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FLORILEGIUM GALLICUM: FRENCH WRITERS IN ENGLISH
TRANSLATION
by Kevin Brown
Five books by authors ranging from Balzac to Michel Leiris, three of them translated by Lydia Davis,
can be used to understand centuries of French literature and history. One could argue that not
only Michel Leiris, but Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, and ultimately Davis
herself, are all quasi-ethnographers possessed of a grasp of both how society works and a
sucient distance to view it objectively. They are able to then write about it from both on high (
le
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monde
) and down low (
le demi-monde
) yet stand at a sucient remove to retain what translator
Raymond N. MacKenzie calls “a clear-sightedness that is almost but not quite cynicism.” This essay
examines the evolution of this insight into French culture through some of literature’s most gifted
contributors.
I
Brisées: Michel Leiris at 100
One of several Leiris titles Davis translated over thirty years,
Brisées: Broken Branches
(Northpoint Press)
is a gathering of art
catalogue essays, reviews, letters to the editor, meditations on the
body human and politic, and other occasional personal pieces.
Brisées
connects to the musculature of Leiris’s overall body of work
the way
Swann’s Way
,
Madame Bovary
,
Lost Illusions
, and
Lost Souls
connect to the skeletal system of French literature. In her 2020
New Yorker
article on Leiris, Sasha Frere-Jones notes there are
books that “are fully intelligible only as part of the project of a life.”
Brisées
, like Davis’s
Essays
, is among them. The groundwork Davis
laid translating Leiris’s essays prepared her for what might seem
the “pinnacle” of her career as translator—rendering Proust—but
counter-intuitive as it may sound, Davis says “the less popular
Leiris,” not Proust, may in fact be, “stylistically more intricate and daunting.”
There’s a rational explanation. Like Proust, Leiris is saddled with an “unshakeable and undeserved
reputation” for being dicult. During the drafting of his account of an expedition from Dakar to
Djibouti (translated by Brent Hayes Edwards as
Phantom Africa
, Seagull Books, 2019) and
thereafter, Leiris developed his books using the old index-card system, jotting down aches and
pains, bits of fact, memories, dreams, reections, lines of lineated verse, prose-poetry, and other
scraps. Leiris’s “Cartesian Self” wrote by what he called “ts and starts and without regard for
spatial or temporal unities.” To put it surrealistically, they’re like hypnagogic journal-entries, as if
painted by Yves Tanguy, a
poésie brut
documenting the chiaroscuro of the unconscious “in the full
light of midday.” Some of Leiris’s essays are as short as one paragraph, a page or two, leaning
heavily on metaphor rather than exposition or argument. They sometimes communicate “by way
of allusion, analogy, evoking an image.” Davis’s description of Rimbaud’s prose can also be said of
Leiris: “A wealth of images . . . develops by leaps of immediate personal association rather than by
sequential or narrative logic.”
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Leiris excels at physical description. He watches writers, painters, composers like Erik Satie, Joan
Miró, and Aimée Césaire. Giacometti’s drawings, engravings, etchings, paintings, and sculptures
inspire some of Leiris’s most distinctive writing. And part of what makes Davis such a good
translator is disappearing into her role, or seeming to. Adhering to the French tradition of “clear
and exact prose,” Davis articulates Leiris’s ideas in such a way that they seldom seem
“unnecessarily abstract and obtuse.” Such transparency means the reader isn’t peering over Davis’s
shoulder as she translates Leiris, or peering over Leiris’s shoulder as he writes about Giacometti;
the reader is standing alongside Giacometti himself, with his “crown of wooly hair,” as he agonizes
—
merde
!—over a gure-study of “isolation and inertia,” the pinched-clay pockmarks and bored-in
eyes of a miniature head perched atop “sad stylites.”
Leiris came to manhood as Proust was dying. It’s as true of Leiris’s essays as it is of Proust’s ction
that both are best understood in terms of deep thinking rather than mere phraseology. What Leiris
calls “the Proustian illumination,” a certain train of thought, can only be elucidated during
unavoidably long hours of concentrated drafting. Leiris is sometimes saying not very novel things
but in utterly novel ways. Once you’ve read himon authors such as Paul Eluard, the poet of love in
time of war, whose
Letters to Gala
(published in Jesse Browner’s translation by Paragon House,
1989) is a rsthand account of the Surrealist movement, for example, or pivotal 19 -century
predecessors like Rimbaud, who inuenced that movement—it becomes clear Leiris is, like Proust,
a demanding but not especially “dicult” writer.
