Arquivo de literature | Page 134 of 140

The Homeland of Letters

I was in Paris in mid-2019. As soon as I disembarked, I deliberated: I will use my stay to buy some works that I have difficulty finding in Brazil.

Well, It was my first time in Paris. They advised me to search for the books in small tallows on the edge of the River Seine, near the Louvre, to find the best prices. There I went and arriving, you see, I found not one, but twenty tents lined up, all of them full of books. “I am in the homeland of letters” — I thought.

So I started doing math: I did not have the space or the money to take everything I wanted to buy. I would have to choose, say, four or five authors and that’s it. I desired, anyway, a physical version of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal; Aveux et anathèmes, by Cioran, was another indispensable purchase. I therefore decided and asked the first seller, “Avez-vous quelque chose de Baudelaire, Cioran, Flaubert ou Maupassant?“. The quelque chose sounded to me like insolence. There would certainly be the complete works of all the authors…

The salesman searched, searched, searched and returned the answer: “Non“. I went to the next tent; again the answer: “Non“. So I passed in each of the stalls, always asking the same question, and always getting the same answer. When I received the last “non” and noticed that the tents had run out, I just did not believe it, I thought it was impossible the scene I had just experienced.

There were, as I said, about twenty tents, each with two, maybe three hundred books. How did none of them have a single work by Charles Baudelaire, the greatest poet of the 19th century? I understand the French do not read Cioran, but Baudelaire? Flaubert?

Then the obvious question popped into my head: “If there is no Cioran, Flaubert, Maupassant or Baudelaire, what are these tents full of?” And, believe it or not, sweeping the nearest shelf with my eyes, there I found, in a prominent position, L’alchimiste, by Paulo Coelho.

____________

Talent is a Long Patience

Some interesting words from Guy de Maupassant, in my translation:

Later Flaubert, whom I sometimes saw, took affection for me. I dared to send him some essays. He read them kindly and said to me, “I don’t know if you will have talent. What you have brought to me proves a certain intelligence, but don’t forget that, young man, that talent — in Chateubriand’s words — is nothing but a long patience. Work.”

____________

The Basis of Literature

Charles Bally, Swiss linguist, makes a very virtuous reflection in his Traité de stylistique française. He is extolling the importance of the spoken language, with all its subjective burden, for literary language: he says the literary language feeds and rejuvenates the spoken language. He then says the aesthetic pleasure derived from the literary form is directly related to the spoken language, since such pleasure is nothing but the capture of a “sublime deformation” operated by the artist, which is only perceived through comparison. Bally reinforces that emotion, the quality of ideas or its organization were never enough to consecrate a literary work, not allowing us to quote a single masterpiece that obtained its consecration by abstaining from the form. Charles Bally then concludes, in other words, that the day when there is no form, and there is no contrast between the spoken language and the literary language, there will be no more literary language, and literature will be dead. Excellent, excellent! Now let us analyze the progression of poetry and prose over the centuries and draw our conclusions…

____________

Simplicity and Action

Guy de Maupassant, this great French writer, tells about his artistic conceptions in the essay Le roman, available as a preface to his Pierre et Jean. This essay is very interesting: Maupassant outlines his vision of the varied literary movements of the nineteenth century, says some of his influences and addresses some particularities of the literary creation process.

Let’s look at two interesting points from the essay.

Saying about what he thinks is the role of an artist, says Maupassant (in my translation):

To move us he must reproduce it (life) before our eyes with a scrupulous resemblance. He will, therefore, have to compose his work in such a skillful way, so hidden and of so simple appearance that it will be impossible to see and indicate his plan, to discover his intentions.

This carries some of Flaubert, incidentally, whom Maupassant considered his master. Accuracy, here is the summary. No flourishing, bluntness or excess: the artist must paint life exactly as it is.

This principle goes through the whole essay and influences different aspects of the creative process. At one point, Maupassant says about excessive explanations, about having the artist to be justifying the action of his characters, as if painting his psychological profile to substantiate his actions. Says the author:

Therefore, instead of explaining in detail the state of mind of a character, objective writers seek the action or gesture that this state of mind should fatally induce this man into a given situation. And they make him behave in such a way, from one end of the work to the other, that all his actions, all his movements are the reflection of his intimate nature, of all his thoughts, of all his desires or of all his hesitations.

Let the acts speak; action…

I like very much Maupassant’s style, as well as that of Stendhal, another French writer associated with realism. I do not think the artist should extend into explanations, treat the reader like an idiot. Letting the characters speak — or rather, act — is an effective technique for building a thought-provoking, moving, and real narrative.

We will continue in these notes on another occasion. For now, the message is this: when a teacher teaches, we do well listening to him.

____________