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revolution_fr2009-10-18 01:12 pm
elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com) wrote in revolution_fr2009-10-18 01:12 pm
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The Last Nights of Ventôse
"Actually, they were almost the same age, with a difference of two years only, but never really realizing this fact. They both accepted Maxime as the older one with no doubt. Their mutual feelings were much stronger than normal friendship; it was simply love from both sides, in Camille's case with a huge amount of adoration. The condition for his own happiness was Maxime being close to him; an adult child tended to live in a constant exhausting rebelion against his own slave's dependence. Yet the feelings of the older one were probably even stronger, though they did not restrain his being. Maxime's love was 'at least strange', entirely protective, much more passionate than fraternal attachment, not even paternal, but typically maternal. A kind of love hard to bear, painful, monstrously deep, mindless to the point of absurd, full of nervous fear and insatiable tenderness - in the case of a man, of course, hidden extremly well. During the last months, he didn't have time - nor right - to ponder Camille, aching in his all body with a dumb pain he refused to even think about; for half a year Camille had been giving him one stroke after another, deliberately and knowingly hitting the weakest point each time. An incredibly strong attack of malaria, from which Maxime was pulling through with such a toil, was probably the result of this game. A love of this kind is ripped of any dignity so far that the more your darling one harasses you, the more loved he is."
Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.
Translation by me.
Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.
Translation by me.
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"Les Misérables" is a good example of this (though a bad one in other points; Hugo includes quite a few 'pages of history' for which, in providing them as a contextualisation of his action, he implicitly claims accuracy, even though in writing a novel he is not sworn to any such thing): Hugo could have called his Enjolras Charles Jeanne and placed his barricade at Saint-Merri, but he doesn't, he takes a very real insurrection and in its context realistically sets up a fictional barricade, where the personal tragedies of his characters can play out against a background of greater affairs, with a fictional leader, whom he can depict as as many ideals incarnate as he likes - imagine he had given the whole radiantly beautiful charming/terrible angelically chaste firy/icy marble Spartan treatment to Jeanne! (Perhaps most notable in this context is that he doesn't give it to Saint-Just in his "93".) In my eyes, that would have done damage to the historical personnage, and unnecessarily so, since the adventures can be told, the same great points made through fictional characters. And that in turn applies a thousand times to fiction that doesn't want to make Great Points in the first place.
It's different again (as Sibylla said) in cases where the author makes it absolutely clear that they are primarily playing around - for instance, I would not even be tempted to take Naomi Novik's word on the Napoleonic Wars and thereby come to believe that Admiral Nelson survived Trafalgar, because it's clear that she's playing merry hell with history (and aware of it) from the fact that There Are Dragons! I could (in keeping with what I said above - I've probably contradicted myself five times over by now ;D) demand that she stay away from all real persons, but I do think it's different, since she actually creates a whole 'nother history that every reader can easily distinguish from the real one, as opposed to taking said real one and making changes so small/realistic there remains a temptation to believe it - or believe the author believes it.
There is a 'biographical study with selected letters' of S. P. in English that I have read by Daniel Gerould, who also edited the translation of the two plays, and Jadwiga Kosicka (the biography is short, but understandably so, but I wish there were more letters); going by that, she was a morphine addict from circa 1921 onwards until the end of her life, so all she produced while understanding herself as 'exclusively a writer' would have been created under the influence of the drug. Taking the longevity of her habit into account, I wouldn't 'blame' it for any oddities in her writing (that is to say, not to the extent of claiming that she would have turned out something altogether less idiosyncratic without it), nor for her mental state - the three forces (morphine addiction and destitution, mental imbalance, writing) all seem to have enabled one another.
I've not read any of her father's writings (another thing I always mean to do) so I can't compare them in style, but he seems to have been one of the most decisive influences in her life, artistically and otherwise; she spent some of her later years trying to 'improve' the flaws in his writing. As for leaving Freud out of it, her second Revolution-related play (after the first completed draft of "Thermidor"), "93", apparently (as I understand it, nothing has survived of this even in Polish?) centered around a young aristocrat who denounces her father in order to see his reaction ... yeah.