The Leirisian sentence, tied in stubborn knots of clause and subclause, reects contradictions in
the man himself. On meeting him, Davis thought Leiris compartmentalized, which seems mirrored
in his prose. His person, shesays, was “tailored, spotless.” From getting on the number 63 bus near
his apartment to getting o near the gardens of the Trocadéro, Leiris smokes a cigarette and
trumpets into his handkerchief, lost in the fugue-state of his own thought, past the point where “a
mode of shared understanding” can follow “our private meditations.”
Every author, says Leiris, is “the historiographer of his own themes.” His training as an
ethnographer placed Leiris in the perhaps impossible “position of impartial observer, detached
from the system of values [one] inherits from [one’s] own culture and likewise detached from the
cultures [one] studies.” Ethnography allowed him to form “a concrete view of . . . the social
minimum that denes the human condition.” But it washis taste for poetry that led Leiris to
ethnography, not the other way around. The self-begetting essays in
Brisées
range from a lecture
on Haitian voodoo priests to prose-arias of minotauromachy before coming back to ethnographic
contributions to French journals on the syncretism between African spirits and Catholic saints.
Davis says “Leiris’s project was to take himself as subject, with a sort of ethnographic objectivity,
th
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and write himself into being, to arrive at a sense of himself and how best to conduct his life,
through the years-long, intensive labor of exploring himself through writing.”
Readers shouldn’t expect
Brisées
to wind itself seamlessly around a central theme. The “Ariadne
thread” tying these essays together is Leiris’s eort to follow the many aspects of art as one whole
—the circus clowns of Picasso’s Rose Period, dance, music, theater—in order to “arrive at a
complete view of man encompassing his twofold existence as a product of culture and a fragment
of nature.”
II
Swann's Way: Proust at 150
Proust was about thirty when Leiris was born; by 1909, he’d
arrived at the mature style we now call “Proustian.”
Swann’s Way
(Penguin Classics, $20)
tells two related yet distinct stories: one
involving Marcel, a younger version of our Narrator, the other
about Charles Swann, a friend of Marcel’s family. “Swann in Love,”
the psychobiography of jealous obsession embedded within, is a
novella of manners ashing back to a period 15 years before the
narrator was born and continuing through Marcel’s youth at
Combray, where his grandparents live and his family visits during
holiday vacations. Taxiing down the runway for the rst 195 pages,
the novel sprouts wings and generates lift, a magic-trick
exhilarating to witness. A reader who gets that far may nd the
rest hard to put down.
Swann’s Way
is less daunting when its many modalities and disquisitions—adage, aphorism,
apothegm, architecture, art criticism, literary criticism, maxim, music, natural history, portraiture,
prose poem, proverb, theater—are thought of as essays in search of a novel. Some have
questioned whether in order to achieve hybridity, Proust sacriced achieving “unity, life.” Whether
describing a waterlily, a cathedral façade or the racing of his insomniac thoughts, there’s
something of what Davis in another context calls “deliberate overload”—auditory, gustatory-
olfactory, tactile, visual—in Proust’s perceptions. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that, “Leiris doesn’t
interpret [a thing] so much as study himself in its presence,” and it’s Leiris who’s most helpful in
this context because precisely the same can be said of Proust. “Every observation,” Leiris writes, “is
a relationship between someone looking and something looked at.” Oftentimes Proust’s Narrator,
insisting that the reader “pay attention to me . . . know me!” is pushing the limits of the
communicable past the point of the ineable. Leiris is making what he calls “a perpetual
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encroachment of the act of narration on the thing narrated.” Proust doesn’t just toe the line
between the all-consuming “I” and the universal “we,” between absorption and self-absorption,
between direct or indirect object and almost overwhelming subjectivity, between pitiless scrutiny
and self-pity—he crosses it. Proust isn’t so much a “dicult” as an experimental writer, attempting
to write as Monet painted or Wagner composed. It’s in the nature of experiments to test failure.
Swann’s Way
is full of eccentrics such as Proust. “Like certain novelists,” he “has divided his
personality between . . . characters.” Proust is not always Marcel, or vice versa. Asthmatic, noise-
sensitive, Marcel has much in common with our Narrator, whom Proust calls “the unconscious
author of my suerings,” but is not necessarily the same person. Likewise, “I began to take an
interest in [Swann’s] character,” our Narrator says, “because of the resemblances it oered to my
own.” Swann’s eczema, his balding red hair, and patchy beard in no way resemble the features of
our androgynous pretty-boy with curl papers in his hair. On the other hand, Swann, “my other self,”
is very much like Marcel in that he’s “a shrewd observer of manners.” Marcel’s “studious youth”
recalls “the inspirations of [Swann’s] youth, which had been dissipated by a frivolous life.”
