All the World’s Mornings

Novel vs. Film

All the Mornings of the WorldAll the Mornings of the World

The Novel vs. the Film

All the World’s Mornings

Novel vs. Film

All the Mornings of the World

What Quignard actually knew:

• Sainte-Colombe taught Jean Rousseau, who reports he added the seventh string to the viol.

• was a compatriot of Michel Colichon, a famous instrument maker.

• gave concerts with his two daughters.• wrote beautiful haunting compositions: 67

suites for two viols and 180 solos.• practiced in a garden cabin

• would play unknowingly for Marais, who listened under the cabin after his lessons with S-C were discontinued.

• had a son Francois, who composed “Tombeau pour Mr. De Sainte-Colombe le pere”

• was most likely a protestant, which would have prevented his working in the king’s court and forced him out of the country after 1685

• died in unknown circumstances on an unknown date

Historical Elements

Jansenism

• Associated with Port Royal Cistercian Convent and the Arnaud family

• Port Royal pupils included Racine, Arnuad family and Pascal

• Emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace and predestination

• High level of moral rectitude and religious piety• Influenced by Augustine’s philosophy

Society of Port Royal

“These were men whom the love of retirement had united to cultivate literature, in the midst of solitude, of peace, and of piety. They formed a society of learned men, of fine taste and sound philosophy. Alike occupied on sacred, as well as on profane writers, they edified, while they enlightened the world. Their writings fixed the French language. The example of these solitaries show how retirement is favourable to penetrate into the sanctuary of the Muses; and that by meditating in silence on the oracles of taste, in imitating we may equal them.”

Blaise Pascal

• “We arrive at truth, not by reason only, but also by the heart.”

• “[I feel] engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.”

• “However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.”

• “All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.”

Lubin Baugin 1610-1663

• Master of the still-life• Two distinct periods of work—earlier, still life

(France); later, religious portraits (Italy)• Lived outside of Paris• He was openly involved in republishing the

books of the empirical doctor, David Laigneau, against bloodletting. A Protestant, Laigneau had also written a treatise on alchemy. Could an interest in empiricism and alchemy exist in harmony with orthodox piety in 1660? In any case, it was the sign of a free spirit.

St. Jerome--Bible Translator

Seymour Chatman

“What Novels can do that Films can’t (and vice versa)”

Narratives vs. Images

• Narratives take time to read, while images are taken in in a glance

• Narrative, more than an image, invokes a virtual, as well as actual, time: “story time” (the imagined movement in time) vs. “discourse time” (the actual movement of words across the page)

• The time of a narrative can be ordered internally in a manner an image cannot.

• But, keep in mind the film combines images with narrative structure. Film images move. Storied time (movement through time) pulses in counterpoint to the synchronic presentation of scenes, of an image.

Complications in All the Mornings

• Because music is involved, the temporal structure becomes more complicated especially in the film

• Two “virtual” times—the time of the story and the time of the musical pieces are fit into the time of the film “discourse.”

Description in Narrative

• Interrupts and freezes the time structure of the narrative and invokes a tableau vivant (a living picture).

• Only a limited amount of details can be invoked in the tableau

• The details are invoked in a particular order.• An implied narrator easily asserts details as

existing: e.g. the “tiny” cart, a “mulberry” tree.

Setting a Scene in Cinema

• Occurs simultaneously as the action unfolds• Numerous details must be added• The details can be structured visually but

are more synchronic than diachronic• Assertions of an implied narrator cannot be

easily included in the setting up of a scene.• Action still occurs even when the director

has a scene stand still.

“Then he shoved the door of his hut full open, and stood up trembling. He bowed ceremoniously as Monsieur Marais entered. At first they could not say anything. Monsieur de Sainte Colombe sat on his stool and said to Monsieur Marais:

‘Sit down!’ Monsieur Marais, still shrouded in his sheepskin, sat down. The two of them just sat there, awkward, embarrassed.”

The two of them just sat there, awkward, embarrassed.”

They left…the snow had stopped falling but Now reached to the tops of their boots. Night had fallen with no moon and no stars. A man passed by with a torch he was protecting with his hand, and they followed him. A few flakes were still drifting down.

Monsieur de Sainte Colombe took his pupil’s arm and stopped him: in front of them a little boy was pissing, making a hole in the snow. The sound of the hot urine mingled with the noise of snow crystals slowly melting. (p. 48).

