A Reading Diary (11 page)

Hector loved above all the final moment in Lavelli’s production, when, the experiment concluded, the aristocrats are about to cross over onto the island where the children are kept, but stop at the edge of the bridge; at this point the curtain falls. For Hector, the aristocrats’ true character lay in this hesitation: to observe but not to experience. (Earlier he had noticed the same hesitation in the film version of Hartley’s
The Go-Between
, when the matriarch refuses to go and see for herself her daughter’s infidelity.)

Somewhere I read that King Frederick II tried to conduct a similar experiment, not on the nature of love but on the nature of language. In order to discover what our “original” language was, he ordered that a number of newborn babes should be tended by wet-nurses who were forbidden to speak to them; in this way he imagined he might hear the first words spoken “naturally,” untaught. The experiment failed because none of the babies lived. Apparently we need language as we need food, in order to survive.

That an experiment is doomed to failure doesn’t make it, of course, ineffective. In
Werther
, Goethe facetiously remarks, “If mutual trust had earlier brought them together again, if love and understanding had helped them open their hearts to each other, our friend might still have been saved.” Not so, as
Elective Affinities
proves, because it is in the characters’ own nature that they must fail, and in that failure lies the novel’s success.

Elective Affinities
has something of a soap-opera plot centred around its four main characters: the middle-aged Eduard and Charlotte, who loved one another in their youth, drifted apart and then finally married after their partners died; and Ottilie and the Captain, their long-term guests, with whom they fall respectively in love.

“Fate,” says Charlotte, late in the book, “takes command of certain matters, and is very stubborn. Reason and virtue, duty and everything sacred oppose it in vain; things are likely to happen that seem justified to Fate but not to us; and so Fate asserts itself, whatever choices we make.” And then she realizes the truth, which sounds like an accusation: “But what am I saying! In fact, Fate is trying to carry out my own wishes and intentions, which I, in my thoughtlessness, have acted against.”

I am puzzled and enchanted by this realization. Charlotte argues that Fate knows
better
than herself her own intentions. What is this Fate that is wiser than the protagonists? Not the Fate (in the guise of Death) of Cocteau’s story in
Le grand écart
, as helpless as his victims to know the future:

Eduard and Charlotte, the aristocratic gardeners in
Elective Affinities
, never shy away from the encounters that Fate prepares for them (even if sometimes they arrive, as Charlotte does, a little late). They merely follow the plot: Fate as story.

Where does this notion come from? Not from the
imaginaire
of the Greeks, as Paul Veyne makes clear in his lovingly written book on the “constitutive imagination,” as he calls it,
Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
The notion belongs to literature, or rather to the reading of literature, when the reader accepts what he reads as fiction and yet “willingly suspends disbelief” for the sake of the story; this is what we mean by the inevitability of the plot. All business is conducted between the characters and the reader; the author is absent, or (in the case of Goethe) he is merely a master of ceremonies who comments on but has no say in his characters’ behaviour.

The youthful Stephen Dedalus has this to say in Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Today, playing with hypertext in the postmodernist sandbox, where we have the illusion of diverting the plot down a finite number of paths, we are like Eduard and Charlotte
and Ottilie and the Captain; we choose possibilities that Fate (like an authoritative parent) has already chosen for us.

I’m reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who jotted down this idea for a story in one of his astounding notebooks:

The Palliser Hotel in Calgary looks incongruously European in this Midwestern setting, like something out of Henry James. I sit in a red velvet armchair among potted palms, waiting for the car to take me to Banff, and watch the characters enter and exit a story.

Goethe never bothers with architecture in his novels. And though I wrote that he has no say in his characters’ behaviour, this formality isn’t coldness; one senses a raging passion behind the gilded façade, something torn between emotion, duty and an ultimate sense of helplessness. When Eduard, Charlotte and the Captain are discussing the
elective affinities in chemistry and comparing them to human relationships, one knows that the carefully arranged words, exchanged as in one of those philosophical dialogues dear to Hobbes and Newton, betray a turmoil that is kept unseen, a rawness that (I like to think) is Goethe’s own. My fondness for the old man comes, I believe, from that brittle combination of strength and delicacy. There are times when the clean and proper shell of his prose moves me to tears, for the sake of the darkness it covers.

Like his beloved Diderot, Goethe always seems to be laying his working tools out for the reader’s inspection. There is a startling self-assurance in this, like a magician inviting the public to inspect his bag of tricks. Eduard, criticizing the author of the book he’s reading, calls the man “a true Narcissus: he finds his own image everywhere and sees the entire world against the background of his own self.” This
Bespiegdung
or “mirroring” is, of course, Goethe’s own, or rather, that of his characters.

The Colombian Fernando Vallejo, explaining why he will not second-guess his characters’ thoughts: “I am a
first-person
novelist.”