Haunted by unnished works like
The Human Comedy
, by unrealized talents like that of Swann,
Marcel decides to become a writer, to describe faithfully what he sees in nature, art, and society.
One day, Marcel dreams, “I would be the foremost writer of the day.” A man of 38 subsisting on
croissants and caeine, Proust spent the last dozen years of his life in search of lost time, reliving it
from childhood to his present twilight moment in European civilization. Sometimes in the guise of
Marcel, sometimes as Proust himself, our Narrator is writing himself into being.
Passages in Proust are sometimes long, and if it’s been decades since you last read a couple
volumes from
In Search of
, it can take some time to readjust because within “his long sentences,
far-fetched comparisons, and over exuberant eloquence,” sometimes very little actually happens.
But Proust’s sentences don’t ramble; they are built on solid foundations of syntax and grammar.
Whatever problems readers may have with him, mere length shouldn’t be among them. Proust’s
storytelling breathes, sometimes shallow and gasping, sometimes deep. But he can be strikingly
succinct, and to her credit as translator, Davis can match him for brevity or expansiveness: "He
raised himself on his tiptoes. He knocked.”
The “Proustian sentence” isn’t one thing; it’s many things. You might even say, stretching the
comparison to absurd lengths, that the Proustian paragraph itself is not a single thing, continuous
and indivisible. It is composed of a molecular innitude of successive sentences, of dierent
sentences, which may in themselves seem ephemera, but by their interrupted multitude give the
impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.
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That said, a single sentence of Proust’s can go on for an entire paragraph, and that paragraph for
several pages sparsely populated with commas unless the author is striving for eect, in which
case he may sometimes at or sharp them like “wrong notes coaxed by unskillful ngers from an
out-of-tune piano.” Dialogue is sometimes broken out conventionally, as in a stage play, which
permits those pages to go quite quickly. Other times, the dialogue stays within the paragraph.
Chapter headings or section breaks are almost non-existent, in contrast to Flaubert or Balzac. This
slosh-over eect forbids the reader to put the novel down and conveniently pick up the thread
again. The thousand-odd pages of
Within a Budding Grove
and
Swann’s Way
, so needful of constant
attention, are best suited to uninterrupted stretches of reading on a delivery device other than a
smart phone. A reader has two choices: either indulge Proust as he introduces all the characters
who will occur, develop, and recur throughout this seven-movement opus, as he introduces all the
themes that rhyme with what’s gone before and what’s yet to come; or read something else.
Of course, Proust has his critics, and his critics have a point. Even Davis admits, in a 2006 letter to
the editors of the
New York Review of Books
, that he can be “oppressively overwrought, even
saccharine.” Some readers couldn’t care less about the gaes Marcel commits or about his perhaps
excessive disillusionment over the petty snubs of petty snobs who never really deserved all that
attery and fawning he’d lavished on them in the rst place. And for some critics, Proust’s vast
intellect and powers of observation seem squandered in this “study of the nobility; a Parisian novel;
an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert; an essay on women; and an essay on pederasty.”
Proust’s Narrator shifts back and forth between the necessarily circumscribed “I” of Marcel, the
third person “he,” she,” and “they” of “Swann in Love,” and the all-seeing eye of Proust himself and
his philosophically generalizing “we” and “our” used in speculative digressions. The points of view
get blurred, intentionally or otherwise. It’s hard to tell how and what one character, including
Marcel, knew about another, and when that character knew it. Through what he called
“retrospective illuminations,” Proust gives his Narrator access to information other characters lack.
But the reader also begins to suspect things about Proust that he himself may not have known or
wanted known. “Since I wanted to be a writer someday,” our Narrator writes, “it was time to nd
out what I meant to write.” Even Proust at his death could not have known how self-fullling this
prophecy would be.
Unless he was gathering material for his great work of recapturing the past, Proust made himself
scarce. Perhaps he realized literary genius would never have taken him “very far in society”
anyhow. By the time of these reections, Proust—a shut-in, mostly bed-ridden, like his great-aunt
Léonie—mostly came out at night, his complexion ashen and his eyes hollowed out like a
Giacometti portrait in monochrome. Even indoors, dining at the Ritz, Proust wore a heavy fur coat
over his evening clothes, and evening clothes over his long-johns, refusing to remove his top-hat
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for fear of worsening his cold, his canals infected by the earplugs he always wore to drown out the
neighbors’ noise. “How frightfully ill he’s looking,” people whisper, scandalized.
Proust wasted away to 100 pounds, and was dead, like Balzac, by age fty-one.
