finite number of paths, we are like Eduard and Charlotteand 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:
A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions: that the characters act otherwise than he thought: that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages.
WEDNESDAY
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 theelective 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 todomesticate 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
I’m reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who jotted down this idea for a story in one of his astounding notebooks:
A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions: that the characters act otherwise than he thought: that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages.
WEDNESDAY
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 theelective 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 todomesticate 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
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