The physical landscape of Goethe’s novel becomes the landscape of the characters’ emotions; they attempt to
domesticate nature much as they attempt to plan their affinities on an actual chart. Nature is seen as a sort of
Carte de Tendre
, the seventeenth-century allegorical map that traces the way to the loved one’s heart. Charlotte’s garden, for instance, is too easy a symbol for their experiment in the human world (the hut that can fit two or three or, as Charlotte heavily adds, “even a fourth,” etc.) and yet it matches the artificial tone of their dialogue—artificial, at least, to my foreign ears. There is something of the maxim-collector in their speeches (Charlotte ending the chapter with “And yet in many cases … it is kinder and more useful to write nothing of import, than not to write at all”). How different the tone, a little later in the book, when the irreversible nature of the present is described, and another voice, intuition or experience, not the mere imitation of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms or the Book of Proverbs, calls out: “And yet the present will not be deprived of its terrible rights. They spent part of the night in amusing conversation, which seemed all the freer because the heart unfortunately had no part in it.” These words are spoken from an intimate, visceral understanding of such a moment, one we all recognize.

Laurence Olivier was once asked how he managed to utter Oedipus’s now famous piercing cry of pain. “I heard about how they catch ermine,” he explained. “In the Arctic, they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it. And his
tongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that when I screamed in
Oedipus.”
An absolute grasp of a moment of truth.

“These analogies,” says Charlotte, “are effective and entertaining, and who would not gladly amuse himself with such similarities?”

This morning, I read in the Calgary paper that once again the provincial government intends to cut all manner of social programs, including support for handicapped people. A legally blind man, whose wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis and couldn’t work, was threatened with having his government payments cut off because he had taken a part-time job. His disability benefit amounted to $800 Canadian a month; no one can live on that amount, paying for rent and food. The statistics of child poverty in Alberta are astounding, especially in one of the richest provinces in one of the richest countries on earth. In 1996, for instance, the number of children living below the poverty line was 148,000.

What did I do about any of this?

I feel like Mittler, the fifth character in
Elective Affinities
, the outsider who, on the one hand, will not “waste his time
in any household where there was no help to give and no quarrel to resolve,” and, on the other, haughtily refuses to help out his best friends. Even though he fails, he seems to me to be a worthy
Mittler
(the word means “mediator”). “Those who are superstitious about names,” we are told, “maintain that the name Mittler had obligated him to take on this strangest of all vocations.” If so, my name would echo perhaps my countless
Mangeln
(“faults” in German), if
Mangelhaftigkeit
(“inadequacy”) is my lot. The English etymology is kinder, associating my name with “among” or “a person among many”—in other words, one of Dr. Johnson’s “common readers.”

Back home to France. Every time I return, I’m astonished to see, after the immense prairie skies, the stinginess of the skies in European cities.

Goethe seems to be always thinking; anywhere you go in his writing, there is never pure narration, there’s always conscious, articulated thought, permeating every room like the smell of fried onions. I enjoy this pervasiveness; a character can’t make a simple gesture without it being reflected upon, after being caught in the all-seeing eye of this minor god. The omniscient Goethe; this reminds me of a calligraphic sign that hung in the bedroom of a
schoolmate of mine when we were both nine or ten, in Buenos Aires:

Both observer and observed are present in the brief scene (and intellectual reflection) in which Eduard, reading out loud, crankily complains of Charlotte reading over his shoulder. “If I read to someone, isn’t it just the same as if I were explaining something orally? The written or printed words take the place of my own feelings and intentions, and do you think I would take the trouble to talk intelligibly if there were a window in my forehead or my breast, so that the person to whom I wish to relate my thoughts and feelings one by one knew in advance what I was aiming at? When someone reads over my shoulder, I always feel as if I were split in two.”

Here speaks a true reader, aware of the protocols of reading and jealous of his reading space, which must be one of three: either entirely private, silent and collected; or shared, silent as well, like the reading of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, whose eyes and then lips meet across a page; or
shared through reading out loud, when the possession of the page is that of the reader exclusively, never that of the listener. The duplicity that Eduard feels—“split in two”—is that of simultaneous modes of reading that contradict one another. Ottolie writes in her diary, “Each word that is spoken gives rise to its opposite.”

Also, the question here is that of the performance of fiction. The narrative act must exist in the time allotted for its telling, and the reader-accomplice (in this case the listener-accomplice) must not jump forward to the text’s conclusion, since this would shorten, as it were, the life of the story. (That conclusion is the forbidden last page of the magic book in fairy tales. … )

In Turkish, the word
muhabbet
means both “conversation” and “love.” You say for both, “To do
muhabbet.”
I like the idea of conversation being a window into one’s heart or mind.

I’ve looked at two translations of
Elective Affinities
in English: one by David Carradine, published by Oxford University Press; the other by Judith Ryan, published by Princeton. Neither is fully satisfying but both, as the French say,
se laissent lire
. Goethe suggested, in one of his
many letters to Wilhelm von Humboldt, that national languages reflect the national character, and that English writers share with the Germans the same ways of thinking and the same sense of what is precious. This would explain why Shakespeare is part of the German tradition; it does not explain why Goethe never became part of the English tradition. Somehow, “Gouty” (to use Joyce’s disrespectful epithet) hasn’t lodged in the English-reading canon in his successive incarnations. Even though the first full-length biography of Goethe in
any
language was written by the multitalented George Henry Lewes in 1855, and in spite of Goethe’s influence on writers such as Lewes’s partner, George Eliot (I remember the
Elective Affinities-like
ending of
The Mill on the Floss)
, he has few English readers.