Nicholson Baker - The Size of Thoughts - Essays and Other Lumber

In the original French, the name that Flaubert has Homais give his upstairs sanctuary is not one of the cluster of basic alternatives for “warehouse” or “place of storage”—words like depôt or magasin or debarras or grenier . Rather it is the exotic-sounding (exotic at least to English-speakers) capharnaüm . Capernaum was the town in Galilee where such a press of spectators gathered to hear Jesus (Mark 2) that a palsied man had to be lowered in his bed through the roof to be healed, and it was the site of various other miracles and pronouncements, including the sermon Jesus preached (John 6) after the feeding of the five thousand with the magic loaves and fish-baskets. Hence “un vrai capharnaüm” came to mean (according to the stacked volumes of Littré and Le Grand Robert and Trésor de la Langue Française ), a room in which lots of things are tumbled together pell-mell — a “lieu de désordre et de débauche.” Harrap’s dictionary and the Oxford French Dictionary offer bear-garden and glory hole as English equivalents, but these have an unsavory ring. “Lumber room” is the term that J. Lewis May supplies in his translation, the text that was imported into the Library of the Future CD-ROM. Translations by Mildred Marmur (Signet), Joan Charles (edited by Somerset Maugham), Alan Russell (Penguin Classics), Francis Steegmuller (Quality Paperback Book Club), and Paul de Man (Norton) give Capharnaum without umlaut or explanation; 1clearly, however, the English reader needs some interpretive help. Lowell Bair’s translation for Bantam floats depository as an alternative, turning Homais’s beakered retreat into a sperm bank, which may not be so far wrong, since it is the place where, in Flaubert’s nudging phrase, he “se délectait dans l’exercice de ses prédilections.” Gerard (not Manley) Hopkins, on the other hand, in his Oxford Classics edition, gives the burly and Father-Knows-Bestial Den .

Nabokov also addressed the problem of the best English equivalent. Although he uses lumber room in the published text of his lectures on Madame Bovary , it seems that he also at times tried storeroom . On a handwritten list of mistranslated words that he evidently read aloud to his students, in order that they might correct their copies of the Aveling translation — a facsimile of which, headed “Last Batch of Mistranslated Words,” one may inspect in the Lectures on Literature paperback, p. 161— Capharnaum appears next to “storeroom (or house of confusion).” An additional hard-to-read note says “derived from the name of a [?devastated] city in Palestine.” Maybe this list dates from a period following the first composition of the lectures: having encountered some American-undergraduate bewilderment when he used lumber room , Nabokov possibly fell back on a plainer word. But Den, depository , and storeroom are not good enough: they strip the faded splendor, the reverberantly umlauted plume of Carthaginianism, from capharnaüm , which in the mouth of a small-town pseudo-savant and freethinker like Homais is exasperating and ludicrous, and yet still preserves (as does lumber room , with its fitful gleams of old gold and Lombard wealth) a residue of its own original radical glory. “I can’t accept the idea of a God who goes walking in his garden with his cane in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a groan and comes back to life three days later,” Homais tells Emma; his capharnaüm holds “acids and caustic alkalis” (which he sells on credit to Charles), rather than a prophet and a throng of converts. But it is nonetheless a place of novelistic transubstantiation, of course, in which Emma, driven to eat fistfuls of arsenic powder in Homais’s chemical attic, an act without any of the classical panache of asps or hemlock, nonetheless manages to resurrect herself as an immortal tragic heroine, right on the powder-white page.

There is another beakerful of meaning in this seductive word, too. Gallic lexicographers suggest that capharnaüm may be influenced by a ruralism from the region of Berry, in central France. The Berry patois has cafournion or cafourneau or caforgnau (possibly a splice from caverne , “cavern,” and fourneau , “stove”), meaning a little shack or side-room or shed or cabin. So the Eastern strangeness of one ancient biblical etymology merges with the hobnailed and humble country dialect of another. George Sand, soon to become Flaubert’s esteemed correspondent, had called attention to the berrichon word in her pastoral novel La Petite Fadette (1848): her narrator takes a long sentence to explain that a schoolmaster would censure her for saying carphanion rather than carphanaüm [sic], but that she would have to teach him what it referred to: “the lumber-room … the part of the barn next to the stables where we keep the yokes, chains, and tools of all kinds used with working beasts and for working the soil.” (This English is taken from Eva Figes’s 1967 translation, Little Fadette .) Capharnaüm , then, is an ideal word for Flaubert’s purposes, which are to domesticate exoticism, to interleave realism with high romance, to confuse coarseness and exaltation. Homais’s grandly named refuge may also, I note, be a fictionalization of what Flaubert called his “citadel” ( citadelle ). This was, George Sand writes in her diary for August 29, 1866, “a strange little old house built of wood that he uses as a wine store.” 2No doubt he exercised his predilections there, too.

Which carries us to Proust, who defended Flaubert’s steely style late in his life from an attack in the Nouvelle Revue Française , but who listed George Sand as his favorite writer when he was fourteen. Readers of Swann’s Way will remember Marcel’s affection for Sand’s “romans champětres,” and for the old forms of speech that his grandmother used, which were like old armchairs, on which

we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage [

usure

] of our modern tongue. As it happened, the pastoral novels of George Sand which she was giving me for my birthday were regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque, and are now only to be found in country dialects.

One has to believe that capharnaüm was one of the worn-away words from Sand’s pastoral dens that Proust had in mind here — and yet in the original, where we would hope to visit un véritable capharnaüm we confront, instead, a mere mobilier ancien , not a packed attic but something old packed away in an attic, as if Proust were deliberately obscuring his tracks by the Galilean lake, or as if he had interrupted his writing to think over “capharnaüm” and then had chosen to redirect his phrasing slightly, unwilling to dose his clause with Emma’s arsenic, or unable to tolerate so thoroughly vulgarized a metaphor in his own prose, although he could love it and celebrate it in his grandmother’s speech and in his mother’s evening readings from Sand. Or Proust could here have fallen in step with some allied passage in an English book — possibly something from one of Ruskin’s cathedral-threnodies (the mention of the fine points of ornament effaced by the rough usury of the modern tongue has a Lombardic stonemason’s provenance that recalls Ruskin), flamboyancies that Proust’s mother had diligently translated for him into “several red, green and yellow school exercise books” (see chapter 9 of Ronald Hayman’s biography), as he, fired up with Ruskin-love despite his own TOEFL-unready English, wrote a series of essays about the church sites that Ruskin had so copiously empurpled. But I must resist the urge to page through the thirty volumes of Ruskin that Proust said he owned, or even through the French studies of Ruskin by Robert de la Sizeranne and J. A. Milsand whose translated passages Proust drew on for his essays before his English improved. I’m sure the lumber rests somewhere there; I’m sure that I would have to spend only four or five days holed up in the ornate 39-volume library edition by Cook and Wedderburn (1903) and — as in the story Ruskin tells in Sesame and Lilies (a work Proust translated) of some schoolboys throwing stones at their books, which they had piled on gravestones — the dead ~ would live again: