one sees clear and still,"
"But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?--the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world--a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors."
"There's the vista and the vision--there's the distance--the blue blot at the end of the avenue, while, after all, the tea is rich, the muffin hot"
This gave me the impression that whatever we see, we see as a "vista" and a "vision" outside of ourselves. As if we were looking out of a window, detached from ourselves. Of course, this probably isn't what Virginia meant.
Supported by the title, the concept of the book is almost a memorial-a "prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the people one never meets again"-for the things that never were: hinting at the unlimited world of "what-ifs" and possibilities. I feel like she writes this to literally bring this vague world into reality, just by the simple of act of writing it. Usually such wonderings and questions about strangers on the street are nothing more than fleeting thoughts, that are usually barely noticed. One thinks these thoughts in the moment, and soon are lost to the whirlwind of the continuation of life. You think these thoughts, and oh, there's your stop, leaving the connection you had formed in your mind forever there, and forget about it. As new worries, new thoughts envelop you. But no, Virginia commemorates these fleeting thoughts by recording them and turning it into a real story; engraving it on a sheet of paper, if you will.
I remember thinking about such things while on a train, wondering about other people's lives- but that seems to be so far in the past, so much has happened since. My life has moved on from that single thought (naturally: one doesn't want to be stuck on a train forever, spending one's time wondering about other people) and left it behind in the past. But it seems like Virginia refuses to move on, by writing this story directly confronting this vague sense of wondering.
The narrator immerses herself so much in her speculation that she even forgets whether it was she created this reality, or if it is really real. "There she is, tight to her blossom; opening her hand-bag, from which she takes a hollow shell--an egg--who was saying that eggs were cheaper? You or I? Oh, it was you who said it on the way home, you remember, when the old gentleman, suddenly opening his umbrella--or sneezing was it?" As if she's talking to the woman saying, "Oh no, no remember? This is really what happened." She seems to actually convince the person she is silently communicating with, as well as herself, that what she created is real. Why does she need to do this? Why does she need her imaginings to be real? Maybe she is looking for some connection with these characters, but at the same time wanting to be detached from them- find comfort in these silent communications. She becomes attached to them in some very intimate, and yet impersonal manner. And I think she prefers that. She prefers to muse about them, instead of asking them outright "What is your story?". She loves them in her own way, thinking of their feelings and desperations, and yet, they are still a concept to her. These characters are merely just sources of inspiration. Therefore, they themselves don't matter- only the stories they generate. "I come irresistibly to lodge myself somewhere on the firm flesh, in the robust spine, wherever I can penetrate or find foothold on the person, in the soul, of Moggridge the man." Anywhere, just to get a source of inspiration. It is merely a "foothold" for her imagination. Once James leaves the train, the narrator says, "James Moggridge is dead now, gone for ever." He might as well be dead, as far as she is concerned. Because he was alive to her as long as he stood in the same train as her. So as they left, the narrator felt empty because she lost her only connection to them as concepts, "Well, my world's done for! What do I stand on? What do I know? That's not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life's bare as bone." She realizes that it really wasn't real, and that she made it all up. And yet, at the end she still loves them for their vaguness, because to her, they exist in her mind as Minnie and Moggridge. "Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow...If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it's you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it's you I embrace, you I draw to me--adorable world!" She adores them for what they mean to her. That's something- that's more than most.
--
From "The Works of Virginia Woolf: 12 Novels and Short Stories in One Volume"
Published by Halcyon Classics
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
The Marquise by George Sand
As an aside, I was currently attempting to read Bukowski- then I decided I wanted to read something worthwhile...
"[...] this man in whom the body seemed wasted and shattered by the soul, and a single one of whose glances contained all the life I failed to find in real life, exercised over me a really magnetic power."
He was who she wanted to be.
"I must tell you that instead of struggling against this passion I yielded to it with eagerness, with delight. It was so pure! Why should I have blushed for it? It gave me new life; it initiated me into all the feelings I had wished to experience; it almost made me a woman."
"Long wings of lace fell from our arms, and our ribbons, purses, and jewels were variegated with the most brilliant colors. Balancing ourselves in our little high-heeled shoes, we seemed to fear to touch the earth and walked with the disdainful circumspection of a little bird on the edge of a brook."
"But from the moment that I loved I began to enjoy my beauty for its own sake."
