Ah, What Is It? - That I Heard [antikvár]

Foreword Vincent O'Sullivan At least for some readers, the insistent tolling behind the title of La Recherche du Temps Perdu is that for all the novel's triumphal claim for art, for most of us time is not retrieved, and the possibilities of life arc the finer for their occurring, as most of us believe, just this once. Yet Proust's defiance of that truism chimed with what had been in the air for much of the nineteenth century. Katherine Mansfield, as a young woman on the far side of the world from Europe, was in thrall as so many of her generation were to Walter Pater's celebrated dictum that it was art and art alone that gave "the highest quality to your moments as they pass",1 while the current hurries us down stream to an inevitable Niagara. For the later Mansfield, goaded by her early and fatal illness, an abiding challenge was how not to despair that the river ran always faster than one seemed prepared for? Mansfield was among the first of her contemporaries to take on board quite what a later generation, in France especially, would mean by "authenticity", and did so before the resonant language of Existentialism was available to her. So much of what she wrote in her short stories, in her precise and fearless journals, and in her scintillating letters, might now be read as counterpoint to what her contemporary, Martin Heidegger, was finding a way to speak of with the coolcr distancing of philosophy. The creative writer, with her innate suspicion of formula and prccept, would engage more sensuously with image and pattern, with what Maurice Blanchot called "the shiver of rhythm, the call of a cadencc",2 that attends them. It is there, in the textures of her fiction and her self-examining, that 1 Walter Pater, "Conclusion", in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature (1868), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 153. : Maurice Blanchot, "The Novel and Poetry", in Faux Pas (1943), trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001, 203.