I think it’s fair to take old Anton to task for a kind of severity and double-minded “reformist” provincial/cosmopolitan exhaustion with his subjects, who were some of the last real feudal people in “Europe” (I think it’s hard for us to imagine just how much so). But the end of “The Kiss” should dispel any notion that he didn’t know exactly what grubby little impulses make us tick. (Incidentally “The Duel” is probably my favorite true novella.)
Yes, that sounds right. Fitting that George Saunders, who has approximately the same relation to "MAGA country," dotes on him in that recent Russian short story book, not to put them on the same level. "True novella"—as opposed to? I really liked it, but may have read it too late and wouldn't personally put it above Death in Venice, The Metamorphosis, The Dead, Heart of Darkness, Billy Budd...
Fuck Saunders. The dander of propriety that lands on Chekhov is undeserved (include Wood in this). I haven’t yet read Billy Budd, but hell, why not a whole post & thread about what constitutes a novella? (Metamorphosis, yes; Heart of Darkness, no -- I’m unsure why?)
Okay: submitting that “true” novellas include only very minor changes of scene (excludes Heart of Darkness?). The Dead is one evening; The Metamorphosis is one apartment and two or three weeks? The Duel is also, what, two weeks at a seaside spot? (Are they in fact in Crimea?)
On novellas, I will have to think about it; it's a strange category, traditionally said to encompass anywhere between 10K and 50K words, pending one's use of other or intermediate categories like novelette, nouvelle, short novel, or long short story. The Metamorphosis is just a good deal shorter than Heart of Darkness, almost half the length, even though both could be called novellas; the former has the feel of an expanded modern folktale and grotesque stage tragicomedy, the latter of a compressed epic (with all the implied scene changes). I thought of one of my own novellas, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, pretty much as a play or screenplay given the dialogues in a confined space; another one, Right Between the Eyes, though less than half the length of Quarantine, seems to me more like a very dense and compacted novel narrating several whole life stories.
Going to meditate on this. (Btw I’m immensely enjoying Major Arcana; intending to go back to the PDFs you shared). When the parameters get expansive I have to throw in Giovanni’s Room, Revolutionary Road, and William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow.
Thank you! Re: the three you've listed (never read the Maxwell) I think I wondered somewhere why we don't have a whole list of graduated length categories for fiction running from Kafka's half-page parables to War and Peace. (Though once we get into multiple Proustian volumes, we do find another length category in the roman-fleuve.)
Your comment about the easy middlebrow morality of Mitchell speaks maybe a little to why as I’ve said somewhere else he’s the only major author of this century I’m constantly forget if I’ve read or not (I’m pretty sure I read Cloud Atlas at a more impressionable age, but I’m just not quite sure, which *never* happens to me)
I go through periods of interest in him, which then inevitably wane. He seems to have every gift, to be the ultimate writer, the ultra-novelist at the end of the form's history, and yet there's something missing, and I want to know what that thing is (or at least to name it more reasonably than "lack of the daemon" or something).
I think “lack of daemon” is probably fair, but by all means go on if you think there’s something more you can hold and examine for the rest of us! I keep meaning to go back and reread, but there’s always something “better” I haven’t read. It’s like Knausgård, he sounds somewhat interesting someday, but not when the rest of Proust, Joseph and his brothers, Man without Qualities and even that one mammoth Uwe Johnson novel that escapes me remain unread!
Maybe it's that in trying to do everything, and even succeeding, he has done nothing in particular. "Mitchellian" is the name of a narrative gimmick but not a sensibility. I still like it better than "wan little husks of autofiction." Speaking of, Knausgård isn't terrible, isn't great; I only read the first volume but didn't have a burning desire to read more. (Then again I also only read the first volume of Proust.)
What I’ve read of Proust (the first two volumes) at least makes me want to read the rest! There’s an almost psychedelic quality in the granularity of it I think. I’ve never read Knausgård, although I enjoyed your review of the first volume-both perhaps a little overhated and an absolutely convincing explanation for why he was such a phenomenon for a whole there.
I don’t think it’s terribly complicated. Mitchell is a ChatGPT of 20th century conventions. No one complains about the quality of a cocktail on an airplane, because, what do you expect? Take small luxuries where you can get them. I will refrain from Bolaño-talk in this exchange, but as an aging millennial, it does seem that “aughts” fiction in the Anglosphere was very “late empire” and it begat or was already turning into autofiction (and Mitchell is a sort of outlier, but John also wrote once about the future-dystopic mode being the other side of autofiction). A brilliant incision, I thought at the time, and still think.