"When, by the light of the smoky lamp, I looked at Lelio, I thought I had been mistaken and had followed another man. He was at least thirty-five, sallow, withered, and worn out. He was badly dressed, he looked vulgar, spoke in a hoarse, broken voice, shook hands with the meanest wretches, drank brandy, and swore horribly. It was not until I had heard his name repeated several times that I felt sure that this was the divinity of the theater, interpreter of the great Corneille. I could recognize none of those charms which had so fascinated me, not even his glance, so bright, so ardent, and so sad. His eyes were dull, dead, almost stupid; his strongly accentuated pronunciation seemed ignoble when he called to the waiter, or talked of gambling and taverns."
How beautifully she emphasizes his divinity and plunges the reader into a sense of vulgarity and disappointment. It would have been better if she had never known who he really was in reality.
"I thought myself thoroughly cured of my love, and I tried to rejoice at it, but in vain. I was filled with a mortal regret, the weariness of life again entered my heart, the world had not a pleasure which could charm me."
"Lelio was sublime, and I had never been more in love with him. My recent adventure seemed but a dream. I could not believe that Lelio was other than he seemed upon the stage. In spite of myself, I yielded to the terrible agitations into which he had the power of throwing me."
How powerful our impressions are! Especially when they have the least trace of reality!
"My Lelio was a fictitious being who had no existence outside the theater. The illusions of the stage, the glare of the footlights, were a part of the being whom I loved. Without them he was nothing to me, and faded like a story before the brightness of day. I had no desire to see him off the boards; and should have been in despair had I met him. It would have been like" contemplating the ashes of a great man.
"Oh, my madness was arrant, but it was sweet! Leave me my illusions, madam; what are they to you?"
He has his own illusions of her.
"I no longer understood how it had been possible for me to consent to exchange my heroic and romantic tenderness for the revulsion of feeling which awaited me, and the sense of shame which would henceforth poison all my recollections."
"Above all, I mourned for Lelio, whom in seeing I should forever lose, in whose love I had found five years of happiness, and for whom in a few hours I should feel nothing but indifference."
She knew for sure she would be disappointed.
"Alas! did he deceive himself! Was he playing a part?"
Was he encouraging her in her illusions? Was he trying to make her illusions a reality? If he did then what did his individuality matter?
'“Listen, Lelio,” said I. “Here we separate forever, but let us carry from this place a whole future of blissful thoughts and adored memories."'
"I asked him if he would not find happiness in thinking of me, if the ecstasy of our meeting would not lend its charm to all the days of his life, if his past and future sorrows would not be softened each time he recalled it."
"After a few steps, when I was about to lose him forever, I turned back and looked at him once more. Despair had crushed him."
This is almost Biblical. Don't look back! Imagine, instead of having her impression of him on her mind for her entire life, she had the picture of his true self: a disappointment. Wow, what a critical detail. Maybe, she would have been different if she hadn't looked back. Maybe she would have gone away with the false hope that the embodiment of the ideal might be possible. Instead, she walked away with a sense of the crudeness of reality. Not pretty.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First of all, let me praise George Sand for her response to the "classic" dandy. Since nearly all of the books written in the true Romantic Period were written by men, they constantly emphasize the classic "poet". The guy who falls in love with the most beautiful actress and raves over her beauty. He usually either ends up with her and gets disappointed later, or gets disappointed right away and then kills himself, or something of the sort. Yes, yes. We all know that men are impulsive and treasure beauty (at first, anyway) over anything else. And here comes George Sand. She turns the table and switches the roles. This time, yes it is possible, a woman fell in love with an actor. Why not? I mean that is more likely to happen. Not only were men more free; they could either go to the theater or to the local brothel, but they could have their fill of femninity. Not so for the women. This is why the imagination was such a comfort for them, because they could invision their lives and passions in their minds. That is where it was most safe. I'm sure plenty of women fell in love with the actors, and nursed a passionate love in the privacy of their own minds. I mean, it is extremely convenient.
