Gaya Scienza

Rimbaud (cont.)

It was a good surprise to read, in the first pages of a small book directed at the prospective professors of literature in France:

L'historicité de l'oeuvre [de Rimbaud] apparaît aussi sur un autre plan, car certains des besoins, désirs et fantasmes de Rimbaud ne peuvent se contenter des revendications communardes. À un moment qu'il serait vain de vouloir circonscrire, il a compris qu'il éprouvait des désirs qu'on ne qualifiait pas encore d''homosexuels', mais de pédérastiques (ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'il était uniquement attiré par les hommes, une lettre de Verlaine laissant entendre en 1875 que s'il donnait de l'argent à Rimbaud, son ami en ferait profiter des 'cabaretiers' et des 'filles'). Son oeuvre n'évoquera ces sentiments que d'une manière oblique, exception faite pour les parodies de l'Album zutique où il sera possible de prêter à d'autres ces désirs peu avouables, mais comme on l'a souvent dit (en général cependant dans le cadre d'une analyse homophobe jusqu'aux années 1960), il n'est sans doute pas fortuit que les poèmes de 1870-1871 reviennent avec insistance sur des thèmes scatologiques. Nos interprétations de Venus anadyomène ou L'Éclatante victoire de Sarrebrück suggèrent que la sodomie joue déjà un rôle dans l'imaginaire du poète, avant même Le Coeur supplicié de mai 1871 ou le Sonnet du Trou du Cul qu'il a composé avec Verlaine vers la fin de la même année. Que la pédérastie apparaisse sous des formes surtout obliques et souvent satiriques n'a rien de bien surprenant compte tenu de l'interdit qui planait sur de tels désirs, mais Rimbaud semble avoir pu ainsi au moins évoquer cette question, quitte à trouver d'autres moyens d'en parler plus tard, de manière plus voilée et aussi moins humoristique.

Rimbaud - Poésies, Une saison en enfer (collection Clefs concours, Atlande, 2009, 256p) is authored by Steve Murphy, one of the top experts in the French poet, and Georges Kliebenstein. It's a very good introduction to Rimbaud and it includes a nice bibliography with comments. According to the authors, the best general purpose edition of Rimbaud is the one edited by Pierre Brunel (Livre de Poche, 'Pochothèque', 1999). Et bien voilà.

2010.01.31

But let's Get Back to Our Knitting...

While in the plane, returning from Paris, I caught up with some of the newspapers and magazines I had somewhat neglected... I used to always carefully select a good book for my trips. I still do it, but most of the time, between meals, sleeping and going through the recent press, I don't have time for a book... You never know, however: long delays are always a possibility, not to mention hijackings...

In the New York Times, on January 17th, Edmund White gave a very positive review of Concerning E. M. Forster (Frank Kermode, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009, 180p):

Sir Frank Kermode, who turned 90 last year, has written a subtle and fascinating book of criticism that obeys the delightful vagaries of rhythm more than the inflexibility of pattern.

Kermode makes neither too much nor too little of Forster’s homosexuality. He points out that Forster’s affection for an Indian student in England was what initially caused him to travel to India, a trip that eventually led to his finest novel. He also argues persuasively that Forster’s pleasure in writing his homosexual romantic novel, “Maurice,” which was published only posthumously, and in writing his gay short stories, some of which he destroyed as he went along, eclipsed the interest he’d taken in writing about heterosexual characters. If he stopped writing novels altogether for the 46 years between the publication of “A Passage to India” in 1924 and his death in 1970, it was partly because he was very comfortable financially (since his considerable royalties had topped off his inherited income) and partly because he was convinced he was not free to explore in print the only subject that now mattered to him.

I then found a short review by Mark Bostridge of a new crime book in last weekend Financial Times. I had read Mark Senderson's previous book, Wrong Rooms, published in 2003, "a moving memoir of his relationship with a young Australian called Drew, and of the loss of his lover from skin cancer," and liked it. His new book, Snow Hill (HarperCollins, 2010, 352p), not yet available in the US, is a thriller, looking worth a look:

Snow Hill can’t match the poignancy of Sanderson’s earlier work, nor is it trying to. It has a run-of-the-mill plot, but Sanderson enlivens it with elegant, unpretentious writing, a strong build-up of suspense and the portrayal of a central relationship between Johnny, the hot-shot reporter, and his old school buddy Matt Turner, a policeman from the City’s Snow Hill police station, which is both emotionally believable and intriguing.

