That Smell and Notes From Prison (10 page)

The rest of Yevtushenko’s article in
L’Express
:

— Prose is far less tractable than poetry. A novel can’t
be written in a few days, nor read aloud to the public.

— Realism is the greatest
ism
of art. But realism, as I understand it, can assume hundreds if
not thousands of different forms. . . . Each work that moves the spirit of man,
whether or not it represents houses, people, and trees, I take to be a work of
realism.

— Once a tired woman worker came up to me and said,
“Just write the truth, son, just the truth. . . . Look for the truth in yourself
and take it to the people. Look for the truth in the people and store it within
yourself.”

November

Eliot’s “objective correlative”: he means an
image through which the poet articulates his emotion, so that the image provokes
a similar emotion in the reader. This emotion is not a feeling but rather the
transformation of feeling into an image, for poetry is not an expression of
feelings but rather an escape from them. It is the poet’s effort to transform
his personal pains into something strange and fertile, something universal that
accords with a general rather than selfish interest.

Can I unify the personal with the objective in my
writing? Set off in three directions at the same time: subject, style, and
form.

My father taught me to put no store in anything whose
only justification was custom. I learned from him that I must think about
everything for myself, on my own terms.

Naguib Mahfouz’s style in
The
Search
is the same style I used last year in my own writing. It’s
also derived from Joyce and Woolf. Mahfouz’s novel, of which only four parts
have so far appeared, will be the beginning of the modern Egyptian novel.

December

“I projected
The
Battleship Potemkin
as a consecutive series of events, a dramatic
totality. The secret of the work’s unity lies in my having arranged the events
according to the laws of tragedy, a classical tragedy in five acts. I divided
the events of the film into five acts and in each act treated specific events,
whose meaning was dependent on the events that preceded and followed them, with
the stipulation that each shot add something new to what came before. . . . Each
shot has a particular meaning and the general idea of the film does not lie in
the film itself, but is rather created by the spectator through his tracking of
the events, which were selected from among the facts of the historical
narrative.” “A Director’s Thoughts,” Sergei Eisenstein.

Friday, December 20, 1963. How wonderful suddenly to
hear a word of praise directed at something of yours which no one else found
value in. A. said something that’s turned my head; I don’t know what to say or
to think. It’s a beautiful thing to have someone call you a kind of genius, or
to say that you will make something truly new. But is it true? I’ve been
searching for the new, which is why I was so irritated to discover Naguib
Mahfouz using stream-of-consciousness in
The Search
,
just as I had. . . .Well then, will I repeat him? . . . Must look for something
new. . . . I have just realized that stream-of-consciousness, in the novel and
in the short story, is on the march all over the world, including Egypt. And
I’ve become irritated by all those ready-made phrases, now turned into fossils:
He walked, he went, he said. Can our country innovate in the novel on a world
scale?

A.’s words to the effect that man had discovered the
scientific method and used it in his life, and that the method must be reflected
in his literature.

Realism in art and literature was a new vision of the
world following the transformation of material, social, and political conditions
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specifically the industrial
revolution. The writer no longer wrote to save mankind from its boredom, nor to
help them pass the time. He aimed his discoveries at the darkness surrounding
his field of vision. He was enriched by new movements in morality and politics,
which left their marks on literary and artistic groups: partisan literature and
realism
→
psychological realism,
historical realism, social realism, materialist realism, socialist realism,
revolutionary realism.

All these schools represented a persistent attempt to reach reality,
as well as a quest for new forms. Surrealism was not a mode of pessimism nor
escapism, as frivolous people suppose. It was another attempt, motivated by the
nightmare of World War I, to discover reality, which had abruptly demonstrated
the impotence of previous schools to articulate and uncover it. Socialist
realism played this same role in the age of science. But it failed due to
intellectual stagnation, Leftism, and an “unscientific” approach to reality (its
neglect of contradictions, its gaudy picture-painting, and its commitment to a
style and technique that were out-of-date). Scientific socialism is a science,
not a method. There is no commitment. There is only the issue of the scientific
method. . . . Art is opposed to daily politics. It takes a long, comprehensive
view. Trial and error. It is not a tool, but open to all newness. Lenin and the
freedom of the imagination.

Life will have no meaning unless we stop at once and
look at it and see all the things we have been blind to . . . unless we look at
everything that lies below the surface, unless our curiosity is fired by the
miracle of the everyday.

Toward a new movement in the novel and the short story.
Why is there a crisis? We don’t have a long history in this art form. Our
reality has changed in bewildering fashion; it’s no longer possible to represent
this reality using the old methods. The development of this art form cannot
happen in Egypt as it happened in Europe. We need a true leap forward.

“The directors of the New Wave face up to the absence of
conventional drama. They put characters on display, but do not attempt to have
them make sense. Their films are entirely free of the structure of conventional
drama. So long as the camera is no longer constrained to tell a continuous story
with beginning, middle, and end, it can represent what it sees, just as in life.
For life is not orderly, its unity is incomprehensible, its one continuity is
its principle character, the axis of life and its events.” Alexandre Astruc in
Le Monde
, August 12, 1959.

“Why Neorealism Failed,” Eric Rhode, translated by Ata’
al-Naqqash for
al-Katib
, April 1963: Moravia
believes neorealism ended because it fulfilled its task, which was “to respond
to the pressing need, after the war, to account for every kind of deficiency
brought about by defeat and national disaster.” Neorealism offered more than
merely spiritual succor. It was an attempt once again to go back to the
beginning: What is man? What are his rights and responsibilities?

— “The reality buried under myths flowered once again.
Cinema remade the world. Here was a tree, an old man, a house, a man eating, a
man sleeping, a man screaming.” Cesar Zavattini.

— Principles of the movement:

1) An end to naïve clichés.

2) An end to imaginary and grotesque
fabrications.

3) An end to historical narratives and
the adaptations of novels and stories into films.

4) An end to the rhetoric that
represented Italians in general as on fire with the same noble sentiments .
. . making all of them equally awar
e of all the problems of life.

— Zola defined the naturalist writer: “His great concern
is to gather material and to find out what he can do in this world he wishes to
describe. When this material is collected, the novel will spontaneously find its
form. The writer has only to gather the facts and put them into a realistic
frame. The oddities of the story must not claim his attention. On the contrary,
the more the narrative is shared and universal, the better. . . .”

—
Umberto D
is the closest
Zavattini has come to his ideal of inserting 90 consecutive minutes from the
life of man into a film. . . . Here we are confronted with a paradox of
neorealist film, which presents, at moments, a reality broken off from life and
therefore as meaningless as the realism of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
Le Voyeur
. But this should not surprise us, because it
is the logical development of Zola’s idea of collecting the facts and then
seeing what significance or importance they bear in and of themselves.

— Georg Lukacs says of Zola: “Perhaps no one has been
able to paint so precisely and suggestively the exterior trappings of modern
life. But merely the exterior trappings. . . . These constitute the enormous
backdrop in front of which minuscule people come and go, acting out with random
gestures their accidental lives. Zola was unable to discern what the great
realists such as Balzac, Tolstoy, or Dickens, had achieved by representing
social institutions as human relations, and social phenomena as composed of
these relations. . . .”

— Description and analysis is substituted for epic
situations and plots.

For realism, as for Aristotle, the characteristic
procedure of art is its method of imitating an action.

Writers at Work: The Paris Review
Interviews
, Van Wyck Brooks (Viking).

— “I believe that it is no longer possible for lyric
poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too
cumbersome, too complicated.” Pasternak.

— “I always feel it’s not wise to violate rules until
you know how to observe them.” Eliot.

On
Le Nouveau Roman

— “Only through writing can the writer uncover new
artistic values.” Alain Robbe-Grillet.

— “The writer must distance himself from visible, known,
and studied reality. He must focus on the interior world that is strange to
him.” Nathalie Sarraute.

“He would write a book when he got through with this.
But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew. I will have to
be a much better writer than I am now to handle them he thought. The things he
had come to know in this war were not so simple.” Hemingway
, For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

1964

January

Naguib Mahfouz in
al-Katib
: “When the novel was interested in life as such, the
traditional style was the most appropriate. Human character appeared in all its
details. When life becomes a problem, the human being cannot be a particular
person but simply a human being. . . . Details vanish, along with narrative, and
dialogue dominates all the other aspects. . . . When man stands face-to-face
with his destiny, details lose their value.”

The only essential commitment of art is to the
truth.

Sex and Morality in the United States,
Time Magazine
:

— Hemingway’s phrase has become a moral law: “What is
moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad
after.”

— It is part and symptom of an era in which morals are
deemed private and relative. Pleasure is more like a constitutional right than a
privilege, and self-denial is increasingly seen as foolish rather than
virtuous.

— The days of its bold talk of sexual freedom long over,
Communism has now become the most powerful force for Puritanism in the
world.

— Radcliffe girls believe that necking is dirty because
it provokes desire without satisfying it. Intercourse is therefore more
virtuous.

— The new sexual freedom in the United States does not
necessarily set people free. . . . The great new sin today is no longer giving
in to desire, but not giving into it fully and successfully. While enjoyment of
sex has increased for many, the competitive mania to prove oneself as a
functioning sexual machine makes many others feel neurotically guilty, and
therefore impotent or sexually frigid.

Sartre’s article on the Soviet film
Ivan’s Childhood
,
in
Les Lettres
Françaises
, the literary magazine of the French Communist
Party: “The better socialist realist productions have, in spite of
everything, always given us complex, nuanced heroes; they have exalted their
merits while taking care to underline certain of their weaknesses. In truth,
the problem is not one of measuring out the vices and virtues of the hero
but one of putting heroism itself into discussion. Not to deny it but to
understand it.”

March

March 7, I’ve been trying for two days to start
writing again. I thought I had figured out what it was really about and how I
would write it. But when I start writing I become frightened. Early yesterday I
cried because I couldn’t go on for more than two pages. I felt like I’d lost
something. I hadn’t thought I would write at night, but then I felt a strong
urge and had a clear mind — but with the same result.

“.
.
.
I read it and was really upset, because it taught me the story of mom and
dad, and you and me. It taught me how much effort it cost dad before he
could take me away from my mother, and how much worry we caused him. He
could have lived in a nice place if we had never existed. But thank God he
did keep at it until he could take me away from my mother’s family. I would
have been so miserable if I lived with her. It also taught me what Mama
Aisha did to us, and a lot of other stuff I hadn’t known before. You’re the
one who knows everything. I liked the story because you took it from real
life. I mean there’s not too much fantasy in it. I also liked your style and
your way of putting things. It’s not the normal way. There’s something a
little strange about it and this was the best thing in your story — your way
of putting things. But how did you remember everything so
exactly?