Anyway, I absolutely loved Sand's emphasis on the importance of the Marquise's illusions. They were far better than real life. On stage, Lelio appeared, "The word charm should have been invented for him; it belonged to all his words, to all his glances, to all his motions." He became her ideal, and that is what she worshipped. She herself admitted, "It was a passion purely intellectual, purely ideal. It was not he I loved, but those heroes of ancient times whose sincerity, whose fidelity, whose tenderness he knew how to portray; with him and by him I was carried back to an epoch of forgotten virtues." She loved what she saw, she loved the impression the concepts he tried to portray made on her mind, her imagination. I think that is the most important thing about illusions: the person itself ceases to exist, what feelings and concepts the person excites in the other is what really exist. Well, those impressions exist for the person who experiences them only. And that is the beauty of this concept, because it only matters how we see things in this world. And no, I don't mean to give a painfully boring lecture about how one can change the world and so on. I am a pessimist after all. No, but I mean just the fact that we each view the world in literally different shades of red, of blue, of yellow... says something about our conception of our own world. She consciously knew that Lelio was a product of her imagination, and wished it to remain that way. She begged him, after the strangely realistic meeting, to remain in her fantasies like she saw him in the present. To not continue life and drone it with the day-to-day existence. She wanted him to live in that moment.
Because she knew how painful reality was- how he could be something (as she so grotesqueley found out) completely different. Coincidentally, I have come to find out the same thing: that our impressions are so safe. Lelio could be anything one wants him to be, as long as one doesn't know who he truly is in real life. I prefer not talking to a person I would like to get to know, for who knows, maybe they aren't who I want them to be. Of course, there is a danger in that too, because one is left with a world full of manufactured impressions that don't resemble real life. I think that may be classified as "crazy".
And so, I was wondering throughout the story- what if Lelio did become her ideal? What if he truly did embody everything she imagined in reality. I mean, realistically he was everything she wanted him to be. If that was possible, would she still have been happy? Or is it that the imagination provides an impossible advantage: having the unlimited capacity of molding and changing one's ideal. If she had wanted him to be this hero, this charmer, now- he could. If she had wanted him to be someone else- he could. Do our ideals stay fixed? Or do they change according to our mental development? So, personally, I think even if that would be possible, she would have wanted him to be something else. Once she achieved her ideal, the realism of it all would repulse her.
---
Kindle Edition
"[...] this man in whom the body seemed wasted and shattered by the soul, and a single one of whose glances contained all the life I failed to find in real life, exercised over me a really magnetic power."
He was who she wanted to be.
"I must tell you that instead of struggling against this passion I yielded to it with eagerness, with delight. It was so pure! Why should I have blushed for it? It gave me new life; it initiated me into all the feelings I had wished to experience; it almost made me a woman."
"Long wings of lace fell from our arms, and our ribbons, purses, and jewels were variegated with the most brilliant colors. Balancing ourselves in our little high-heeled shoes, we seemed to fear to touch the earth and walked with the disdainful circumspection of a little bird on the edge of a brook."
"But from the moment that I loved I began to enjoy my beauty for its own sake."
"When, by the light of the smoky lamp, I looked at Lelio, I thought I had been mistaken and had followed another man. He was at least thirty-five, sallow, withered, and worn out. He was badly dressed, he looked vulgar, spoke in a hoarse, broken voice, shook hands with the meanest wretches, drank brandy, and swore horribly. It was not until I had heard his name repeated several times that I felt sure that this was the divinity of the theater, interpreter of the great Corneille. I could recognize none of those charms which had so fascinated me, not even his glance, so bright, so ardent, and so sad. His eyes were dull, dead, almost stupid; his strongly accentuated pronunciation seemed ignoble when he called to the waiter, or talked of gambling and taverns."
How beautifully she emphasizes his divinity and plunges the reader into a sense of vulgarity and disappointment. It would have been better if she had never known who he really was in reality.
"I thought myself thoroughly cured of my love, and I tried to rejoice at it, but in vain. I was filled with a mortal regret, the weariness of life again entered my heart, the world had not a pleasure which could charm me."
"Lelio was sublime, and I had never been more in love with him. My recent adventure seemed but a dream. I could not believe that Lelio was other than he seemed upon the stage. In spite of myself, I yielded to the terrible agitations into which he had the power of throwing me."
How powerful our impressions are! Especially when they have the least trace of reality!
"My Lelio was a fictitious being who had no existence outside the theater. The illusions of the stage, the glare of the footlights, were a part of the being whom I loved. Without them he was nothing to me, and faded like a story before the brightness of day. I had no desire to see him off the boards; and should have been in despair had I met him. It would have been like" contemplating the ashes of a great man.
"Oh, my madness was arrant, but it was sweet! Leave me my illusions, madam; what are they to you?"
He has his own illusions of her.
"I no longer understood how it had been possible for me to consent to exchange my heroic and romantic tenderness for the revulsion of feeling which awaited me, and the sense of shame which would henceforth poison all my recollections."
