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GCC có mấy số ML về Flaubert, số trên chắc là mới nhất. Trong có bài “Nghệ Thuật Khinh Bỉ” đọc cũng thú: Mặc dù văn phong khách quan, cuốn tiểu thuyết của Flaubert nằm trong truyền thống văn chương miêu tả những bất hạnh của cái xấu, cái ác, les malheurs du vice. “Bà Bô” phải gợi ra lòng thương hại lẫn khinh khi, nhưng Flaubert không hề có ý định viết văn để ăn mày nước mắt độc giả, những kẻ mủi lòng vì số phận người đàn bà ngoại tình, mặc dù những bất hạnh giáng xuống đời Bà.

Số báo còn hai bài, cũng thật tuyệt. “Sổ Đọc” của Vila-Maltas: Monsieur Mantra, "l'irréalisme magique " de Rodrigo Fresán, và bài của Linda Lê, trong mục “Trở về với những tác giả cổ điển”: "Les Griffes du passé, Những móng nhọn của quá khứ.
Hai mục này, Gấu đều mê, nhưng sau này đều bị tờ ML bỏ đi.

Tiếc!
[Thuổng văn phong của Thầy Kuốc: Thích!]


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Số Mùa Hè, 2013. Báo nhà [Toronto]. Nhiều bài tuyệt lắm, hà hà!
Nhẩn nha đi vài đường, sau.
Một trong những đề tài của số này, là về “cái gọi là” kết thúc, the end, của 1 cuốn tiểu thuyết.

 Flaubert  

JULIAN BARNES
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

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Note: Đọc bài này, thì cũng nên đọc thêm bài Julian Barnes viết, trong tập tiểu luận của ông, Qua Cửa Sổ, Through the Window: "Dịch Madame Bovary", Translating Madame Bovary [qua tiếng Anh]. Trong bài viết, ông có chê bản dịch mới của em Lydia Davis, được coi là 1 trong những chuyên gia về Flaubert. Bà này, trên 1 số Paris Review, Fall, 2010, có đi mấy truyện ngắn, phỏng theo Flaubert, After Flaubert.

At the Hay Festival if Literature and the Arts twenty years ago, Julian Barnes and Mario Vargas Llosa met to talk about Gustave Flaubert. In January 2013 at Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias in Colombia, they discussed their hero again-and found that he had changed almost as much as they had. Marianne Ponsford moderated their conversation.

Note: Hai ông học trò, một ông Booker, một ông Nobel, vinh danh Thầy, cùng lúc, viết về mối tình của cả hai, với cùng 1 em bướm, Madame Bovary.

Flaubert cried out against the paradox whereby he lay dying like a dog whereas that ‘whore’ Emma Bovary, his creature… continued alive.
G. Steiner, The Uncommon Reader.

Flaubert la lên, tại sao ‘con điếm’ Bovary cứ sống hoài, trong khi ta nằm đây, chết như một con chó ghẻ? 

“Cái chết của Lucien de Rubempré là một bi kịch lớn, the great drama, trong đời tôi”, Oscar Wilde nhận xét về một trong những nhân vật của Balzac. Tôi luôn coi lời phán này, this statement, là thực, literally true. Một dúm nhân vật giả tưởng đã ghi dấu thật đậm lên đời tôi hơn những con người bằng xuơng bằng thịt, bằng máu bằng mủ mà tôi đã từng quen biết.

Llosa mở ra cuốn tiểu luận của mình The Perpetual Orgy, "Đốt đuốc chơi...  Em", như trên.
Cả một cuốn tiểu luận, dành cho Em Bovary, chưa đủ, sau ông còn viết cả một cuốn tiểu thuyết, Gái Hư, The Bad Girl, để vinh danh Em!