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Historical fiction would be unreadable without 'the human touch' (if there could even be 'fiction' without it - if a book contains only hard facts or argument-based theories, it's non-fiction, isn't it?), but I think that from the point on where there is more romance, more psychology, or more decidedly out-of-time-and-place politics/philosophy (e.g. Marxism in the eighteenth century) than accurate history, it should step away from involving real people as characters. Not from choosing real events as the setting, necessarily, unless it distorts them absolutely ... in which case (as both Sibylla and I have said a few times now), why pick them in the first place (unless you have absolutely no other way of getting your word out)?
(... all right, maybe it didn't add anything. Ah well!)
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Saint-Just in 93 is given one sentence, in which he is described as "sad". As much as I love Les Misérables, I think 93 is his best book.
It matters a lot whether she was taking morphine in 1921 or was addicted to it in this year. I'd be careful here: I'm the last person to run from using the author's biography to interpretate literary (or any other) work, but we cannot exagerate.
Daniel Gerould, as the one who wrote the history of guillotine?
And how many of Przybyszewska's letters are available in English? More or less; I'd like to compare it with what was edited in POlish.
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At the same time, it's easier (relatively speaking) to faithfully recreate fictional persons, since there is one definite source text that contains all that must be considered true about them, whereas with historical figures there are a thousand sources (or hardly any), all of which are already somebody's inevitably simplified black-on-white take on three-dimensional persons and complex events.
Speculation is more likely to go wrong then (gaps in the lives and personalities of fictional characters that are filled by fanfictioneers may not be what the author had in mind, if they had anything in mind for the things they did not write, but the possibilities can't be denied unless by the author, whereas in real people's lives there definitely are no gaps, there is a truth; it may already be impossible to retrieve, but there remains a challenge to at least try to come close to it - 'careful modifications', as you say - or even accept the gap, rather than fill it with whatever pleases), but it is also more necessary if there's to be a coherent story. One can identify an author's depiction of a real person as 'wrong' if it contradicts known facts, but it's hardly ever possible to call it 'right' if it doesn't, since we can never fully know the persons in question.
RE: one sentence - exactly! Taking into account how obviously phrases used to describe Enjolras (by the author, by other characters) match the phrases commonly associated with Saint-Just, it wouldn't have been absurd to expect that, apparently being so fond of describing that type, he'd give Saint-Just a scene to re-use some of that - not least since he does give Robespierre, Danton, and Marat a long scene (which I think is very well-handled), thus is clearly not averse to featuring historical figures as acting characters if it fits the context. But he doesn't. He has no need for Saint-Just to take the stage in order to tell his story, or to teach the reader anything. That is what I find so noteworthy - of course E. is not Saint-Just, but he has so much of him that, concluding (perhaps mistakenly - in which case this entire point is nil) that Hugo found him intriguing, I expected an extensive portrait (more as in 'painting' than as in 'characterisation/analysis', but a bit of both, surely) of Saint-Just in "93" and was initially disappointed when none was there - but seeing how it wouldn't have added anything to the novel if there had been one, I'm glad he resisted the temptation (perhaps I am wrong, and there was no temptation in the first place) to throw him in just to babble a bit about his hair and/or the incompletion of the absolute.
(As concerns the 'sad', by the way, it disappeared from the final version, but in an earlier draft, Enjolras, not yet the chief, had two lines for his initial description, too, describing him as 'froid, fanatique, et triste'-- which is not relevant to the characterisation of historical figures, just to further stress the connection between those two).
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There are about ninety letters in the collection, the first from 1914, the last from November 1934. If you like I'll type up a list of precisely which they are - it would be interesting to see if the translators deliberately focused on letters on any topic in particular or omitted anything glaring. (There are also [...]s all over the letters, even the short ones.) Most are to her aunt (almost all that discuss the contents of her work in concrete terms - as opposed to chances of staging, progress or lack thereof - are), Helena Barlińska, a few interesting ones to Julia Borowa, some to Iwi Bennet, a few to Wacław Dziabaszewski, a few to writers (Bernanos, Cocteau, Mann). But the long diary-esque outpourings addressed at the aunt definitely make up the largest part. It says the selection is 'based on' a two-volume collection of her letters edited by Tomasz Lewandowski in 1978 and 1983.
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Most of her writings remains in manuscripts - alas, almost nothing in Gdańsk (= my home town), otherwise I'd have seen it long time ago. When I have time at work, I'll check local biographical lexicon, the part about Przybyszewska includes a list of her unedited works. I happen to know the person who worked on it, I'm curious whether he chcecked the texts himself or just worked basing on a list. I promise to ask.
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