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Dec. 29th, 2010 03:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception71. Ivanov, Stoppard's adaptation
72. Andromache, tr. Wilbur
73. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I'd never read the latter before - can you believe that? I think because I assumed I already knew the story. I've been reading Julie to sleep with it, though, and it occurs to me that if someone were to read it aloud but with the two names changed to something else (and dropping the lawyer's pun about being Mr. Seek) it would take quite a while for someone who hadn't read it to realize what story it was. I mean, maybe they'd have it by halfway through, but it would restore a large dose of what it once must have been. As it is, it's a strange sort of reading experience, reminding me of Denzel Washington driving in two time periods in Deja Vu, where you at once can't help knowing and seeing what the knowing see, while trying to reconstruct what the unknowing would have, since it's primarily, and ingeniously, made for them.
And I'd only ever read Stevenson's poems before this - can you believe that either? So this was my first experience of, well, Stevenson, deep favorite of Borges, Calvino, Crowley. And D.H. Lawrence, for that matter. He is a damn fine writer, is my first impression; a lot of those 19th century people astonish with their sensitive way with prose - poetry has a reputation for sensitivity but it's really for doing one intense thing at a time, then perhaps intensely switching to another intensity. But prose of this kind somehow takes on several spins, several flavors all at once, then enters subtly into new ones.
A couple examples; the first anticipating Kafka on the Devil and devils:
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.
Which also anticipates Little, Big, especially combined with this:
He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
Excluding the element of pure evil; but including that of a secret little man.
72. Andromache, tr. Wilbur
73. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I'd never read the latter before - can you believe that? I think because I assumed I already knew the story. I've been reading Julie to sleep with it, though, and it occurs to me that if someone were to read it aloud but with the two names changed to something else (and dropping the lawyer's pun about being Mr. Seek) it would take quite a while for someone who hadn't read it to realize what story it was. I mean, maybe they'd have it by halfway through, but it would restore a large dose of what it once must have been. As it is, it's a strange sort of reading experience, reminding me of Denzel Washington driving in two time periods in Deja Vu, where you at once can't help knowing and seeing what the knowing see, while trying to reconstruct what the unknowing would have, since it's primarily, and ingeniously, made for them.
And I'd only ever read Stevenson's poems before this - can you believe that either? So this was my first experience of, well, Stevenson, deep favorite of Borges, Calvino, Crowley. And D.H. Lawrence, for that matter. He is a damn fine writer, is my first impression; a lot of those 19th century people astonish with their sensitive way with prose - poetry has a reputation for sensitivity but it's really for doing one intense thing at a time, then perhaps intensely switching to another intensity. But prose of this kind somehow takes on several spins, several flavors all at once, then enters subtly into new ones.
A couple examples; the first anticipating Kafka on the Devil and devils:
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.
Which also anticipates Little, Big, especially combined with this:
He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
Excluding the element of pure evil; but including that of a secret little man.
