I would be fine reading The Secret Agent rather than HoD for the fourth or so time, but I get the argument against it! Probably agree with the ego stuff although it can be tiresome outside of the work itself in interviews etc. if you don’t think you’re in dialogue with the greats, better than this that or the other, why write literary fiction or poetry?
My reasoning is: the Conrad novel follows three weeks of plays and poetry (the plays are like two hours and can be watched on YouTube) so there's time for a longer book *and* The Secret Agent, while longer than HoD, is probably quicker and more fun to read.
Agreed that it could become tiresome; I'm mainly arguing against performances of humility, not in favor of constant boasting.
I am very fond of your not very humble authorial pose. I think if you're self-publishing then it's necessary to not be humble. To self-publish is to insist that mainstream sources of value are corrupt and shouldn't be listened to. But in the self-publishing world there really are no critics who can do the work of telling everyone how great you are. You can't afford to not be rhetorically serious about your work. Whether it's right or wrong, noble or ignoble, is immaterial. You either tell people it's worth reading, or they don't read it.
Auto fiction seems to be the dominant mode in Europe for the last 50 years at least. I'm glad that we are hopefully going to avoid that path. Here it's never really become that juggernaut that it is in, say, France. I think American literary fiction is much more commercial than high literature in most places, either that or our high taste is much more democratic. The result is almost nothing with ambition gets published, but least there remains some vestigial attachment to the concept of entertaining the reader.
Thank you! And a few of the non-humble people I mentioned were self- or independent published too. That's also the impression I get about American literary fiction (probably British as well), and I think it probably does have to do with a democratic ethos. Despite the fact that Emerson himself said novels would be replaced by personal narratives in America because of our individualism—this is quoted as the epigraph to Tropic of Cancer, which I never finished!—it seems more aristocratic than democratic to assume one's own life is of some inarguable interest to anyone else. I mean, my work, after all that strenuous critical labor on my own part, is also pretty commercial.
I know, your work is! It's so emblematic of contemporary America that a certain type of pretty-commercial, pretty-enjoyable, potentially-very-mainstream novel has to go underground! Like if you went to a rave and everyone was drinking tea and listening to Mozart. The alt-lit world is, if anything, tediously European in its insistence on autofiction (every book Semiotexte publishes, for instance, is essentially a Jenny Ofill novel). But it's hard to see what other tack they can take: not sure any small press can make "this is a lot like a mainstream literary novel, but actually good" work for them, although Graywolf and Grove seem to be making a decent go at it.
I've read The Scarlet Letter (spurred on by having my, as you once said, "doors blown off" by The Marble Faun) and keep intending to get to Blithedale next, so I feel as if I'm being personally pampered by this curriculum change.
Would be nice to get beyond Heart of Darkness for the Conrad slot!
I would be fine reading The Secret Agent rather than HoD for the fourth or so time, but I get the argument against it! Probably agree with the ego stuff although it can be tiresome outside of the work itself in interviews etc. if you don’t think you’re in dialogue with the greats, better than this that or the other, why write literary fiction or poetry?
My reasoning is: the Conrad novel follows three weeks of plays and poetry (the plays are like two hours and can be watched on YouTube) so there's time for a longer book *and* The Secret Agent, while longer than HoD, is probably quicker and more fun to read.
Agreed that it could become tiresome; I'm mainly arguing against performances of humility, not in favor of constant boasting.
I am very fond of your not very humble authorial pose. I think if you're self-publishing then it's necessary to not be humble. To self-publish is to insist that mainstream sources of value are corrupt and shouldn't be listened to. But in the self-publishing world there really are no critics who can do the work of telling everyone how great you are. You can't afford to not be rhetorically serious about your work. Whether it's right or wrong, noble or ignoble, is immaterial. You either tell people it's worth reading, or they don't read it.
Auto fiction seems to be the dominant mode in Europe for the last 50 years at least. I'm glad that we are hopefully going to avoid that path. Here it's never really become that juggernaut that it is in, say, France. I think American literary fiction is much more commercial than high literature in most places, either that or our high taste is much more democratic. The result is almost nothing with ambition gets published, but least there remains some vestigial attachment to the concept of entertaining the reader.
Thank you! And a few of the non-humble people I mentioned were self- or independent published too. That's also the impression I get about American literary fiction (probably British as well), and I think it probably does have to do with a democratic ethos. Despite the fact that Emerson himself said novels would be replaced by personal narratives in America because of our individualism—this is quoted as the epigraph to Tropic of Cancer, which I never finished!—it seems more aristocratic than democratic to assume one's own life is of some inarguable interest to anyone else. I mean, my work, after all that strenuous critical labor on my own part, is also pretty commercial.
I know, your work is! It's so emblematic of contemporary America that a certain type of pretty-commercial, pretty-enjoyable, potentially-very-mainstream novel has to go underground! Like if you went to a rave and everyone was drinking tea and listening to Mozart. The alt-lit world is, if anything, tediously European in its insistence on autofiction (every book Semiotexte publishes, for instance, is essentially a Jenny Ofill novel). But it's hard to see what other tack they can take: not sure any small press can make "this is a lot like a mainstream literary novel, but actually good" work for them, although Graywolf and Grove seem to be making a decent go at it.
Tweeting little complaints about one's critics feels very low-stakes. Either banish them from your mind, or threaten to kill them.
"You want a squirrel? I'll show you a squirrel—I'll chew through your fucking face!"
I've read The Scarlet Letter (spurred on by having my, as you once said, "doors blown off" by The Marble Faun) and keep intending to get to Blithedale next, so I feel as if I'm being personally pampered by this curriculum change.
Excellent! This further emboldens me.