Encounters with Rousseau and Borges in Geneva

I was recently on vacation, in Lyon and Burgundy, a food-and-wine vacation, of little literary interest.  Well, try the Memoirs of Phillippe de Commines for some firsthand Burgundy history.  The Duchy, not the wine, I mean.

Aside from that, we ended up, briefly, in Geneva, where we visited the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the upstairs of which is now, how to describe it, a narrated, illustrated encyclopedia entry.  How fun does that sound.  Not worth visiting except as a pilgrimage, and an excuse to think about this complex, and, to me, confusing figure.  So, put that way, worth visiting, absolutely.

A bit down the street, this tribute to Jorge Luis Borges:

“Of all the cities in the world,
of all the intimate homelands
that a man searches for (to deserve)
in the course of his travels,
Geneva seems to me
the most propitious
to happiness.”  (translation mine, obviously; third line a puzzler)

Geneva has no place at all in my idea of Borges, but my idea is wrong.  He went to John Calvin High School, for pity’s sake.  That is a true Genevan credential.

Unwavering affection - Sebald's A Place in the Country

The only certain thing is that he writes incessantly, with an ever increasing degree of effort; even when the demand for his pieces slows down, he writes on, day after day, right up to the pain threshold and often, so I imagine, a fair way beyond it.  (129)

W. G. Sebald is describing Robert Walser in a chapter of A Place in the Country, his 1998 book of essays on all of my favorite writers:  not just Walser but Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, and Gottfried Keller, as well as the artist Jan Peter Tripp.  If not my favorites, exactly, I can at least say that I have read something by all of them, which must be rare among English readers although not among serious readers of Sebald.

I can still remember quite clearly how, when I set out from Switzerland for Manchester in the early autumn of 1966, I placed Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich, Johann Peter Hebel’s Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreunds, and a disintegrating copy of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten in my suitcase.  The countless pages I have read since then have done nothing to diminish my appreciation of these books and their authors, and if today I were obliged to move again to another island, I am sure they would once again find a place in my luggage.  This unwavering affection for Hebel, Keller, and Walser was what gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late.  (3)

That last phrase is a little too sad.  The pieces on Rousseau, Mörike and Tripp have different origins but share thematic material with the others.  To point out an obvious one, Rousseau, Keller and Walser are Swiss, while Mörike, Hebel, and Tripp (and Sebald) are from nearby parts of Germany.

A Place in the Country is not a work of fiction, but it is written in the hybrid style Sebald had developed in his novels.  It is easy enough to imagine Sebald making it fiction.  It is no surprise to see, for example, Nabokov (another Swiss writer) make an appearance in the Walser essay, although this time as a writer, as a source of quotations, rather than as the ghost who floats through The Emigrants.  If Sebald’s fictional prose works are not exactly novels, this late work of criticism gestures towards fiction, more so than, I think, his next book, also criticism, On the Natural History of Destruction (1999).  This book is rather a history of destruction through writing.  Please revisit the description of Robert Walser up above.

Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling translated the text and added thoughtful notes.  She is, I am amazed to see, now translating Sebald’s earlier critical essays on Austrian writers, thornier stuff than in this book.  I never thought any of this would be translated – Hebel! Stifter! You gotta be kidding me! – but I could not be happier to be wrong.  I will wander in it for a couple more days.  Terry Pitts at Vertigo has, as one might guess, already written a piece on each chapter, beginning with Hebel.

And the reading, the learning, the constant stimulation and stretching of the mind! - Goncharov's ideal

The worst thing in Oblomov today.  The boring part, I mean.  The novel is a comedy, a great one.  The long first single scene is the comic highlight, but there are plenty of later returns to form, and the wind-down to the ending is entirely satisfying.  This is all Oblomov’s story.

Yet two chapters (Part 4, Chapters 4 and 8) have no jokes at all, no humor.  They are serious, sincere, and lack Oblomov, instead finishing off the stories of two supporting characters, Oblomov’s “active” friend Stoltz and one-time fiancée Olga.  I did not believe that their stories required any but a summary resolution, yet Ivan Goncharov gives them 10% of the book.  This is the purpose of calculating the percentages, by the way, to emphasize myself that the author thought this part of the book was important.

As far as Oblomov, the character, is concerned, the contents of these chapters could have been compressed into a paragraph.  The characters meet in Paris, fall in love, and marry.  They then establish the ideal household, perfectly managed, and ideal marriage, energetic and loving, while Oblomov falls into, let us say, a different ideal.  But Goncharov wants his readers to understand the machinery of perfection.

Some sample sentences:

It was with joyous serenity that she contemplated the broad expanses of life, its vast green fields and hills. (374)

Like the perpetual beauty of nature that bathed its surroundings, the interior of the house was constantly abuzz with ideas and vibrated with the beauty of human activity.  (395)

Leaving aside the question of love and marriage as such and without bringing in such issues as money, connections or position, Stoltz did nonetheless ponder the problem of reconciling his outer and hitherto ceaseless activity with an inner family life, and his role as a traveler and businessman with that of a homebound family man.  (398)

The prose is that of a different writer, a different novel.  I suspect many readers, after that last example, will say a worse writer.  In an amusing paradox, this novel about sloth is full of comic energy, while the two chapters about activity are without spark.

And the reading, the learning, the constant stimulation and stretching of the mind!  (401)

He did not actually draw her diagrams or go over tables with her, but her talked to her about everything…  Like a philosopher or artist he tenderly molded her intellectual development and never in his life had he found himself so deeply absorbed…  there had been no task so challenging as that of nurturing the restless, volcanic intellect of his life’s companion.  (402)

There is the clue – these two chapters are modeled after the fiction of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  They update the idealized love affair of Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and the idealized pedagogy of Émile, ou de l'éducation  (1762), two of the strangest books I have ever read.  Émile is particularly insane.

The characters themselves use Oblomov as a foil, discussing how they can maintain their energy and interest in their marriage and lives and avoid falling into Oblomovism.  My guess is that Goncharov more or less means all of this, and that readers are meant to choose virtue over vice, but in the end even the noble couple acknowledges their love for Oblomov:

“’I’ve felt love for many people, but never such a strong and lasting love as for Oblomov.  To know him is to love him forever; right?’”  (413)

They love him for his sincerity and “gentleness,” while I love him because his parts of the novel are well-written, but we end up in the same place.