I'm not one for programmatic positive statements about how the novel (or anything) should be, but I do after all agree with Peck at least on avoiding both certain strands of 'experiment' (which are usually played out anyway--eg, my making fun of NYRB Classics too-late-modernism and Robert Gluck's post-avant-gardism) and flat stale 'verite'-y realism. Through Barthes and Kristeva, I've been lately reading Bakhtin on the novel and find a lot that I like about his vision of fiction as richly multiple in its comedic play of multiple voices--which, crucially, does not equate to 'ambivalence' or 'irony' in a distancing mode, but rather of being plunged into participation in the various irreconcilable sociolects and little languages that make up our tradition and our present. Which is how at least Ulysses had read to me when I looked at it 15 years ago (although perhaps revisited now it would look otherwise). Of course, Bakhtin liked Dostoevsky and Rabelais, who fall totally flat for me (the latter reminds me of Bellow, who I also can't stand!).
I'd want to distinguish a bad modernism/postmodernism that sets the world's discourses in quotation marks to perform a sterile knowing mastery (the voice of Twitter/Oyler) and a good, carnivalesque one that cites and stylizes itself through available rhetorics rather the way we would take roles in a game, to play them, to have sincere fun. Although the line between the two is perhaps just a way of distinguishing the enjoyable from the unenjoyable rather than a real principle of distinction...
I loved Barth and Barthelme in high school and have only reread the latter since, but it's surprising to me that things like the Balloon Man story don't appeal to you! I find him vitalizingly silly when he's not (as in Snow White) getting a bit too up his butt on second-hand ideas about 'language' and the 'collapse of meaning.' Barth in stories like 'Night-Sea Voyage' or in Gilles Goat-Boy is having the sort of fun Woody Allen does in the sketches of 'Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex...'--I'd rather read him than Pynchon (Sotweed Factor over Mason and Dixon) or Delillo (I've only attempted Cosmopolis and Mao II and couldn't get anywhere in either)... but, as per my Dostoevsky comment, there may just be something characterological at work.
I'm not sure what you mean by Flaubertian hauteur--who can read Bovary or the Three Stories with a dry eye?! He was the master of the sentence but also of pathos. One could do a lot worse than having him as 'true Penelope'...
My programatic positive statements, because I make so many of them and because they contradict each other, "must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel," as Barthes said.
Definitely something characterological at work, because I agree with the substance of everything you've said, including your Bakhtinian understanding of Joyce, and your observation on the difference between "participation" and distanced irony is just how I grasp the novel as a form too—and yet I love Dostoevsky, Bellow, and DeLillo! I don't do well with silliness somehow. I prefer DeLillo's wryness or Dostoevsky's hysteria as modes of the comic.
(I do like Flaubert too, though: "Flaubertian hauteur" was free indirect discourse, how Lawrence thought of the matter, that Flaubert stands apart in sickly superiority from characters he maliciously keeps small, similar to your characterization of irony—these ideas are in DHL's essays on Thomas Mann and Giovanni Verga—but you're totally right about the Flaubertian pathos too, invisible to Lawrence in his preference for a rhetoric of intensity.)
I admit I haven't read Lawrence's critical writings (and only 2 of his novels--I like the nature descriptions in Sons and Lovers but that's it), but he's interestingly off-base about Flaubert, who is really a master of imitating different kinds of talk-- blather about politics in Sentimental Education, hicklib autodidact retardation in Bouvard and Pecuchet, etc--while also being capable, as Hickey says in that great essay about the parrot in A Simple Heart, of thrillingly tender humanity.
Lawrence makes me think of this pseudo-Whitman/Blake vatic bathos ( https://poets.org/poem/whales-weep-not ) so I can see why he might not appreciate the combination of the mot juste and real (not even under-stated, unless you've, like Lawrence, made yourself deaf from your own screaming) sentimentality. Compared to the humping whales, maybe, Charles Bovary or Felicty the maid seem small... but hard for me to think Flaubert is exercising anything like superiority over them. And indeed there's much intensity in the ecstatic parrot scene, or the gladiatorial combats and infant sacrifices of the Carthage novel, or the Temptation of St Anthony...