Số báo Brick, trên, gồm bài viết của 44 tác giả viết về cái hậu, the end, của 1 cuốn tiểu thuyết; Madeleine Thien, chắc là Mít, ở Montreal, phỏng vấn Tsiti Dangaremba, về cuốn tiểu thuyết đầu tay thần sầu của em này, hai ông nhà văn thổi bướm Bovary….

Trong 44 tác giả, chưa có ai từng đọc Lukacs, theo Gấu, bởi là vì, Lukacs là người đưa ra 1 nhận định cực thần sầu về cái kết, của 1 cuốn tiểu thuyết:

Đó là lúc ý thức của tiểu thuyết gia vượt ý thức của nhân vật chính, để tìm lại đời sống thực.

Trong bài viết về Bếp Lửa, 1972, Gấu “đế” thêm: Đây là hình ảnh Lưu Nguyễn về trần, bởi là vì, mỗi một cuốn tiểu thuyết lớn, thì là 1 câu chuyện thần tiên, đúng như Nabokov phán, khi viết về Madame Bovary của Flaubert.
Cả cuốn Bếp Lửa [cuộc sống của anh chàng Tâm trong "Bếp Lửa"], thật khệnh khạng [đi ra ngoài đó - lên rừng, theo VC – thì cũng chỉ là 1 thứ đánh đĩ], thật kịch cợm, thật trí thức, thật siêu hình [giả như Thượng Đế mà nhập thân trong xác phàm, thì cũng từ chết đến bị thương, từ thua cho tới thua, và chỉ thoát ra bằng sự thất bại], một câu chuyện "thần tiên", kết bằng 1 câu thật cảm động, thật sến, mà tất cả lũ Mít đều thèm nghe:

Anh yêu quê hương vô cùng và anh yêu em vô cùng.

Trong 44 tác giả, tuyệt nhất với Gấu, là Pico Iyer, viết về kết thúc của Người Mỹ Trầm Lặng của Graham Greene.

Pico Iyer mở ra bài viết bằng 1 câu, qua đó, có vẻ như cũng thật mê Greene (1)
Tôi mất cả nửa đời mình để nhập vô cuốn phúc âm nhức nhối của Graham Greene về nhân loại.
It took me half a life time to grow into Graham Greene’s anguished gospel of humanity.

Tuyệt!

Tờ Brick viết về Pico Iyer:

Pico Iyer cố làm bật G.G khỏi hệ thống của mình bằng cách viết ba ngàn trang về G.G, tới cuốn mới nhất: “Người đàn ông trong đầu tôi”. Nhưng vưỡn thua.
Pico Iyer tried to get Graham Greene out of his system by writing three thousands pages on him, boiled down into his most recent book, The Man Within My Head (a). He still failed

“Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
Viết, quái nhất trong những quái: Lá thư riêng tư cho... một kẻ lạ, người dưng, nước lã!

― Pico Iyer

“Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he's seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he's seen City of Angels on video.”
Cái nguy hiểm nhất của cộng động toàn cầu, là, ngồi ở LA phán, tớ biết Cam bốt, vì mới xem phim “Cánh đồng giết người”. Và 1 tên Cam bốt mới nhập Mẽo phán, tớ biết LA, vì mới coi video “Thành phố của những thiên thần”

― Pico Iyer (1)

“Ông số 2”, ngồi ở Quận Cam, chẳng đã ngậm ngùi phán, Sài Gòn có người chết đói, ngay bên hông Chợ Bến Thành!

 (a)

The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer

We all carry people inside our heads—actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know.

In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene’s trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself.
Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past, commuting between the cloisters of a fifteenth-century boarding school and California in the 1960s, one of our most resourceful explorers of crossing cultures gives us his most personal and revelatory book.


It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Thì vưỡn đẹp khi cảm thấy trái tim đập
Nhưng thường là cái bóng có vẻ thực hơn cơ thể
Vì samurai xem ra chẳng có ý nghĩa gì
Bên cạnh bộ giáp với những vẩy rồng đen thui của ông ta.

