Reviews for Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader: Reading, Writing, and the Question of Pleasure

The average rating for Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader: Reading, Writing, and the Question of Pleasure based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-29 00:00:00 Martin Becker 3.8 stars. The take home. Some books are un-filmable. The language of cinema doesn't work with them. Filmic attempts to be true to the spirit of Proust actually start to run counter to his objectives. Beugnet contends rightly that Hollywoodic hegemony means that our cinematic presentations are 98% "parole" and very little "langue". Drawing on its 19thC foundations and the state of its bedfellow, Literature, cinema has been founded on and promulgates specific archetypes of presentation of characters and storylines, which we as viewers are inured to. Conventions become logical and we bristle when they are breached. These include the logic of time progressing or regressing with analogues of presentation (ticking clocks, flowing rivers, fluttering calendar pages, the clever use of make up for actors, wobbly fades to show dreamstates) the mentative logic of character and action even when aberrant (even when we don't know why a person does something on film, we can begin to guess at reasons), logic of scene and place and setting. Congruity so that we may follow the action. As readers of Proust we know that Proust's gestamkunstwerk revokes some of these logics - most noticeably those to do with "personhood" and history and past, as he plays with time, character, associative events and consonances. Proust famously claimed that in all his writings, one would never see anything so literal or procedural as a man putting on his coat or opening a door. The Proustian eye is gimlet, but the focus is not the quotidian or the mundane, but everything other than this. Yet popular cinema - and Schlon's mission statement definitely was to make it appealing to as many as possible, which means quite a few bare boobies, Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti not looking as hot as she did in Flash Gordon, which is crazy to think about, and the hilarious sight of Irons smoking a cigar whilst banging a bored prostitute,) cannot do without this mundane movement, the mise en scene establishing the environment actors are situated in. It is the meat and potatoes of the cinematic world. It has to rely, on the caricatures and tropes of "heritage cinema" a format whose concern with mimetic verisimilitude Beugnet rightly says is ill-suited to Proust's intentions: "In effect, Schlondorff's adaptation significantly fails to fulfil the expectations of a public of amatuers of the genre. The passage of the written word to the screen, the visual actualisation of Proust's imagery, creates a kind of slippage "a discordance...that disrupts the conventional economy of the heritage film." (pg 121) What then can we do? We could take Ruiz's Way. With his Time Regained, Ruiz uses the main ideas of ISOLT (in particular its last volume) as his starting point - the vagaries of memory, time and remembrance, the position of self as opposed to others, the evolution of a person through history, and them presents them in their cinematic analogue. We therefore come to experience the cinema of the fragmented, the absurd, the extra-logical. Dissociative editing, surrealist juxtapositions (flying boys, people moving without walking, intrusive musical leitmotifs, three distinct timelines and one extra diegetic narrator whose room begins to be inflicted with gianticism) to portray simultaneous timeframes and events within the book of the past-as-being-remembered and the past-as-presented (cinematic fix = overlay of one face on another, grotesque makeups, the mise en abime* of a child Marcel playing before diegetically age appropriate Marcel-Narrator.) I feel very sorry for those who have not read the book, trying to work out what the hell is going on. I had trouble myself, and I have seen it twice now. Such an approach is indeed faithful to the construction and artistry of the text, is formally semi-faithful, yet it mistakenly foregrounds its own art over Proust's. The result is over-mannered, and not, as Buegnet says, faithful to Proust vision. ISOLT is more than the bricks it is made with. For all its formalism, Ruiz aspires to the historical as well. As in Schlondorff, heree is an aigrette, there a heaving bosom, calfskin gloves, coachmen, a monocle, ballgowns and footmen. Women en deshabille, garments removed, coats put on, doors opened, hats doffed. And yet this is the problem. The moving image (Proust also famously said he'd never seen a film and we have no reason to doubt his word) immediately concretises and formalises: we must eat up what we are given (or turn off, or object.) Were I given to the same type of academic language as the authors of this book are I would assert that this is the peculiar "tyranny of the image" or something. So in short. neither Schlondorff or Ruiz are satisfactory. What then, if not semi-abstract, "playful" treatments, like Ruiz's? Or the mimetic sterility of Schlondorff? Would Visconti's star-studded production (Bardot as Odette, Brando as Charlus, Delon or Dustin Hoffman(!) as Narrator, Bogarde as Swann...) have been much better? Given his corpus pre-Proust-pitch, yes, perhaps, but again what would have been lost in the making of the film?* I have to say: I side with the book's conclusion. Proust subsists sub specie aeternis, unimpeachably grand and self contained. It seems that faced with something so subtle as Proust, cinema is impoverished and can only approximate his vision. His stylistic self assuredness gained from his quest to repudiate his forebears (his wisdom was all his own). As all great geniuses do, he used the influence of Pascal, Flaubert, Hugo, Saint Simon, and so many more (Proust was widely read indeed) and assimilated and then bettered them all in a mode of art perfectly suited to him. Film interpretations so far made* are mere footnotes to his edificial creation. In essence: to experience Proust "faithfully" one must read him. ______________ This book is a good find for fans of Proust, and for those who have seen the films mentioned therein. It is made up of thoughtful essays on the intersection of film and literature, specific weight and focus obviously given to attempts to film Proust. Accessible, and not too specialised. NOTES: *naturally the book uses a fair few filmy terms. "Mise en abime," is one consistently mentioned, and sometimes used overeachingly. "the gaze" also features in discussion of Schlondorff, which I didn't really pay much attention to as it is again, an overused trendy term used to justify just about anything, but often used, as here in silly misunderstandings of "sexual politics" in the film. * I cannot comment on the Carpi films mentioned in this book as I have not seen them, and probably never will be able to. Suffice to say, they are loosely based on Proust and use his book as an influence. *We must leave aside Pinter's screenplay, as it was never filmed, and would likely debase and cheapen itself by being made. Of all the attempts at screening Proust, this remains the best. Stanley Kauffman praised it as "the best screen adaptation ever made of a great work." and I can only agree. It is perfection.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-12 00:00:00 Gary Conrad Reading this book is akin to taking a graduate level course in Montaigne. And if you love Montaigne like so many of us do, it is a course well-worth enjoying. Happy reading!