Casanova the Irresistible
152
Casanova the Irresistible
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Overview
Armine Kotin Mortimer's translation of Sollers's reading tracks the alluring Venetian through the whole of his astounding and disreputable life. Eschewing myth, Sollers dares to present the plain realities of a man "simple, direct, courageous, cultivated, seductive, funny. A philosopher in action." The lovers are here, and the ruses and adventures. But Sollers also rescues Casanova the writer, a gifted composer of words who reigns as a titan of eighteenth-century literature. As always, Sollers seeks to shame society for its failure to recognize its failings. By admiring those of Casanova's admirable qualities present in himself, Sollers spurns bourgeois hypocrisy and cliché to affirm a jocund philosophy of life devoted to the twinned pursuits of pleasure and joy.
A masterful translation that captures Sollers's idiosyncratic style, Casanova the Irresistible escorts readers on a journey into the heads and hearts of two singular personalities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252098154 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 527 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Casanova the Irresistible
By Philippe Sollers, Armine Kotin Mortimer
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 1998 Éditions PlonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09815-4
CHAPTER 1
People think they know Casanova. They are wrong.
I open a dictionary, I read:
"CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, Giacomo (1725–1798), an adventurer born in Venice, famous for his novelesque exploits (particularly his escape from the Piombi of Venice) and his gallant exploits, which he recounted in his Memoirs."
Casanova was indeed born in Venice near the beginning of the eighteenth century, he is inseparable from the great legend of that city, but he died far from there, at seventy-three, in Dux (now Duchcov), in Bohemia. Why?
The real title of the Memoirs is Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life). It is an enormous volume loaded with adventures revolving around gambling, travel, magic, and sex, and very few people know that it was written in French before being published in German, then retranslated into French in a more "proper" version than the original. To read what Casanova really wrote, with his pen, we had to wait until the beginning of the sixties, in the twentieth century. (But only a few specialists or enthusiasts are interested in that publication.) It isn't until 1993 that this essential text, along with a selection of other writings by the same author, are at last published in French in three volumes anyone can obtain.
This has to be our point of departure: the original version was deferred, and "subtitled." Why?
Yes, why did people decide to forget that Casanova was also a writer? What can be done to unmask two centuries of injurious censure and repression alongside this willful ignorance?
Seingalt is an added pseudonym, forged by Casanova himself in 1760 when he is in Zurich. He calls himself Chevalier de Seingalt, he ennobles his signature. If one thinks of the meaning of the word seing, "signature," it's as if he wanted to say that his signature is high (alt) and ancient. One can imagine that Stendhal (who called Casanova Novacasa in his Journal) remembered this move when he chose his pseudonym as a writer. Casanova in French is Maisonneuve, Newhouse in English. Jack Newhouse. No need to add that we are at the antipodes of that other Jack, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The century of Casanova is the century of Voltaire and Mozart (but also Sade). Mozart, Da Ponte, and Casanova met at Prague, incidentally, for the creation of Don Giovanni in 1787 (Casanova arrived from Dux). This scene has never really been depicted. Why?
There are two known autograph folios by Casanova, the examination of which shows that they are the drafts of interchangeable variants for scene 10 in the second act of the opera. The author who made this discovery writes: "Few nonmythical beings were as much the man of the instant, of the pure present, as Casanova. And also the man of the catalogue. ... It is not out of the question to imagine that in listening to:
Un catalogo gli e che ho fatt'io
sung in this Bohemian autumn of 1787, the old adventurer could believe that it was time to copy over the list of his own love affairs. Thus Don Giovanni may well have had a part in bringing us the Story of My Life, which remains, after all, the immortal catalogo of Giacomo Casanova, though it is far from being only that."
In September 1787, then, Mozart is in Prague at the Three Lions, Lorenzo Da Ponte at the Hotel Plattensee. The two hotels are so close that the musician and his librettist can speak to each other from the windows. Casanova arrives. At the time, he is seeking to publish a long science fiction novel.
But the real science fiction novel is actually the encounter of these three men. Casanova has known Da Ponte since his stay in Vienna two years earlier, when he was secretary to the ambassador from Venice (whom he doesn't like). It's easy to imagine that he met Mozart. Note that, not insignificantly, our three characters are Freemasons.
One evening at the Villa Bertramka, Casanova is in dialogue with Mozart about his escape from the Leads in Venice. There's a friendly plot developing, which ends up locking the composer in his room. He won't be liberated until he has written the overture to his opera, already composed in his head but still not written out.
Do we see all this?
And do we see how fascinating it is to reflect on the fact that Casanova starts writing the story of his life during the summer of 1789?
In music, then: Vivaldi and Mozart. In painting, Fragonard, Tiepolo, Guardi. The cities? Venice, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, London, Naples, Constantinople, Cologne, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Munich, Zurich, Geneva, Berne, Basel, Vienna, Paris again, Madrid.
