Reading Boyishly

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

Carol Mavor

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780822339625, 9780822338864
• eBook ISBN: 9780822397779
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Anorectic Hedonism: A Reader’s Guide to Reading Boyishly; Novel or a Philosophical Study? Am I a Novelist?
• One. My Book Has a Disease
• Two. Winnicott’s ABCs and String Boy
• Three. Splitting: The Unmaking of Childhood and Home
• Four. Pulling Ribbons from Mouths: Roland Barthes’s Umbilical Referent
• Five. Nesting: The Boyish Labor of J. M. Barrie
• Six. Childhood Swallows: Lartigue, Proust, and a Little Wilde
• Seven. Mouth Wide Open for Proust: “A Sort of Puberty of Sorrow”
• Eight. Soufflé/Souffle
• Nine. Kissing Time
• Ten. Beautiful, Boring, and Blue: The Fullness of Proust’s Search and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman
• Conclusion. Boys: “To Think a Part of One’s Body”
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Index