HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
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brilliant. And I think the letters of Lord Byron are probably the most
fabulous letters of the whole nineteenth century.
Michal Govrin:
Let me just start a little argument here with Andre. I
think that we may have a contradiction between two traditions of form.
The nineteenth-century form, which Proust breaks like an egg and puts
back into the shell with mayonnaise, like something served in a deca–
dent restaurant, is still easily digestible. Kafka on the other hand, leaves
us with an unfinished, torn form. This might be precisely his goal: to
point to the inherent impossibility of pretending that form can be dev–
iled back into an egg. Its openness may be prophetic for what was going
to happen in this century, more than Proust's memory. Looking back at
the century after the Holocaust, I think that the form that touches the
chord of horror and of the unspeakable, is, perhaps, the form of the let–
ters, diaries, and unfinished novels of Kafka.
Andre Aciman:
I disagree with you because I think of every form that it
is the right form. I find it difficult
to
believe that the fragmentary form,
which is meant to express our fragmentary century, is the appropriate
form. I don't think it works that way. And I don't think it should work
this way. An author should find something that rises above even such a
terrible thing as the Holocaust, and maybe even turn his back to it. Art
has to create its own form, and our crazy century-and I think all cen–
turies have been crazy-is nor a justification for it. It's nor a way to read
Kafka. Yes, he died a couple decades before the Holocaust, but I don't
think we should read him that way.
Michal Govrin:
Vive la difference.
Rita Kramer:
This is a question for Jeffrey Meyers, and it's about the
writing of biography, by which 1 simply mean writing a life in its time
and place. I went back recently to read a biography I had written some
years ago, hoping
to
read it as a stranger, or at least with the perspec–
tive one is supposed
to
have gained with the years. And I fOLlnd it-to
continue with what seems
to
be the informing metaphor of the morn–
ing-a bit of a vicar's egg, which is a reference to a British anecdote
about a young vicar invited to breakfast with the bishop, who served an
egg that had gone bad. When the bishop apologized, the vicar said,
"Well, parts of it were very good."
The less-good parts of my own egg seemed to me
to
have been the
consequences of something 1 would call the narcissism of discovery, the