We find ourselves in the great Europe of the Enlightenment, the epoch from which an obscure force of violence has attempted and still attempts to divert us.
It goes without saying that Venice is the center of this variable geometry. Everything stems from there, everything returns there, even if Casanova died in exile in Czechoslovakia. But when he writes, it's Venice that writes.
In French.
People didn't want to think of Casanova as a writer (and let's say it calmly: one of the great writers of the eighteenth century). They have made him into a circus animal. They are relentless in drawing a false image of him. Producers have projected themselves onto him and presented him as a puppet, a mechanical lover, a more or less senile or ridiculous marionette. He haunts people's imaginations but makes them anxious. They are happy to recount his "gallant exploits," but on condition of depriving their hero of his depth. In short, they are jealous. They treat him with a diffuse, uptight, paternalistic resentment. Fellini, in a remarkably stupid comment, went so far as to say that he found Casanova stupid.
Let us rather conceive of him as he is: simple, direct, courageous, cultivated, seductive, funny. A philosopher in action.
He enjoyed himself a great deal, he saw human behavior from behind the scenes, he studied the nervous system of credulity. He sometimes deceived certain partners, but, as he explained it, it was their will, not his, and someone else would have tricked them in any case, less well. He doesn't always portray himself as a hero; he doesn't embellish, he describes with precision, he is quick. He is as amusing to read as Cervantes's Don Quixote. In short, his Story of My Life is a masterpiece, the record of a man who affirms his truth.
He had an exceptional body. He followed it, listened to it, spent it, thought it. That, basically, is what the eternal spirit of bigotry reproaches him with.
In April 1798, at Dux, Casanova falls ill. He stops revising his manuscript. On May 27, his nephew, Carlo Angiolini, arrives in Dux to take care of his uncle, who dies on June 4. Angiolini takes the manuscript to Dresden.
In 1820, the Angiolini family sells the manuscript to the publisher Brockhaus in Leipzig.
From 1822 to 1828, the first edition of the Story of My Life appears in German translation, "cleaned up"
From 1826 to 1838, it's the first French publication, "revised" (the Laforgue version, the one Stendhal reads in 1826, still available in the Pléiade edition).
In 1945, the manuscript of the Story of My Life narrowly escapes destruction and is transferred from Leipzig to Wiesbaden. Only in 1960 does the publication of the original text appear (the Brockhaus-Plon edition), republished in 1993 in three volumes by Bouquins (Robert Laffont).
It is obvious that Casanova has been "forgotten" a lot, even if he has also been quietly looted. He is forgotten, rearranged, costumed in keeping with Ancien Régime-type fantasies (as they say). They don't want him to make History. Life should not be confused with History, and even less with sexual freedom and writing. Fortunately, against all these obscurantisms, admirable "Casanovists," mostly amateurs, have worked to provide a multitude of verifications. Aside from a few errors, mostly of dates, everything Casanova writes is true. That is probably what is most explosive about him. Keep in mind, finally, that the text itself, Casanova's hand, has had its full effect for only five years. Just a beginning, then.
I like to picture this clandestine transferal of 1945 in a Europe on fire under intensive bombardments and destroyed by human madness. At that time, the death drive is everywhere; an unprecedented savagery seems to have annihilated the very idea of civilization. Thousands of pages of small black handwriting, piled into cases transported by trucks, recount an unimaginable life.
Fire from the heavens has not succeeded in destroying this writing. Nor have hypocrisy, censure, pictorial deformations, indifference, malevolence, and publicity. But what are we to make of it now? Are we free enough to read it?
Casanova: man with a future.
CHAPTER 2Jean Laforgue was a professor of French in the nineteenth century.
He is a scrupulous and serious layman of the kind that used to be produced at the time. He is asked to rewrite Casanova. He does.
He comes upon this sentence about women: "I have always found that the one I loved smelled good, and the stronger her perspiration, the more intoxicating it seemed to me"
Laforgue thinks about it for thirty seconds. No, in the nineteenth century (no more than today, by the way), a woman does not perspire.
So he corrects this incongruity and writes: "As for women, I have always found intoxicating the odor of those whom I loved."
It is better, after all, right?
Laforgue blows his nose.
After smell, taste. Casanova does not hide what he calls his "gross tastes": game, red mullet, eel's liver, crabs, oysters, rotting cheeses, all accompanied by champagne, burgundies, Graves.
Laforgue (a bit like Leporello) finds this appetite barbaric, exaggerated, slightly degenerate, and even frankly aristocratic. So he abbreviates and writes, in a more bourgeois vein, "delicious suppers."
Now for touch. At one point, Casanova describes himself in action at night, barefoot so as not to make any noise. Barefoot? Laforgue immediately gets cold feet and puts "lightweight slippers" on his hero.
