The Last Nights of Ventôse

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

"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.

Comments

[lucieandco.livejournal.com]

Thank you for replying - and apologies, in turn, for making you wait even longer (caught up in my own soap-operatisms for a bit).

I don't think Przybyszewska is sexually obsessed - she doesn't write pornography or anything close to it, and she always weaves those little romantic/erotic insinuations into the contexts of the plot (be it Desmoulins caught between Danton and Robespierre, Saint-Just smiling sadly to see Robespierre go to Desmoulins, or Billaud et al being jealous and afraid of Robespierre's power; all of these can be explained in completely 'unslashy' terms) - which, to me, makes it at once better and worse: the 'personal affairs' all run parallel to the political affairs, which makes the latter more vivid and graspable especially for readers/audiences who aren't well-versed in the historical details (this might be the human touch you speak of), but sometimes the emphasis is placed so that the personal side comes dangerously close to overshadowing the political one. That is where the problem begins or can begin, in my opinion, with the shift of emphasis: in presenting (to go, still, with the example at hand) the final split between Desmoulins and Robespierre in a scene so romantically/erotically charged, she supports - I don't think for a second that she meant to, nor that she even subconsciously believed that 'really the whole thing was all about love/sex', though, well, yes, there seems to be more of that in her interpretation than she acknowledges when discussing either the events or her plays in her letters - a take on the situation that reduces it to that, reduces the conflicts between the central figures to one located on that 'personal' plane. It's a matter of context (which was why I asked what the rest of the novel is like), as always; in the context of the entire play, the political components are (in my opinion) sufficiently (though no doubt questionably in their own right) represented. But there are, in my opinion, more 'personal' scenes/overtones than are a)historically sound and b)necessary for the human touch/vivid-making.
Tackling the play as a play I enjoy these and think they are applied in good measures at the right places in order to create, maintain, and (most effectively) not resolve a lot of tension that would otherwise not be there (except for those readers who are themselves passionately caught up in the history/politics). Tackling the play as a treatment of history, and therefore completely independent of its accomplishments in structuring, pacing, even characterisation (since her Robespierre, even if he is dismissed as a far-fetched interpretation by the historian, surely deserves some credit as a fascinating creation from the non-historically inclined reader - the same goes for a thousand figures immortalised in historically dubious shape by some play or other), I think the representation is potentially damaging at least to the uninitiated reader. I must add, though, that as an uneducated afficionada I cannot claim the faintest expertise in either field, nor back up my impression with any proper theories. I apologise if I am being overly fatuous!

The reason I pointed this out the way I did (and contrasted it with fanfiction, or with the Mantels, Lees, and many, many film makers of this world, who seem to have no concrete historical/political objective at all, but merely a taste for the 'playground' of the era and the 'characters' involved; the entire debate, I guess, boils down to whether or not one thinks that real life should be used for 'playing with' in a piece of fiction if there is nothing more to it than that) is that it seems to clash so with her self-proclaimed ambition to write, so to speak, the definite dramatisation of the events, one that isn't coloured by personal interest or taste (in this she also meant to counteract Büchner) - whereas what she wrote definitely is, both in her interpretation of, especially, Robespierre as a political thinker (his visionary monologue at the end of "Thermidor") and in the way she styles his aura, so to speak. (TBC)