Transfixed by their future
From “The Self-Inventing Man,” by V. S. Pritchett, in the November 6, 1969, issue of The New York Review of Books:
Stendhal’s method is to put a collection of static shots or stills together and to give a questioning, disjointed motion to them; the narrative flows only where he intervenes in one of his disguises. He is a restless rather than a flowing novelist. He is always beginning again. This abruptness is the making of his portraits of young men; here no novelist has surpassed him, not even Tolstoy. To be continually startled is to be young. No one has so defined and botanized the fervor, uncertainty, conceit, timidity, and single-mindedness of young men, their dash, their shames, their passion for tactics and gesture. They shed self after self and are always becoming something else; this, though with less elan, for in Stendhal’s world they are passive, as is true of his women. Stendhal’s sense of human beings living now yet transfixed, for an affecting moment, by their future, gives the doctrine of self-invention a depth which is not often noticeable in its practitioners today.
October 20th, 2007 00:25
this pritchett excerpt about stendhal, especially “to be continually startled is to be young,” reminded me of what baudelaire said about a modern artist: that he must be a man-child and an eternal convalescent, because the convalescent, like the child, can see everything in its newness (”painter of modern life”). when walter benjamin deemed walser’s characters as convalescents, perhaps he had baudelaire’s thoughts in mind, as keen as he was on what baudelaire wrote…
October 23rd, 2007 07:29
Ah – here is is, in his 1929 essay about Walser:
“The wholly exceptional gentleness of these stories is apparent to all. But not everyone sees that the life they contain is not the nervous tension of decadence, but the pure and lively atmosphere of convalescence …. For nobody enjoys as does the convalescent. Everything orgiastic is alien to him: he hears in brooks the flowing of his replenished blood and, blowing from the tree tops, the purer breath on his lips.”
You may be right about the Baudelaire connection. There seems to be a division in literature regarding perception of convalescents: vigorous or vague? Like Larkin, I’m more in the latter camp: “wax-fleshed outpatients / still vague from accidents.”