These slippers, you understand, are an entire program. The body too raw, too present, too three-dimensional: that is the danger. Try to imagine the man in Fragonard's The Bolt (Le Verrou) wearing slippers: it's no longer the same painting. Laforgue is a specialist of the fig leaf (each period has such "restorers").
But lay prudishness has two visages (that's one of its charms). For example, the word "Jesuit" makes it shudder. So when Casanova uses this word ironically, Laforgue piles on the sarcasm. Same thing whenever it's a question of the monarchy. How can one reconcile the fact that Casanova is openly hostile to the Terror with the fact that his adventures (as tempered by censure) put him in phase with History? An irritating paradox, that. Laforgue will let the praise for Louis XV stand ("Louis XV had the most handsome head one can imagine, and he carried it with as much grace as majesty"); after all, that Louis didn't have his head cut off. On the other hand, better to suppress the diatribe against the people of the French who massacred their nobility, the people who, as Voltaire said, "are the most abominable of all" and who resemble "a chameleon that takes on all colors and is susceptible to anything a leader can make it do, good or bad."
Women perspiring, odors, food, political opinions: it all needs to be kept under surveillance. If Casanova writes "the low people of Paris," he'll be made to say "the good people." But obviously it is the details about sexual desire that are the thorniest. About a woman who has just fallen, Larforgue writes that Casanova "repairs with a chaste hand the disarray that her fall had caused in her clothing." How gallantly these things are spoken! Casanova, however, is more explicit: he says he went to "quickly pull down her skirts, which had displayed all of her secret marvels before my eyes." Not a chaste hand, as you see, but a prompt glance.
Professor Laforgue "fears marriage like fire." Is it because he doesn't want to shock his mother, his sister, or his wife — or his wife's numerous women friends — that he rejects Casanova's wording: "I fear marriage more than death"? More abruptly, one mustn't show two of the main heroines of the Story of My Life, C. C. and M. M. (the two friends in one of the happiest periods of Casanova's life in his casino in Venice), in a scene like this: "They began their labors with a frenzy like that of two tigresses who looked like they wanted to devour each other" (picture Marcel Proust blushing while reading this sentence). In any case, it is out of the question to print this: "We were all three of the same sex in all the trios that we executed." (Only quite recently, a nice young woman writing about Casanova wondered what sex might be in question here. One cannot really explain it to her in writing.)
After an orgy, it seems natural to Laforgue to make Casanova feel "disgust." Nothing of the sort; Laforgue is making it up. It is true that in his time the flesh is supposed to be sad and all books read, that ennui and melancholy, doubt and despair increasingly overwhelm the mind.
If Casanova writes: "Sure of a complete orgasm at the end of the day, I let myself go with all my natural gaiety" (that's how he is), Laforgue corrects him and has him say: "Sure of being happy...." The word orgasm (jouissance) is banished. A woman, according to the professor, cannot be represented lying on her back while "masturbating." No, she will be "in the act of deluding herself" (understand it if you can). That, at least, is how a hand remains chaste. He will, however, dare to say "onanism" (a medical word) where Casanova forges this marvelous neologism: "manustupration" — a hand for stupre, debauchery.
You can verify this: a clever woman with a hand for stupre is hardly deluding herself. That's what Professor Laforgue probably didn't have a chance to observe. Too bad.
More censure: it is not decent to speak, as Casanova does, about the "ferocious viscera that give this woman convulsions, drive that one crazy, make another devout." Casanova loves women; he describes them as he loves them, without devotion. But Laforgue is already a feminist — he respects women, he fears them, he is prefiguring legions of prudish professors, especially philosophers, a new clergy that will replace the old. Casanova is the bad boy in the class. If he speaks of suspect spots on his pants, he is quickly sent to the boys' room to get that cleaned up. From time to time, moral formulas will be interpolated into his text (they are lacking). These professorial corrections sometimes reach great heights. Here, for instance, is M. M., of whom Casanova writes that "this religious woman, a keen thinker, playful and libertine, was admirable in everything she did." One day she sends a love letter to her Casanova. Laforgue version: "I send a thousand kisses that disappear into the air." Casanova had actually noted (and it is so much more beautiful): "I kiss the air, thinking you are there."
Mere details? Surely not. Love is the science of details.
"My life is my matter, my matter is my life," says Casanova. Usually literature and novels serve to imagine the life one did not have, here it's the opposite: here is someone who realizes, like a last judgment, that his life has been woven like a book, an immense novel: "In remembering the pleasures I have had, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, and I laugh about the suffering I have endured and that I no longer feel. Member of the universe, I speak to the air, and I see myself as giving an account of my management the way a butler does to his master before disappearing."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Casanova the Irresistible by Philippe Sollers, Armine Kotin Mortimer. Copyright © 1998 Éditions Plon. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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