I write as a novice, an initiate into Racine’s imaginative world, and I enter with just enough French to feel how ill-suited it is for the temperament of my Anglo-expectations. I have, for quite a long time, known the two obvious things to say about Racine, but only recently started to work out why they matter, and how they can explain the difference of Racine … Continue reading 250. (Jean Racine)
Stendhal is exhausting and bracing because his energy is relentless and directed relentlessly to one end: the refusal of “style.” It is sometimes said that was painfully aware that he was incapable of style; I think it likely he realized it to be an achievement. To say Stendhal has no style might seem to echo Arnold’s remark about Wordsworth. It is vastly different in … Continue reading 247. (Stendhal)
Here is the second part of the Zola post; undoubtedly shorter, as the fire of fresh reading has sputtered. But there are a few more points I’d like to sort out in my head. They are all interrelated: the balance of high and low, comic and tragic, absurd and terrible; the depiction of the mob as a unit of life and intelligence; and the narratological … Continue reading 75. (Émile Zola)
In the spirit of a reading journal, here’s the first of a two-part attempt to say something coherent about Zola’s masterpiece Germinal, which I’ve just finished reading in translation. For some initial orientation, here is Erich Auerbach, esteeming the novel: Zola took the mixing of styles really seriously; he pushed on beyond the purely aesthetic realm of the preceding generation; he is one of the very … Continue reading 74. (Émile Zola)
