Parisian Literary Salon

Happy New Year to all !! The possibilities rush forward: resolutions are only one way of marking the freshness offered by this calendar change. In the Salons I have found the opportunity to bring threads of meaning and questions together- to turn over with other awake minds the wonder of the world, and come to some halting and brief truths in the face of our shared experience in the study of the literature. I expect the offerings for the coming series will offer this opportunity again- part of the magic is that I cannot predict where the studies will take us.

Although there are three choices below, I will probably only start the two most subscribed. Notice that Disgrace and To the Lighthouse are 5 weeks Salons- I am responding to the request by some participants for a shorter commitment: let’s see how that works. I will confirm your participation by email with the reading schedule and opening thoughts when I receive your commitment. For those who have previously done a Salon, an email stating your participation for one (or more) of the Salons listed below is sufficient. If this is your first Salon, please send a check for 25 euro to reserve your place in the Salon to me at 3 ter rue d’Alesia, Paris 75014. The 6 week Salon is 75 euro, 5 week Salons are 65 euro.

CHOICES:
1. The Odyssey by Homer (Translation: Robert Fagles)
Tuesday evenings, 8-10 PM first meeting Thursday January 17
Apologies for the change in pattern for the first meeting- the rest of the meetings will follow as usual on Tuesday evenings…

2. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee * 5 week Salon *
Monday evenings, 8-10 PM first meeting January 21st

3. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf * 5 week Salon*
Tuesday afternoons 2-4 PM first meeting January 22nd

The Odyssey - The Salon has certainly been a place to re-discover- or discover for the first time- the works that form the cornerstones of Western literary tradition. The Odyssey is a root for our understanding of ourselves as well as the words and ways of the ancients. How does it continue to shape our idea of the heroic? What do the dilemmas that Odysseus faces offer to us today? Can we still appreciate the lyric and narrative quality alongside a violent story filled with the suffering and death of nameless servants, slave girls and soldiers?

David Denby, in his work Great Books, describes his engagement with The Odyssey as an essential exploration of the formation of the self for the reader as well as for Telemachus and Odysseus:

Even at the beginning of the literary tradition of the West, the self has masks, and remakes itself as a fiction and not as a guiltless fiction either. . . The Odyssey is an after-the-war poem, a plea for relief and gratification, and it turns, at times, into a sensual, even carnal celebration.

Disgrace - Disgrace won the Booker Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and J.M. Coetzee was winner of the Noble Prize in Literature. While these are all good reasons to read the book, the work challenges the reader in disturbing ways. Written in the world of post-apartheid South Africa, the narrative perspective is uncomfortable: a 52 year old university professor whose solution to the problem of sex is first a paid liaison followed by a possible rape of a student of his. But this is not what the work is ultimately about- nor is it the most uncomfortable aspects of the work. Some critics have accused Disgrace of offering racist portrayals of the black characters who are limited in their presentation and behave violently. Reading this work will bring us to some jagged considerations: what is the responsibility of a writer in a politically charged landscape? What is the relationship between art and politics? How much do we trust the distance between a writer and his protagonist? Can a writer use a deeply disturbing situation to develop human understanding and compassion? Can art offer redemption?

The prose is fittingly sharp and spare. There are parallels in character and situations- both within and beyond the book- that get our attention. Just this week an essay in the NYT considers this work in light of its historical time and place:

An unsettling interweaving of realism and allegory, with biblical allusions and Dostoyevskian moral complexity, Disgrace has been called a masterpiece “a novel with which it is almost impossible to find fault,” wrote the critic James Wood, who praised “its loose wail of pain, its vigorous honesty.” The reviewer goes on to discuss the accusations of racism that have been aimed at the book. We will need to consider this carefully, and see if in our own study, we find the book offers us something more in exchange for the discomfort we experience.

For the full text of the article, see- Essay: Out of South Africa
BY RACHEL DONADIO
Published: December 16, 2007 in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/Donadio-t.html?ref=review

To the Lighthouse
- by Virginia Woolf
see ‘What We might read’ section