Note: Bài thơ thần sầu. Gửi theo ông anh quá tuyệt. Bảy năm rồi, xác thân nào còn, linh hồn thì cũng có khi đã đầu thai kiếp khác, hoặc tiêu diêu nơi miền cực lạc. Nhưng cái bóng thì lại càng ngày càng lớn, dội cả về Đất Cũ:

VC bi giờ coi bộ trân trọng cái bóng của ông cùng cái áo giáp, mấy cái vảy rồng đen thui, còn hơn cả đám bạn quí hải ngoại của ông! (1)

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Số Mùa Hè, 2013. Báo nhà [Toronto]. Nhiều bài tuyệt lắm, hà hà!
Nhẩn nha đi vài đường, sau. Một trong những đề tài của số này, là về “cái gọi là” kết thúc, the end, của 1 cuốn tiểu thuyết.

Flaubert 

JULIAN BARNES

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

At the Hay Festival if Literature and the Arts twenty years ago, Julian Barnes and Mario Vargas Llosa met to talk about Gustave Flaubert. In January 2013 at Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias in Colombia, they discussed their hero again-and found that he had changed almost as much as they had. Marianne Ponsford moderated their conversation.

Ponsford: What has changed for you in your appreciation of Flaubert in the past twenty years?
    Barnes: I suppose there are two parts to the answer: what has changed with Flaubert, and what has changed with me. Rather surprisingly, Flaubert, despite being dead for 133 years, is still changing. That's to say, the corpus is still expanding. In the last twenty years, the magnificent Pleiade edition of the Correspondance has been completed, and so we can now read almost every single letter of his that has survived. And the correspondence is the place to find Flaubert the human being and is to be read side by side with the novels. It's a great work of art in itself. Other things that have been published: the Pléiade produced the Oeuvres de jeunesse for the first time in a complete format-everything he published before Madame Bovary. It's a fat volume that has more words in it than all the books he published in his lifetime. And it also proves that if Flaubert had died in 1850 or 1851, before he'd started writing Madame Bovary, no one would say, We have lost a genius.
    Also what has changed with Flaubert is new translations-some of them are an improvement and some of them are not. I don't follow the academic discourse, but in the world of amateur Flaubert scholarship amazing books keep coming out. One arrived on my desk the other day: it is a dictionary of all the words that appear in Madame Bovary. In order. Every time the word crops up, it is listed. So you get “I” and you have “la” and “le” and "lui," and there are eleven pages, each of six columns-2,027 entries in all-going "la la la la la"-like we're in a demented opera house. You look at it and you think, What is this for? There's a very French introduction to it, which says, This is perhaps a work suited to the Oulipo school, whereby if we put all the words of Madame Bovary into a book, in alphabetical order, you the reader can then manufacture your own novel using only the words that are in the original. Crazy, or what?
    So that's how Flaubert has changed. For myself, I continue to read him, and I find that I do read the books differently, still. I go back the most often to Madame Bovary, and I still find, in its adamantine perfection, that there are new things to discover, things I had not noticed before. Bouvard et Pecuchet now stands clearer and greater in my mind because I think I'm beginning finally to understand what it's about. It's not a book to read when you're a young man.
    Llosa: No.
    Barnes: So partly he's changed, and partly I've changed.
    Llosa: I'd like to add a footnote to what Julian said. It's a fact I read not long ago and which pleased me enormously. It was about the number of critical works generated by French authors worldwide, and Flaubert came' out third. After Victor Hugo and Montaigne, it was Flaubert who produced the most critical works, university theses, essays, scholarly tomes. And on the personal front: I continue to reread, sometimes fragments, of Flaubert, and he is a writer who has never disappointed me and has always moved me. I even reread scenes that are already very clear in my mind, some of themfor their literary intelligence. The scene I always reread-and particularly when I’m depressed-is Madame Bovary's suicide. For a strange reason, which a psychoanalyst could no doubt explain to me one day. Why is it that that scene, which is so atrociously sad, the scene in which Madame Bovary swallows the arsenic, and there's that truly chilling description of what happens to her face, her mouth, her tongue ... How is that a scene that draws me out of my own misery and demoralization and makes me feel somehow reconciled to life? I'm not joking. In periods of great depression in my life I've gone back to read the suicide scene in Madame Bovary-and the perfection, the mastery, the beauty with which that horror is described is so great that I feel an injection of enthusiasm, a justification for life itself. Life is worth living, if only to read the sort of skill to be found in those pages –the extraordinary lucidity, intelligence, dexterity, intuition with which he was able to bring to life a scene which, told straight, would produce a rejection of and a distaste for life. Julian, does that scene have the same emotional effect on you?