"Above all, I mourned for Lelio, whom in seeing I should forever lose, in whose love I had found five years of happiness, and for whom in a few hours I should feel nothing but indifference."
She knew for sure she would be disappointed.
"Alas! did he deceive himself! Was he playing a part?"
Was he encouraging her in her illusions? Was he trying to make her illusions a reality? If he did then what did his individuality matter?
'“Listen, Lelio,” said I. “Here we separate forever, but let us carry from this place a whole future of blissful thoughts and adored memories."'
"I asked him if he would not find happiness in thinking of me, if the ecstasy of our meeting would not lend its charm to all the days of his life, if his past and future sorrows would not be softened each time he recalled it."
"After a few steps, when I was about to lose him forever, I turned back and looked at him once more. Despair had crushed him."
This is almost Biblical. Don't look back! Imagine, instead of having her impression of him on her mind for her entire life, she had the picture of his true self: a disappointment. Wow, what a critical detail. Maybe, she would have been different if she hadn't looked back. Maybe she would have gone away with the false hope that the embodiment of the ideal might be possible. Instead, she walked away with a sense of the crudeness of reality. Not pretty.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First of all, let me praise George Sand for her response to the "classic" dandy. Since nearly all of the books written in the true Romantic Period were written by men, they constantly emphasize the classic "poet". The guy who falls in love with the most beautiful actress and raves over her beauty. He usually either ends up with her and gets disappointed later, or gets disappointed right away and then kills himself, or something of the sort. Yes, yes. We all know that men are impulsive and treasure beauty (at first, anyway) over anything else. And here comes George Sand. She turns the table and switches the roles. This time, yes it is possible, a woman fell in love with an actor. Why not? I mean that is more likely to happen. Not only were men more free; they could either go to the theater or to the local brothel, but they could have their fill of femninity. Not so for the women. This is why the imagination was such a comfort for them, because they could invision their lives and passions in their minds. That is where it was most safe. I'm sure plenty of women fell in love with the actors, and nursed a passionate love in the privacy of their own minds. I mean, it is extremely convenient.
Anyway, I absolutely loved Sand's emphasis on the importance of the Marquise's illusions. They were far better than real life. On stage, Lelio appeared, "The word charm should have been invented for him; it belonged to all his words, to all his glances, to all his motions." He became her ideal, and that is what she worshipped. She herself admitted, "It was a passion purely intellectual, purely ideal. It was not he I loved, but those heroes of ancient times whose sincerity, whose fidelity, whose tenderness he knew how to portray; with him and by him I was carried back to an epoch of forgotten virtues." She loved what she saw, she loved the impression the concepts he tried to portray made on her mind, her imagination. I think that is the most important thing about illusions: the person itself ceases to exist, what feelings and concepts the person excites in the other is what really exist. Well, those impressions exist for the person who experiences them only. And that is the beauty of this concept, because it only matters how we see things in this world. And no, I don't mean to give a painfully boring lecture about how one can change the world and so on. I am a pessimist after all. No, but I mean just the fact that we each view the world in literally different shades of red, of blue, of yellow... says something about our conception of our own world. She consciously knew that Lelio was a product of her imagination, and wished it to remain that way. She begged him, after the strangely realistic meeting, to remain in her fantasies like she saw him in the present. To not continue life and drone it with the day-to-day existence. She wanted him to live in that moment.
Because she knew how painful reality was- how he could be something (as she so grotesqueley found out) completely different. Coincidentally, I have come to find out the same thing: that our impressions are so safe. Lelio could be anything one wants him to be, as long as one doesn't know who he truly is in real life. I prefer not talking to a person I would like to get to know, for who knows, maybe they aren't who I want them to be. Of course, there is a danger in that too, because one is left with a world full of manufactured impressions that don't resemble real life. I think that may be classified as "crazy".
And so, I was wondering throughout the story- what if Lelio did become her ideal? What if he truly did embody everything she imagined in reality. I mean, realistically he was everything she wanted him to be. If that was possible, would she still have been happy? Or is it that the imagination provides an impossible advantage: having the unlimited capacity of molding and changing one's ideal. If she had wanted him to be this hero, this charmer, now- he could. If she had wanted him to be someone else- he could. Do our ideals stay fixed? Or do they change according to our mental development? So, personally, I think even if that would be possible, she would have wanted him to be something else. Once she achieved her ideal, the realism of it all would repulse her.
---
Kindle Edition
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