Thank you, I dimly remember saying that; my point, I think, was the rush in opposite directions away from the middle ground of realistic imagined fiction (as in Chekhov). It occurs to me that a figure comparable to Mitchell but more successful—not ChatGPT but the genuine Aleph—is of course Alan Moore. As for Bolaño, everything said in raptures about Knausgård is more truly said of him.
On the prophet as "a fount of literature," I'll add the example of Ezekiel (which you're likely already reading, as it immediately follows Lamentations): the visions he receives upon being called into his prophetic office are surely a fountain. I'm thinking of "the likeness of the glory of the Lord," flanked by the winged four-faced creatures. This sight is the fountain of his obedience as a prophet, but also one that flows with divine madness of an alien holiness.
The creatures and the cries and the windstorm and the flames are close in their inhuman strangeness to the requests God makes of Ezekiel: the 390 days of lying with a symbolic brick upon his body, the baking of "defiled" food with cow dung in Israel's sight, and certainly the eating of the scroll in his vision. More so than Jeremiah, Ezekiel seems to have an aesthetic of madness as part of his prophecy.
Thanks! Yes, I'm in the middle of Ezekiel now, and it's much more my style, as well being the fount-like source of a number of things I've already read in Dante, Spenser, Blake, Shelley.
Curious - first meeting biblical imagery among its (combative) literary children. It supports the idea that the Bible is a seminal text for Western literature, but I wonder about the longevity of the idea - do you think it survived into 21st-century literature? I think it might’ve, even as the rest of the perceived “canon” became more suspect, if only because many of today’s novelists still came of age in Christianized or post-Christian settings.
It's not like I didn't have a religious upbringing, even a formal religious education, but my dilemma is encapsulated by the old joke: "Of course I haven't read the Bible—I'm Catholic!" I *have* read a lot of the Bible before, mostly in college religious studies courses, but not all, and missed pretty much all of the prophets until now. (Also, this is my first time with the King James in particular.) I think the Bible is safer than other books from the critique of the canon since it's still the root of three world religions, but my impression is that it's less read than it used to be—certainly fewer people are steeped in it as they were before the 20th century.
I think it’s fair to take old Anton to task for a kind of severity and double-minded “reformist” provincial/cosmopolitan exhaustion with his subjects, who were some of the last real feudal people in “Europe” (I think it’s hard for us to imagine just how much so). But the end of “The Kiss” should dispel any notion that he didn’t know exactly what grubby little impulses make us tick. (Incidentally “The Duel” is probably my favorite true novella.)
Yes, that sounds right. Fitting that George Saunders, who has approximately the same relation to "MAGA country," dotes on him in that recent Russian short story book, not to put them on the same level. "True novella"—as opposed to? I really liked it, but may have read it too late and wouldn't personally put it above Death in Venice, The Metamorphosis, The Dead, Heart of Darkness, Billy Budd...
Fuck Saunders. The dander of propriety that lands on Chekhov is undeserved (include Wood in this). I haven’t yet read Billy Budd, but hell, why not a whole post & thread about what constitutes a novella? (Metamorphosis, yes; Heart of Darkness, no -- I’m unsure why?)
Okay: submitting that “true” novellas include only very minor changes of scene (excludes Heart of Darkness?). The Dead is one evening; The Metamorphosis is one apartment and two or three weeks? The Duel is also, what, two weeks at a seaside spot? (Are they in fact in Crimea?)
On novellas, I will have to think about it; it's a strange category, traditionally said to encompass anywhere between 10K and 50K words, pending one's use of other or intermediate categories like novelette, nouvelle, short novel, or long short story. The Metamorphosis is just a good deal shorter than Heart of Darkness, almost half the length, even though both could be called novellas; the former has the feel of an expanded modern folktale and grotesque stage tragicomedy, the latter of a compressed epic (with all the implied scene changes). I thought of one of my own novellas, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, pretty much as a play or screenplay given the dialogues in a confined space; another one, Right Between the Eyes, though less than half the length of Quarantine, seems to me more like a very dense and compacted novel narrating several whole life stories.
Going to meditate on this. (Btw I’m immensely enjoying Major Arcana; intending to go back to the PDFs you shared). When the parameters get expansive I have to throw in Giovanni’s Room, Revolutionary Road, and William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow.