Flaubert is really like Baudelaire in his combination of technical perfection and sometimes lurid purple extravaganza. Or indeed Yeats, whom you and Paul are making me want to reread--and who likewise not so far from Yvor Winters (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47784/time-and-the-garden), whose remarks against Crane ought not to conceal his own astonishing abilities (and who made it up to gays by shaping Thom Gunn)...
Mostly agreed! Lawrence's power—which I believe is real but intermittent, and genre-irrelevant, flickering on and off in novels, stories, poems, essays—is cumulative rather than in the details or the structure, which I think is also largely true of Whitman and to some extent Melville too. But I agree about Flaubert, Baudelaire, Yeats (or Whitman's equal and opposite, Dickinson, whom Winters championed) making up the other and let's face it more credible tendency of intensity powered by significant form.
Underworld pretty well says the point at several points I think. It’s almost a decoder ring for the whole DeLilloan project imo! (Could be wrong about this, I’ve read less than you have.) I definitely have reservations about early Pynchon, though I’ll be interested to see what you make of his later, more humanist work- & the rumor is that PTA’s next film is a Vineland adaptation.
Yes, not to mention Murray's monologues in White Noise! DeLillo and Lawrence have nothing in common except characters saying the themes at each other. I think my favorite Pynchons of the ones I read were actually the first two, V. and CL49. I thought Gravity's Rainbow was just more rebarbative than the theme required. Inherent Vice, by contrast, seemed unserious to me. I've heard Mason & Dixon is where it's at.
I love V and CL49, although I think the “human” and “historical” sides of V aren’t well integrated. Probably don’t disagree that Inherent Vice isn’t as serious but I would go as far as you do in your review. M&D is very probably his other great masterpiece, although the language can take some getting used to. Vineland is a must-read too though, it’s his equivalent of something like Underworld, American Pastoral or Paradise-a sort of backward-looking partial mea culpa for youthful indiscretions.
I'm not one for programmatic positive statements about how the novel (or anything) should be, but I do after all agree with Peck at least on avoiding both certain strands of 'experiment' (which are usually played out anyway--eg, my making fun of NYRB Classics too-late-modernism and Robert Gluck's post-avant-gardism) and flat stale 'verite'-y realism. Through Barthes and Kristeva, I've been lately reading Bakhtin on the novel and find a lot that I like about his vision of fiction as richly multiple in its comedic play of multiple voices--which, crucially, does not equate to 'ambivalence' or 'irony' in a distancing mode, but rather of being plunged into participation in the various irreconcilable sociolects and little languages that make up our tradition and our present. Which is how at least Ulysses had read to me when I looked at it 15 years ago (although perhaps revisited now it would look otherwise). Of course, Bakhtin liked Dostoevsky and Rabelais, who fall totally flat for me (the latter reminds me of Bellow, who I also can't stand!).
I'd want to distinguish a bad modernism/postmodernism that sets the world's discourses in quotation marks to perform a sterile knowing mastery (the voice of Twitter/Oyler) and a good, carnivalesque one that cites and stylizes itself through available rhetorics rather the way we would take roles in a game, to play them, to have sincere fun. Although the line between the two is perhaps just a way of distinguishing the enjoyable from the unenjoyable rather than a real principle of distinction...
I loved Barth and Barthelme in high school and have only reread the latter since, but it's surprising to me that things like the Balloon Man story don't appeal to you! I find him vitalizingly silly when he's not (as in Snow White) getting a bit too up his butt on second-hand ideas about 'language' and the 'collapse of meaning.' Barth in stories like 'Night-Sea Voyage' or in Gilles Goat-Boy is having the sort of fun Woody Allen does in the sketches of 'Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex...'--I'd rather read him than Pynchon (Sotweed Factor over Mason and Dixon) or Delillo (I've only attempted Cosmopolis and Mao II and couldn't get anywhere in either)... but, as per my Dostoevsky comment, there may just be something characterological at work.