III
The Bride of Yonville: Flaubert at 200
What’s left to say about
Madame Bovary
(Penguin Classics, $17)
? This novelspeaks to Proust’s
notion that “the ideal is inaccessible and happiness mediocre.” In order to organize discussion
surrounding this much-discussed work, let’s break this section down by act.
—
Act One
—
We rst encounter Emma “in the freshness of her beauty, before
the delement of marriage and the disillusionment of adultery.”
One obvious dierence between Proust and Flaubert is their
respective degrees of authorial intervention. Always intrusive,
sometimes hectoring, full of digressions “thickened by a great
mass of fustian,” Balzac addresses his reader directly. Meanwhile,
Proust’s rst-person Narrator passes moral judgments Flaubert’s
omniscience does not allow. Flaubert is superb at asynchronous
revelation of motive, how characters see one another, and how
those same characters see themselves. From a vantage point
whose spherical center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere,
Flaubert hints by indirection at things the reader’s already
beginning to suspect; he shows simultaneously the lies people tell
each other, and the half-truths they keep from themselves.
Père Rouault, Emma’s father, oers Charles Bovary the consolations of philosophy to help him get
over the grief he feels when his rst wife dies. Before either the prospective bride or groom see it
coming, cunning meets guilelessness as Rouault calculates how to dower Emma o to Charles, the
way a farmer might auction o a less-than-prize heifer to a witless buyer. (Flaubert describes her
teeth, as if she were a ne specimen trotted out among dung at a county fair, not just as “pearly”
but “nacreous.” The old master practically railroads poor Bovary into the marriage arrangement.
By the morning after the big wedding day, Emma’s already fallen out of love with the reality of a
marriage she feels martyred to. She’s married a physician with more than a little Norman peasant
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in him—he gargles his soup. While Charles is performing his country doctor duties, Emma—with
too much time on her hands—passes her days thinking up extravagant names “for a perfectly
simple dish that the servant had spoiled.” Emma and Charles: so close in the same bed, so far
apart in the same room.
Meanwhile “one day nosed along on the heels of the next.” In Flaubert, as in Proust and Leiris,
there’s maximalist “profusion within a frame” of description, as Davis puts it in "The Impetus Was
Delight" from
Essays One
: the touch of a warm wind; the dogs’ volley-barking; white billiard balls
caroming over green felt tables; that barnyard smell of a hen laying an egg. Vast amounts of data
never seem to retard the narrative momentum of
Bovary
, however, because Flaubert horsewhips
his narrative, foaming and frothing like a thoroughbred. At 350 pages, this booknever once feels
drawn out.
Charles falls hard for Emma, as Swann does Odette, but Emma simply cannot “convince herself
that the calm life she was living was the happiness of which she had dreamed.” Bored with him,
Emma’s already contemplating adultery—though she never seems to admit that to herself. The
reader never questions whether she’s going to cheat on Charles, only when and where. It’s a
village, for Chrissakes! “Provincial life,” Balzac informs, “is based on a meticulous, detailed system
of espionage, insisting that one’s private life be open to everyone’s view at all times.” How’s she
supposed to pull o all this mounting and dismounting? And with whom?
—
Act Two
—
Flaubert’s timing and comic eects sometimes “stupefy the understanding.” One of Davis’s many
achievements in translating
Bovary
is laughter on almost every page. And this is not accidental. She
has clearly thought, very carefully, about keeping Flaubert funny. Any translator can tell you that
carrying humor over from the source to the “target language” is one of the hardest things to do.
Even when Flaubert is drawing your attention elsewhere, you nd it impossible to ignore how
marvelously well he’s doing it. The pecking orders of cruelty in many of these novels is similar and
recognizable. In Proust, Françoise heaps verbal abuse on a Combray servant-girl whom Swann may
or may not have impregnated while she is in labor pains; Forcheville tongue-lashes Saniette in front
of everybody; Mme. Verdurin humiliates Swann in front of Odette and Forcheville. In Flaubert, the
help bully farm animals; masters lord it over the help. Pompous pharmacist Homais is as abusive
toward underlings he berates for their “ineducable incompetence,” as Proust calls it, as he is
“drawn to those in Power.”
Emma’s disappointment breeds contempt. When Bovary undresses, she complains of a headache.
Little by little, she refuses to share the marriage bed at all.