Thank you! Re: the three you've listed (never read the Maxwell) I think I wondered somewhere why we don't have a whole list of graduated length categories for fiction running from Kafka's half-page parables to War and Peace. (Though once we get into multiple Proustian volumes, we do find another length category in the roman-fleuve.)
Your comment about the easy middlebrow morality of Mitchell speaks maybe a little to why as I’ve said somewhere else he’s the only major author of this century I’m constantly forget if I’ve read or not (I’m pretty sure I read Cloud Atlas at a more impressionable age, but I’m just not quite sure, which *never* happens to me)
I go through periods of interest in him, which then inevitably wane. He seems to have every gift, to be the ultimate writer, the ultra-novelist at the end of the form's history, and yet there's something missing, and I want to know what that thing is (or at least to name it more reasonably than "lack of the daemon" or something).
I think “lack of daemon” is probably fair, but by all means go on if you think there’s something more you can hold and examine for the rest of us! I keep meaning to go back and reread, but there’s always something “better” I haven’t read. It’s like Knausgård, he sounds somewhat interesting someday, but not when the rest of Proust, Joseph and his brothers, Man without Qualities and even that one mammoth Uwe Johnson novel that escapes me remain unread!
Maybe it's that in trying to do everything, and even succeeding, he has done nothing in particular. "Mitchellian" is the name of a narrative gimmick but not a sensibility. I still like it better than "wan little husks of autofiction." Speaking of, Knausgård isn't terrible, isn't great; I only read the first volume but didn't have a burning desire to read more. (Then again I also only read the first volume of Proust.)
What I’ve read of Proust (the first two volumes) at least makes me want to read the rest! There’s an almost psychedelic quality in the granularity of it I think. I’ve never read Knausgård, although I enjoyed your review of the first volume-both perhaps a little overhated and an absolutely convincing explanation for why he was such a phenomenon for a whole there.
I don’t think it’s terribly complicated. Mitchell is a ChatGPT of 20th century conventions. No one complains about the quality of a cocktail on an airplane, because, what do you expect? Take small luxuries where you can get them. I will refrain from Bolaño-talk in this exchange, but as an aging millennial, it does seem that “aughts” fiction in the Anglosphere was very “late empire” and it begat or was already turning into autofiction (and Mitchell is a sort of outlier, but John also wrote once about the future-dystopic mode being the other side of autofiction). A brilliant incision, I thought at the time, and still think.
Thank you, I dimly remember saying that; my point, I think, was the rush in opposite directions away from the middle ground of realistic imagined fiction (as in Chekhov). It occurs to me that a figure comparable to Mitchell but more successful—not ChatGPT but the genuine Aleph—is of course Alan Moore. As for Bolaño, everything said in raptures about Knausgård is more truly said of him.
On the prophet as "a fount of literature," I'll add the example of Ezekiel (which you're likely already reading, as it immediately follows Lamentations): the visions he receives upon being called into his prophetic office are surely a fountain. I'm thinking of "the likeness of the glory of the Lord," flanked by the winged four-faced creatures. This sight is the fountain of his obedience as a prophet, but also one that flows with divine madness of an alien holiness.
The creatures and the cries and the windstorm and the flames are close in their inhuman strangeness to the requests God makes of Ezekiel: the 390 days of lying with a symbolic brick upon his body, the baking of "defiled" food with cow dung in Israel's sight, and certainly the eating of the scroll in his vision. More so than Jeremiah, Ezekiel seems to have an aesthetic of madness as part of his prophecy.
Thanks! Yes, I'm in the middle of Ezekiel now, and it's much more my style, as well being the fount-like source of a number of things I've already read in Dante, Spenser, Blake, Shelley.
Curious - first meeting biblical imagery among its (combative) literary children. It supports the idea that the Bible is a seminal text for Western literature, but I wonder about the longevity of the idea - do you think it survived into 21st-century literature? I think it might’ve, even as the rest of the perceived “canon” became more suspect, if only because many of today’s novelists still came of age in Christianized or post-Christian settings.
It's not like I didn't have a religious upbringing, even a formal religious education, but my dilemma is encapsulated by the old joke: "Of course I haven't read the Bible—I'm Catholic!" I *have* read a lot of the Bible before, mostly in college religious studies courses, but not all, and missed pretty much all of the prophets until now. (Also, this is my first time with the King James in particular.) I think the Bible is safer than other books from the critique of the canon since it's still the root of three world religions, but my impression is that it's less read than it used to be—certainly fewer people are steeped in it as they were before the 20th century.