    Barnes: Um, I don't go to it when I'm depressed. I think I'd turn to music rather than literature. But I think I'm a Simpler and less perverse human being than you are. But going back to what we were saying about how Flaubert has changed and how he's viewed. I've been thinking about how when you and I first read him, he was really rather unfashionable. I think he was a victim of political correctness from the Left, partly because he said harsh things about the Commune, and partly because he was after all a rentier. He didn't really live off his writing, he lived off the income from his family and property and so on, and he could be dismissed as a bourgeois-in fact he was resolutely anti-bourgeois. Fifty years ago he was read in schools, but afterwards you were sort of meant to forget him.
    Llosa: I remember that atrocious phrase of Sartre's against Flaubert: "I hold Flaubert responsible for the crimes committed against the Communards, because he never wrote a word condemning them." Which reveals very well that rejection of Flaubert by the Left at a certain moment.
    Barnes: Yes. It was political, and it was also aesthetic. In his autobiography, Les Mots, Sartre writes of being "poisoned by the old bile" of Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt and Theophile Gautier. They were the enemy, who had to be wiped from the battlefield. I've only read the first of his three volumes about Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille, and it's a kind of monstrous work. It's always struck me as an attempt to bury Flaubert. As if he said, I'm going to erect this enormous monument to Flaubert, which will be so vast, and so Sartrean, that everyone will forget who's buried underneath. But he failed.
    Llosa: Even Sartre recognized that Flaubert was the first modern novelist, in the sense that he gave rise to a certain model of novel that continues to this day. There were great novelists in the nineteenth century, but they didn't enrich the novels of the future in the way that Flaubert's teachings did. He created a whole technique for the invisibility of the narrator-a commitment to finding the exact word, so that the reader was not distracted either by exact word or by absence. We have to rearrange our sense of realism when we anything published earlier. The contemporary novel was born with Flaubert, and in that sense all novelists are Flaubertians now, whether we like Flaubert or not.
    Barnes: Yes, I'd agree with all of that, and I'd add his clever and subtle use of irony, and his deployment of the style indirect libre, which he developed to a point of perfection that had not been there before. Also, he was, for me, the novelist who promoted the absolute importance of form in the novel. If we compare the Flaubertian method with what British novelists were doing at the time-Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot-there's one practical difference. Their novels mostly appeared first in monthly parts, and they would write them as they went along. They would be, essentially, brilliant episodes which were then bound up into a novel. I think a lot of novelists, pre- and post-Flaubert, have a very loose and fuzzy sense of what form is. Some think it's just telling a story, and going along until it ends-that structure is only important when writing a sonnet or something. I remember the wonderful thing that Virginia Woolf said about Dickens. She compared a Dickens novel to a blazing fire, which sometimes seems to be dying down, whereupon Dickens suddenly creates a perfectly formed new character and chucks him or her onto the fire, which blazes up again and the novel takes off. Which is responding to the particular needs of writing weekly episodes.