I'm not sure what you mean by Flaubertian hauteur--who can read Bovary or the Three Stories with a dry eye?! He was the master of the sentence but also of pathos. One could do a lot worse than having him as 'true Penelope'...
My programatic positive statements, because I make so many of them and because they contradict each other, "must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel," as Barthes said.
Definitely something characterological at work, because I agree with the substance of everything you've said, including your Bakhtinian understanding of Joyce, and your observation on the difference between "participation" and distanced irony is just how I grasp the novel as a form too—and yet I love Dostoevsky, Bellow, and DeLillo! I don't do well with silliness somehow. I prefer DeLillo's wryness or Dostoevsky's hysteria as modes of the comic.
(I do like Flaubert too, though: "Flaubertian hauteur" was free indirect discourse, how Lawrence thought of the matter, that Flaubert stands apart in sickly superiority from characters he maliciously keeps small, similar to your characterization of irony—these ideas are in DHL's essays on Thomas Mann and Giovanni Verga—but you're totally right about the Flaubertian pathos too, invisible to Lawrence in his preference for a rhetoric of intensity.)
I admit I haven't read Lawrence's critical writings (and only 2 of his novels--I like the nature descriptions in Sons and Lovers but that's it), but he's interestingly off-base about Flaubert, who is really a master of imitating different kinds of talk-- blather about politics in Sentimental Education, hicklib autodidact retardation in Bouvard and Pecuchet, etc--while also being capable, as Hickey says in that great essay about the parrot in A Simple Heart, of thrillingly tender humanity.
Lawrence makes me think of this pseudo-Whitman/Blake vatic bathos ( https://poets.org/poem/whales-weep-not ) so I can see why he might not appreciate the combination of the mot juste and real (not even under-stated, unless you've, like Lawrence, made yourself deaf from your own screaming) sentimentality. Compared to the humping whales, maybe, Charles Bovary or Felicty the maid seem small... but hard for me to think Flaubert is exercising anything like superiority over them. And indeed there's much intensity in the ecstatic parrot scene, or the gladiatorial combats and infant sacrifices of the Carthage novel, or the Temptation of St Anthony...
Flaubert is really like Baudelaire in his combination of technical perfection and sometimes lurid purple extravaganza. Or indeed Yeats, whom you and Paul are making me want to reread--and who likewise not so far from Yvor Winters (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47784/time-and-the-garden), whose remarks against Crane ought not to conceal his own astonishing abilities (and who made it up to gays by shaping Thom Gunn)...
Mostly agreed! Lawrence's power—which I believe is real but intermittent, and genre-irrelevant, flickering on and off in novels, stories, poems, essays—is cumulative rather than in the details or the structure, which I think is also largely true of Whitman and to some extent Melville too. But I agree about Flaubert, Baudelaire, Yeats (or Whitman's equal and opposite, Dickinson, whom Winters championed) making up the other and let's face it more credible tendency of intensity powered by significant form.
Underworld pretty well says the point at several points I think. It’s almost a decoder ring for the whole DeLilloan project imo! (Could be wrong about this, I’ve read less than you have.) I definitely have reservations about early Pynchon, though I’ll be interested to see what you make of his later, more humanist work- & the rumor is that PTA’s next film is a Vineland adaptation.
Yes, not to mention Murray's monologues in White Noise! DeLillo and Lawrence have nothing in common except characters saying the themes at each other. I think my favorite Pynchons of the ones I read were actually the first two, V. and CL49. I thought Gravity's Rainbow was just more rebarbative than the theme required. Inherent Vice, by contrast, seemed unserious to me. I've heard Mason & Dixon is where it's at.
I love V and CL49, although I think the “human” and “historical” sides of V aren’t well integrated. Probably don’t disagree that Inherent Vice isn’t as serious but I would go as far as you do in your review. M&D is very probably his other great masterpiece, although the language can take some getting used to. Vineland is a must-read too though, it’s his equivalent of something like Underworld, American Pastoral or Paradise-a sort of backward-looking partial mea culpa for youthful indiscretions.