A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [Sutherland, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300186857
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The American writer of this period who most perfectly fits Baudelaire's description of the modern poet is Walt Whitman (1819–92). The title of one of his poems, ‘Manhattan Streets I Saunter'd, Pondering’, could, with a change of metropolis, be one of Baudelaire's own. In his ‘sauntering’, writes Whitman, he ponders ‘on time, space, reality’. The meaning of these great abstractions are to be found in the buzzing maelstrom of the city streets. Whitman and Baudelaire did not know each other or each other's work. But they are clearly collaborators in the same literary movement – a movement that was shifting literature out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and into full-blown modernism (Chapter 28).

Whitman called his poems ‘songs of myself’. It fits neatly with Wilde's belief that his life was his most perfect work of art. The writer who pursued this idea to the most artistic of conclusions was Marcel Proust (1871–1922), in his massive autobiographical novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; published in English from 1922 as Remembrance of Things Past). Proust starts from the view that life is lived forward but understood backward; and at some point in our lives, what is behind is more interesting than what is in front. The novel, which took fifteen years and seven volumes to complete, is of all things triggered by the taste of a madeleine cake. ‘One day in winter’, the narrator (manifestly Proust) writes,

my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines’, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

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