    Although Madame Bovary was published in the Revue de Paris in periodical form, Flaubert had already finished it, and he never published anything until it was formally complete. What I see increasingly as I understand more about novels and write more novels is the way in which things are held together. For example, there's a tiny character in Madame Bovary called Justin. He's the assistant to Monsieur Homais, the pharmacien. The main function of Justin in the book is to help Madame Bovary steal and swallow the arsenic. And when you read the book for the first time, that's probably the only time you properly take account of him. But Justin is there for three-quarters of the novel in very tiny touches-often seen in doorways looking at scenes. All these touches, when put together, add up to a sort of parallel seduction, and parallel corruption, of Justin by Emma. At the end, he's the person who is seen weeping on her grave. His presence, and his subtle underlinings, are a way of stitching the novel together, which you can do only if you have a great sense of architecture. And great architects sometimes design the door handles as well as the walls.
    Llosa: I'd like to touch on another aspect of Flaubert, which is his attempt to achieve the impossible. I think that Bouvart et Pécuchet is a novel which proposes to do something unachievable, a novel that is born condemned to disaster. But it has aspired to so much and gone so far, that even though it doesn't reach its goal, the work is extraordinary, unusual.
Well, there's a thread in modern literature that is in some way encapsulated by that insane attempt of Flaubert's to write a novel that synthesized all the knowledge of his time. Joyce-a great admirer of Flaubert, as were Proust and Kafka-wrote, after he finished Ulysses, Finnegan Wake, a novel that is almost impossible to read and impossible to finish. In Spanish we have Paradiso, by Lezama Lima. I think that had never happened before Flaubert-a truly great, unfinished, and frustrated masterpiece like Bouvard et Pécuchet. That too is a branch of his influence.
    Ponsford : I'd like to return to Madame Bovary, the character. She was a frivolous, vain-
    Llosa: No! I protest!
    Ponsford: -irresponsible, volatile woman-
    Llosa: That's a lie. Slander!
    Barnes: Mario-
    Llosa: No, wait! I'm going to defend Madame Bovary! She was just a young girl who read romantic fiction. And she thought that life was as it was depicted in novels. And her tragedy, her drama, is that she wanted to turn that fiction into reality. Like Quixote-who read books about chivalry, thought life was as it was in those, and set out to transform reality into something resembling fiction. That's what Madame Bovary does. She wants life to be made of extraordinary passions that lead one to have great adventures, she wants life to be about pleasure-the pleasure of elegance, of extravagance, of sensuality; the pleasure of the sentimental excesses of passion. That's what she wants to bring about with her deeds, and what does she find all around her? Mediocrities- poor devils who are incapable of living at the level of sensitivity and imagination that she has been taught by fiction. That's the great symbolism of Madame Bovary, what makes it not just a little realist novel but a novel that expresses a fundamental element of the human condition: our inability, as human beings, to accept reality as it is. Our profound need to live in another way-not to have just this one life. It's why we read fiction. Throughout history there have been people like Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, and the world has changed and progressed: we've come out or the caves and reached the moon, thanks to those crazy fools. Madame Bovary wasn't frivolous. She was a great dreamer, a great rebel, an absolutely extraordinary and admirable woman.
    Barnes: I had failed to inform our moderator that Mario has been in love with Emma Bovary for forty or fifty years.
    Llosa: It's true, absolutely.
    Barnes: I too react-though not with quite such personal feeling as you do-when readers complain that Madame Bovary is a trivial person. She is the only person in the novel who attempts to extract herself from her circumstances. She's the only person who acts with boldness and courage, in difficult social circumstances for a woman. The men in Madame Bovary are all cowards. She is not a coward, either in love or in sex, and they don't measure up to her. People sometimes say, "I don't like Madame Bovary." Someone even complained to me that she was" a bad mother." And you think: What's that got to do with anything? You know, Hamlet: he couldn't make up his mind. King Lear: mad as a hatter. You don't go to great literature in order to like people, to find chums. This is the Oprah-fication of literature. But I yield to you, Mario, in your passion for Madame Bovary. I respect her, I admire her, I might even fancy her, but you can have her in that carriage.