I’ve just finished reading the essay “Antigone, Queen” 📕 by Lolita Pille.
Translated from French.
I’ve just finished reading the essay “Antigone, Queen” 📕 by Lolita Pille. To my great delight, she sets out an optimistic and proud vision of literature, in which style — the art of language — is essential. ✨
In it, she draws extensively on antiquity and modern philosophers, as well as numerous authors – including Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf… but above all Marcel Proust. 🤵🏻♂️🕰️
🖋️ “Through his writing, Proust brings about a different kind of metamorphosis. He transforms us… into himself; that other self who is the narrator of In Search of Lost Time. His understanding of the situations and stirrings of the human heart is so penetrating, and he has such clear and powerful words to express it, that his voice merges with our own inner voice. Proust, so alien to us in his opulence and his era, emerges as our equal through his inner life, so much so that, whilst reading “In Search of Lost Time”, it soon becomes impossible to determine with certainty whether we are him or whether we are ourselves, where Proust ends and ‘I’ begins.”
This literature transcends class, race, sex and gender – factors which nonetheless determine the alignment of the stars under which a writer shapes their language and meets their destiny. I could hardly fail to notice that Toni Morrison is a Black woman and Marcel Proust a white man. But I could hardly fail to notice the affinities between Proust and Morrison, these two elite poets. And to my personal sensibility, this affinity between them seems more evident and stronger than that between Proust and a man who might be Proust’s double in terms of class, education and lifestyle, but who does not write; and likewise between Toni Morrison and a woman who resembled her in her social characteristics.
“Our identity is an irregular polygon.”
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