Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott

by Carol Mavor

An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhood—nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and denied— Reading Boyishly is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy—J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue—Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading. To “read boyishly” is to covet the mother’s body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for, but will never become Mother, can. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labor of boyish reading, which suffers in its love affair with the mother. The writers and the photographer that Mavor lovingly considers are boyish readers par excellence : Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up; Barthes, the “professor of desire” who lived with or near his mother until her death; Proust, the modernist master of nostalgia; Winnicott, therapist to “good enough” mothers; and Lartigue, the child photographer whose images invoke ghostlike memories of a past that is at once comforting and painful. Drawing attention to the interplay between writing and vision, Reading Boyishly is stuffed full with more than 200 images. At once delicate and powerful, the book is a meditation on the threads that unite mothers and sons and on the writers and artists who create from those threads art that captures an irretrievable past.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

536 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2007

About the author

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour; Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.

Reviews

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Boyishly finishes with Proust's version of his masterpiece: boring. And this survey of how to read like a boy, is boring, but in the Proustian sense: it weaves, meanders, reprises, folds, unfolds, digs little holes from which subtle plants emerge. Mavor is the Sterne of literary criticism and this is a magnum opus on the theme of childhood/malehood.

The title suggests that the book is about five boys. really it is about four (Winnicott is included for his psychological insights and nothing is said about his life). Of the four, Barthes in the presiding Genius of the Place and Proust the main concern. Essentially, the book develops Camera Lucida and Barthes' fascination with the photographic Image. The Light-Camera leads to Lartigue, the boy photographer who only shot on sunny days, and on to Proust and Barrie and their light worlds in which boys flew and words inflated like souffles.

Mavor is an erudite writer and her aim is nothing less than to take the Mother, the matrix of language, and look at how her boyish writers remained umbilically linked to their mothers and motherhood. Mavor admires Barthes, even though her (Theory) colleagues found her love for him to be outdated. And though she respects him enormously, she is not blind to the dark aspects, how his boyishness made him a predatory lover of boys and how his Instigations is maternally embarrassing and sexually dubious. Mavor traces many threads throughout her discourse on boyhood: string, boxes, nests, ghosts, kisses, flying, bubbles, balloons, breath, air, eggs, eyes, mouths. And from these she stitches a complex psychological tapestry. There are times when the book disappears down Theory holes (Kristeva) but for most of the time this is a rapturous, inspired, poetical book.

Mavor loves the psychology and philosophy of images, as much as Bachelard, and the greatest virtue of this book is its copious illustration from art which spin her ideas into many visual fields. One simple but fine textual idea in the book is that every art work referenced appears in blue lettering so that a reader can see where text and visual fields link.

Really, there should be a companion volume, Reading Girlishly, one that examines the father-daughter bond with the same intensity and wonder as this brilliant exploration of boyhood and its links to the creative imagination.

[Elias Bahrami · Rating 5 out of 5]

بالاخره تموم شد.
اولین کتاب غیرداستانی که به انگلیسی خوندم و البته با این حجمش، قورباغه‌ای بود که قورت دادم و ایشالا زین پس کتاب‌های دیگه غیرداستانی انگلیسی هم بخونم.
البته هنوز کارم با این تموم نشده.

[W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began this book after attending a conference where Carol Mavor presented a paper on photography and was immediately captivated by her theatrical abilities - which are even carried through in her book. I felt it a bit of a challenge simply because I was not familiar with the works of Proust, Barrie and Lartigue so I felt that was a bit of a barrier. I stopped it in hope to catch up with the rest and then venture into Mavor land.

[wiwi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads like (in spirit of all the food references mavor makes) a sponge cake filled with a marmalade too sweet and crumbs of moist sugar lumps on top. I was looking forward to reading this for a long time, and some of it was still enticing. But in big parts felt tangled up in pretentiousness that got underneath my skin too often.

[Acacia · Rating 3 out of 5]

oh yeah.... it... took me a fewmonths to read this, borrowing it and then returning it and then borrowing it again.......... and at first didn't know really what i was reading, but then i think i got it..

[Melody Puller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a beautiful book in many respects, exploring the relationships of mothers and sons, exploring time lost and found...scraps, strings, and wings sewn together to make something wonderful.