Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""Reading Boyishly" is as complete and mesmerizing a work of reflection on art, time, gender, and family (mothers anyhow) as I have ever seen. It is a remarkable and rare invitation to find ways to extend our nostalgia into a positive mode of being that does not close off the future at all but relocates it within desire."--James R. Kincaid, author of "Erotic Innocence"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

READING BOYISHLY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................ixintroduction. Anorectic Hedonism: A Reader's Guide to Reading Boyishly; Novel or a Philosophical Study? Am I a Novelist?.....................1one. My Book Has a Disease...................................................................................................................23two. Winnicott's ABCs and String Boy.........................................................................................................57three. Splitting: The Unmaking of Childhood and Home.........................................................................................77four. Pulling Ribbons from Mouths: Roland Barthes's Umbilical Referent.......................................................................129five. Nesting: The Boyish Labor of J. M. Barrie..............................................................................................163six. Childhood Swallows: Lartigue, Proust, and a Little Wilde................................................................................253seven. Mouth Wide Open for Proust: "A Sort of Puberty of Sorrow".............................................................................315eight. Soufflé/Souffle..................................................................................................................349nine. Kissing Time...........................................................................................................................367ten. Beautiful, Boring, and Blue: The Fullness of Proust's Search and Akerman's Jeanne Dielman...............................................397conclusion. Boys: "To Think a Part of One's Body"............................................................................................433Illustrations................................................................................................................................441Notes........................................................................................................................................455Index........................................................................................................................................519

Chapter One

Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment of gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest pleasure [jouissance].

* Roland Barthes, "Inaugural Lecture"

The subject of nostalgia comes into the picture: it belongs to the precarious hold that a person may have on the inner representation of a lost object.

* D. W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena"

* READING BOYISHLY is a labor of love for four boyish men and one boy. The men are J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), and D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971). The boy is the boy photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986), who did grow up and continued to snap pictures for his entire life (but I will focus on the keepsakes that he made when still in knee pants and during his adolescence). Between the covers of their books, journals, and photograph albums, childhood is a place prolonged through (what some have anxiously labeled as) an overattachment to the mother.

All five of "my boys" are privileged to read boyishly, largely as a result of class privilege. Lartigue was the son of wealth French banker; he lived long and fully with a lifetime of toys, cameras, dogs, kites, homemade flying machines, go-carts, paints, and sunshine, without any serious financial worries. Proust's bourgeois days, always with servants, spent reading in the garden as a child ("under the chestnut tree, in a hooded chair of wicker and canvas in the depths of which I used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might be coming to call upon the family" [I, 115; I, 82–83]) and later reading in his brass bed as an adult, sounding his bell for the prompt delivery of his whims-turned-needs, are stories of infamous cushiness, despite being plagued by lifelong asthma. Winnicott's father was a British businessman, specializing in corsetry, an occupation that provided his son with a thorough upper middle-class life, including boarding school. However, Barthes and, especially, Barrie were weighed down as boys with the heft of monetary uncertainties. Barrie waxes it nostalgically. Barthes gives it a bitter taste.

For Barrie, growing up as a son of a weaver in his tiny house in the even tinier town of Kirriemuir, Scotland, was the fairy-tale, rags-to-riches story. But it seems that it was the reading that pampered him. And he caught the reading bug from his mum, a great reader. In Barrie's own words:

We read many books together when I was a boy, Robinson Crusoe, being the first (and the second), and the Arabian Nights should have been the next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we sent that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever since.... Besides reading every book we could hire or borrow, I also bought one now and again, and while buying (it was the occupation of weeks) I read standing at the counter, most of the other books in the shop, which is perhaps the most exquisite way of reading.

Barthes's background is "bourgeois," although his maternal grandmother was a "wealthy" member of the "constellation." Barthes was not even a year old when his father died in combat in the North Sea, and there seems to be no mourning for him. After his father's death, Barthes and his war-widow mother, Henriette, moved to Bayonne, in the southwest of France, to live with his father's family. (Apparently Henriette was never close to her own mother.) Barthes describes his grandmother's home in Bayonne, with its lovely gardens, as an "ecological wonder." The house is the stuff of fairy tales: "With the modesty of a chalet, yet there was one door after another, and French windows, and outside staircases, like a castle in a story." "His mother, his aunt, and his grandmother all kept a careful watch on the young Roland, and he was surrounded by female affection." However, a "transgression" brought the happy times to a halt. When Roland was eleven, his mother gave birth to his half-brother Michel, out of wedlock. This "transgression," Barthes claims, cost his mother financially and emotionally. Barthes has memories of financial misery:

Simply this, that my childhood and adolescence were spent in poverty. That there was often no food in the home. That we had to go and buy a bit of paté or a few potatoes at a little grocery store on the rue de Seine, and this would be all we'd have to eat. Life was actually lived to the rhythm of the first of the month, when the rent was due. And I had before me the daily spectacle of my mother working hard at bookbinding, a job for which she was absolutely unsuited.... I remember for example, the small crisis at the start of each school year. I didn't have the proper clothes. No money for school supplies. No money to pay for schoolbooks. It's the small things, you see, that mark...