“Then they were standing beside the stove in Monsieur Bagin’s studio. The painter was busy painting a still-life on a table: a half-filled glass of red wine, a lute on its side, an open music score, a black velvet purse, some playing cards with the knave of clubs uppermost, a chessboard on which were arranged a vase holding three carnations and an octagonal mirror learning against the wall.”

(pp. 44-45)

“Then they were standing beside the stove in Monsieur Bagin’s studio.”

They were in the garden; she urged him to creep under the wooden hut built in the low branches of the ancient mulberry tree…One day it so happened that a thunderstorm broke…he sneezed violently several times. Monsieur de Sainte Colombe rushed out into the rain, caught him with his chin on his knees crouching on the wet earth, and started to kick him and call for his menservants. He managed to reach his feet and legs with his kicks and to make him get out, seized him by the collar and asked the first manservant to arrive to bring him the whip. (p. 56)

“Whereas in novels, movements and hence events are at best constructions imaged by the reader out of words, that is, abstract symbols which are different from them in kind, the movements on the screen are so iconic, so like the real life movements they imitate, that the illusion of time passage simply cannot be divorced from them.”

Once they got a real fright. They were in the house because Monsieur Marais was hoping to overhear the airs Madeleine had told him about by creeping under the branches of the mulberry tree. She was standing in front of him in the living room. Marin was in a chair. She had drawn near. She thrust her breasts forward, close to his face. She undid the top of her dress, drew aside her undergarment. Her breasts leaped out, Marin Marais could only bury his face in them. (p. 65).

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bahktin

“Discourse in the Novel”

Dialogical Discourse

• A living utterance• A particular historical moment• A socially specific environment• Dialogical “threads” woven about a social

object• The utterance stems from the dialogue

and enters back into it—participatory rather than theoretical

Heteroglossia

• To use language at all is to speak in many languages

• A social stratification of language(s)—literary genres, professional usages, religious discourses, regional idioms etc.

• Every speaker of language is inhabited by these multiple forms of language in juxtaposition to one another.

Internal Dialogization

• Rather than looking for a pure and coherent image, form or metaphor, the novelist/poet registers in his or her discourse the heteroglossia of language

• To understand any utterance, one must hear it against the background of language and the multiplicity of concrete utterances language allows

From All the Mornings of the World

‘Monsieur…I have received the command to invite you to play at court. His Majesty has expressed a desire to hear you play, and, should your playing meet with his approval, he would welcome you among the musicians of his Privy Chamber.’

‘Monsieur…I have bounded my life by these planks of grey wood set in a mulberry tree; by the sounds of a viol’s seven strings; by my two daughters’ needs. My friends are my memories. My court are those willows there, the running water, the chub, the gudgeon and the elder blossoms. You may inform his Majesty that his palace is no place for a wild man of the woods who was presented to the late king his father these thirty-five years ago.’

From The Unbearable Lightness of Being

By Milan Kundera

Cemetery

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children’s ball. Yes, a children’s ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well.

For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.

From Ceremony

By Leslie Marmon Silko

“Do something for me, the way you did for others who came back. Because what if I didn’t know I killed one?”

But the old man shook his head slowly and made a low humming sound in his throat. In the old way of warfare, you couldn’t kill another human being in battle without knowing it, without seeing the result, because even a wounded deer that got up and ran again left great clots of lung blood or spilled guts on the ground. That way the hunter knew it would die. Human beings were no different. But the old man would not have believed white warfare—killing across great distances without knowing who or how many had died. It was all too alien to comprehend, the mortars and the big guns; and even if he could have taken the old man to see the target areas, even if he could have led him through the fallen jungle trees and muddy craters of torn earth to show him the dead, the old man would not have believed anything so monstrous. Ku’oosh would have looked at the dismembered corpses and the atamic heat-flash outlines, where human bodies had evaporated and the old man would have said something close and terrible had killed these people. Not even oldtime witches killed like that.

The way

I hear iit

Was

In the old days

Long time ago

They had this

Scalp Society

For warriors

Who killed

Or touched

Dead enemies.

They had things

They must do

Otherwise

K’oo’ko would haunt their dreams

With her great fangs and

Everything would be endangered.

Maybe the rain wouldn’t come

Or the deer would go away.

That’s why

They had things

They must do