Henry James on 'character' in the novel form

[from his preface to The Portrait of Lady (1881)]

...I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles,1 saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.

‘To arrive at these things is to arrive at my “story”,’ he said, ‘and that’s the way I look for it. The result is that I’m often accused of not having “story” enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need—to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them—of which I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent d’architecture.2 But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much—when there’s danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I give—having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of one’s wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where they come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of life—by which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposed—floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critic’s quarrel, so often, with one’s subject, when he hasn’t the wit to accept it. Will he point out then which other it should properly have been?—his office being, essentially to point out. Il en serait bien embarrassé.3 Ah, when he points out what I’ve done or failed to do with it, that’s another matter: there he’s on his ground. I give him up my “architecture”,’ my distinguished friend concluded, ‘as much as he will.’

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilité.4 It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of one’s own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting—a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn’t emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could think so little of any fable that didn’t need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn’t depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods of so-called presentation, I believe—among novelists who have appeared to flourish—that offer the situation as indifferent to that support; but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the admirable Russian’s testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly—if it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for one’s uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation, of ‘subject’ in the novel...

Stefanie Sobelle on Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations

Dresden, 1741: A count lies suffering from chronic insomnia. To soothe his misery, he orders a musician to play to him every night, a ritual that necessitates the composition of pieces for the young clavier player. The task is assigned, a set of thirty variations on a theme is written, and one of the masterpieces of Western music is born. The insomniac is Hermann Karl von Keyserling; the harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg; and the composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. So goes the creation myth of the Goldberg Variations, a tightly assembled rotation of elements including canons, genres, and arabesques. Its structure is the organizing principle and its conception the theme of Gabriel Josipovici’s captivating novel Goldberg: Variations.

Bach’s composition has earned its own list of variations (not least, Glenn Gould’s famous recording, recently digitized for a player piano; a Jerome Robbins ballet; and Richard Powers’s novel The Gold Bug Variations). Yet Josipovici has done something delightfully daring for his homage: With the trick of a colon, his rendition proposes variations on Goldberg himself. The novel’s setting is not Germany but nineteenth-century England; the insomniac is not a count but a wealthy aristocrat unmoved by music; and Goldberg, here named Samuel, is not a musician but a storyteller—a Scheherazade plagued with writer’s block for whom Queneau-esque variations are the only solution. Samuel recounts tales of Scottish villages buried in sand and butterflies that reside in little girls’ heads, just as he confronts ordinary agonies of love and loss. His seemingly disjunctive anecdotes reach from Odysseus’s Ithaca to contemporary London. If Bach’s Variations exhilarate partly in one’s anticipation of the next segment, Josipovici’s remind us that one must not forget the importance of “that which lies in between” the details. The reader is informed that “sleep is the goal of art as it is of man”; it is the “blessed” ending allowed when truth is discovered between stories, and “only a true work will allow him to sleep well when he has closed the book.” Inevitably, sleep comes when the insomniac accepts the reliability of silence over the ambiguity of tales.

Like Bach, Josipovici plays with canon (Homer, Shakespeare, Bellow), genre (the epistolary novel, the domestic melodrama), and arabesque (in the end, Goldberg revises the story of his visit— once dark and mephitic, now full of dancing and cheer). Bach’s eighteenth-century moment is, after all, credited with the birth of the novel, and inevitably, the book’s subject becomes that very invention. Samuel must contend with literary history and all its emerging forms, and this burden mutates him into a metafiction within the narrative as another, contemporary author emerges to voice his concern for the artistic process: “You have to feel that more is at stake than the skillful telling of thirty anecdotes . . . that all will add up to more than the sum of the parts.” Josipovici finally suggests that all novels—and, in a sense, all lives—are indispensable variations on one another.

Return of the 'modest poet'

Palestinian poet Darwish returns to Haifa on 1st literary event since self-imposed exile.

By Dalia Karpel

How thrilled is he really about his coming visit to Haifa? What was the impact on him of a report that 1,200 tickets (out of a total of 1,450) for his poetry-reading appearance this Sunday in an auditorium on Mount Carmel had been snatched up in one day? Does this embrace move Mahmoud Darwish, known as the Palestinian national poet, who in recent years has lived in Amman and occasionally in Ramallah?

"When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions," Darwish says, during a conversation that takes place in Ramallah. "I am going to Haifa without any expectations. I have a barrier on my heart. Maybe at the moment of the encounter with the audience a few tears will fall in my heart. I anticipate a warm embrace, but I am also apprehensive that the audience will be disappointed, because I do not intend to read many old poems. I would not want to appear as a patriot or as a hero or as a symbol. I will appear as a modest poet."

How does one make the transformation from being the symbol of the Palestinian national ethos to being a modest poet?

"The symbol does not exist either in my consciousness or in my imagination. I am making efforts to shatter the demands of the symbol and to be done with this iconic status; to habituate people to treat me as a person who wishes to develop his poetry and the taste of his readers. In Haifa I will be real. What I am. And I will choose poems of a high level."

Why do you disdain your old poems?

"When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book. I have not yet decided what I will read to the audience. I am not stupid. I will not disappoint them. I know that many want to hear something old."

Darwish arrived in Ramallah from Amman on Monday morning of this week. He was scheduled to hold working meetings in the days that followed and then go to Haifa, the city in which he embarked on his literary path, in the 1950s. He doesn't yet know how he will travel - there are many volunteers who want to drive him to the meeting in Haifa with residents of the Galilee. The evening is being organized by Siham Daoud, a poetess and editor of the literary journal Masharef, in conjunction with the Hadash Arab-Jewish political party. Darwish will speak and read about 20 of his poems. Samir Jubran will accompany him on the oud and the singer Amal Murkus will moderate. Darwish hopes the Interior Ministry will let him stay in Israel for about a week, although the entry permit he received is valid for only two days.

The conversation with the poet takes place at 4 P.M. in the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. The magnificent, well-kept building contains an art gallery and a hall for films and concerts.It also has a spacious office, from which Darwish edits the poetry journal Al-Karmel.

The room we are in contains a library rich in Arabic books, though a few Hebrew ones are interspersed among them. There is a poetry collection put out by the Hebrew literary journal Iton 77, Na'ama Shefi's "The Ring of Myths: Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis," as well as copies of the literary-political journal Mita'am,edited by the poet Yitzhak Laor, and a poetry collection by Sami Shalom Chetrit.

Darwish, thinner than ever, elegantly dressed, is cordial. For someone who eight years ago was pronounced clinically dead and was restored to life almost miraculously, he looks fit and younger than his 66 years.

"Is there any hope for this nation?" I ask, and Darwish, the great pessimist, does not even bother asking which nation I am referring to. "Even if there is no hope, we are obliged to invent and create hope. Without hope we are lost. The hope must spring from simple things. From the splendor of nature, from the beauty of life, from their fragility. One may forget the essential things occasionally, if only to keep the mind healthy. It is hard to speak of hope at this time. That would look as if we were ignoring history and the present. As though we were looking at the future in severance from what is happening at this moment. But in order to live we must invent hope by force."