All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, “She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard on the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.”
The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument “whose strings buzzed,” and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert has to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.
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- Flannery O’Connor in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” an essay from Mystery and Manners
Thanks to kitsteinkellner and italicsmine for the posts that led me to this book.
I looked to see how Lydia Davis translated the sentence O’Connor admired so much. She used this for her 2010 translation:
When it was thus assaulted by her, the old instrument, with its buzzing strings, could be heard as far as the edge of the village if the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, who was passing on the main road, bareheaded and in slippers, would stop to listen, holding his piece of paper in his hand.
The original French goes like this:
Ainsi secoué par elle, le vieil instrument, dont les cordes frisaient, s’entendait jusqu’au bout du village si la fenêtre était ouverte, et souvent le clerc de l’huissier qui passait sur la grande route, nu-tête et en chaussons, s’arrêtait à l’écouter, sa feuille de papier à la main.
Whatever the language, whatever the translation, O’Connor’s point stands: “the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.” This builds on an idea in O’Connor’s previous paragraph:
A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected with our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.
Finally, the essay seems to have started its life as a talk to a college class. I can’t resist quoting O’Connor’s opening:
I understand that this is a course called “How the Writer Writes,” and that each week you are exposed to a different writer who holds forth on the subject. The only parallel I can think of to this is having the zoo come to you, one animal at a time; and I suspect that what you hear one week from the giraffe is contradicted the next week by the baboon.
(via
davidquigg)
![[NOTE TO SELF: request this to be played at my funeral.]
doubledaybooks:
Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz - A supposedly unplayable piece of music by John Stump.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luas8shmSs1qe712jo1_500.jpg)