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During this petulant depression, everything irks her, not least herself. A creature of moods and
whims—now feverish with gaiety, now “drunk with sadness,” now aloof, now explosive with lust—
Emma’s a bundle of misdirected energy. She stays up all night reading dirty books and sleeps till
four in the afternoon, or else she’s compulsively neat, thrifty as a Picard village housewife,
exaggeratedly attentive to her household duties and newborn daughter. Other times she literally
can’t be bothered with the drooler. Her pathology sounds vaguely familiar. Leiris, too, suered
from bouts of clinical depression. Within months, Emma’s water-faucet tears, her “exaggerated
speeches [concealing] commonplace aections,” are becoming tedious. Even before he’s
conquered Emma, Rodolphe’s already plotting how to get rid of her. Boulanger dallies with Emma,
smacking her emotions around like a tomcat toying with a half-dead mouse.
Flaubert shares with Proust an attention to detail verging on mania—especially in women’s fashion,
for which Emma yearns as lustily as does Odette. For one who inveighs so mightily against the
bourgeousie, the Old Rouennais has a gluttonously keen eye for material possessions. Emma
lavishes on her much wealthier lover extravagant gifts she can’t possibly aord. She lies, cheats,
Ponzi-schemes, goes on shopping sprees. But instead of gratifying, these presents embarrass
Rodolphe.
Rodolphe writes Emma a orid letter. Reading it, Emma sprouts three gray hairs and faints dead
away, lapsing into a coma; she remains bedridden 43 days. Once awake again, she begins
contemplating suicide—an act Leiris attempted via barbiturate overdose. The blue jar on the third
shelf in the capharnaum, once mentioned in Act Two, must be emptied by the end of Act Three.
—
Act Three
—
For Léon, Emma’s nal lover, part of her charm as mistress is precisely that she’s a married woman,
whereas she herself “was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.” They tire of each
other.
After 240 pages, everybody in Yonville knows about Emma’s indelities except Charles. Even when
he nds in the attic a faded love letter to Emma from Rodolphe, Charles convinces himself their
“love” must have been platonic. There are many plausible alternate endings. More than one
character spells out for her the option obvious in the reader’s mind, a theme common to all four
novels under discussion here. But in her own eyes, Emma is much too storybook a heroine for that:
“I’m to be pitied, but I’m not for sale!” “Facts,” says Proust, “do not nd their way into the world in
which our beliefs reside.”
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IV
Balzac: Lost Illusions and Lost Souls
If readers in the monoglot “anglosphere” struggle through Proust
and Flaubert, where to begin with Balzac’s vast ctional chronicle
of France between 1815–1848,
The Human Comedy
? Two novels
recently translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie,
Lost Illusions
and
Lost Souls
(University of Minnesota Press, $19.95 each)
, suggest
an answer. Are these 1,066 pages worth the trouble?
Unequivocally. To read Balzac, you have to accept him for what he
is: a very uneven writer.
Langston Hughes, who might have bussed Leiris’s cabaret table
without either knowing, is a recognizably Balzacian “type.” Wealth,
like an estranged parent’s withheld aection, shunned Hughes all
his life. He churned out plays, opera and oratorio libretti, literary
ction, and newspaper columns under his own name and pulp ction under pseudonyms. He
hustled from book contract to book contract, staying aoat on advances for books not even started
much less nished, dodging landlords when the rent was due. The ctional version of this type,
recurring in both
Lost Illusions
and
Lost Souls
, is poet-dandy Lucien Chardon de Rubempré. A young
man from the provinces, he arrived with “the boldness of the social climber,” writes Balzac, and
“came to the house [the Faubourg-Saint-Germain] ve days out of the week, gracefully swallowed
insults from the resentful, tolerated impertinent glares, and made witty responses to mockery.”
Lost Illusions
, the prequel to
Lost Souls
, is what MacKenzie calls “the truly foundational text in the
vast
Comédie
, both in its form and its themes,” and might easily have been subtitled “Scenes from
Literary Life.”
In some respects, literary life in 1822, the dawn of print media’s ascendancy, seems unchanged
from that of our print media twilight in 2022. Media moguls still rely on interns performing “a year’s
work for no salary.” What has changed is that the supply of journalists now far exceeds the
demand for column inches. Lucien spends his days at the Sainte-Geneviève public library, where
it’s drier and better lit than in his unheated garret, working on his rst novel and his chapbook.
Lucien gets a behind-the-scenes view of how publications are run; how gatekeepers see to it The
Paper isn’t overrun by unsolicited contributors. “If you don’t already have a reputation,” one
publisher, admiring his own manicure, frankly admits, “I’m not interested.”
Not content to live on bread and milk, Lucien networks. He becomes a theater critic and book
reviewer—a “paid assassin” as Balzac puts it, “of literary reputations.” All he need do to get invited
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to dinner seven nights a week, for actresses to twine themselves around him like a clematis, to
become an inuencer in France and nd a publisher for his own books, is to write witty reviews of
other books he may or may not even