Mark Bostridge points to the similarities and differences between Snow Hill and "Jake Arnott’s loose trilogy of 1960s-set novels, which mix gay life and gangsters", which I must admit I didn't know it.

In one of the last issues of the TLS in 2009, John Flower provides a very positive review of Jean-Luc Barré's biography of François Mauriac (Francois Mauriac - Biographie intime, Tome 1, 1885-1940, Fayard, 2009, 645p), the first to disclose his homosexual inclinations. The first volume, the only one published so far, is in fact dominated by this topic.

What the second volume of this “biographie intime” will reveal remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that the first constitutes a book that no student or specialist of Mauriac’s life and work can afford to be without.

After reading several articles on the fascinating recent book on American politics, Game Change - Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (John Heileman and Mark Halperin, Harper, 2010, 464p), I was still hesitating to buy it (nothing gay about it). Until I read the first sentence in The Economist review of the book: "Game Change, the account by John Heileman and Mark Halperin of the 2008 American presidential race, is high-quality political porn."

By the way, I also read fairly good article by Margaret Talbot on Gay marriage in The New Yorker: A Risky Proposal, on Perry v. Schwarzenegger which just started in San Francisco.

2010.01.24

What About China?

Two Op-Ed pieces have caught my attention this week.

First Thomas L. Friedman's Is China the Next Eron? in the New York Times. To tell you the truth I have been fed up for some time with all the talking about China, its miracle, etc, etc... I started reading Mr. Friedman with great expectations... The paper starts with a promising tone:

Reading The Herald Tribune over breakfast in Hong Kong harbor last week, my eye went to the front-page story about how James Chanos — reportedly one of America’s most successful short-sellers, the man who bet that Enron was a fraud and made a fortune when that proved true and its stock collapsed — is now warning that China is “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse” and looking for ways to short that country’s economy before its bubbles burst.

In fact Mr. Friedman has the very opposite opinion, and I was soon disappointed:

I’d rather bet against the euro. Shorting China today? Well, good luck with that, Mr. Chanos. Let us know how it works out for you.

I remembered that Mr. Friedman had initially supported George W. Bush's decision to invade Irak, the worse political decision for America in the first decade of the twenty first century... So he might be wrong again.

Then, the next day, I read another Op-Ed piece, in Le Monde this time: Thierry Wolton's La Chine est-elle menacée par le "syndrome soviétique"? A must read. A very good paper.

Il est donc pertinent de se demander si la Chine, aussi mirifique qu'elle nous paraisse, ne risque pas d'être victime du syndrome soviétique, ses dirigeants finissant par être atteints des mêmes maux qui ont conduit à la chute de l'URSS. La combinaison entre notre admiration béate et un pouvoir sans partage, indifférent aux douleurs de son peuple, obsédé par ses intérêts de puissance, le tout attisé par les doutes des pays occidentaux sur le modèle libéral, autant de facteurs qui pourraient déboucher sur des lendemains difficiles.
Le jeu de miroirs entre des communistes chinois trop sûrs d'eux, convaincus par leurs propres statistiques de la réussite de leur régime, et des dirigeants occidentaux obsédés par leurs balances commerciales et leurs déficits, qui ne pensent qu'à les amadouer pour quelques parts de marché, peut faire oublier à Pékin ses fragilités intrinsèques : obsolescence d'une partie de son appareil industriel, discrimination sociale, déséquilibre entre l'offre et la demande, inflation, bulle spéculative, vieillissement de la population, catastrophes écologiques. En somme, tout ce qui caractérise une économie socialiste.
Cet aveuglement réciproque, entre Occident et Orient cette fois, pourrait conduire la Chine à vouloir aller trop loin, comme l'URSS jadis.

If I had money I would bet against China, after all...

2010.01.17