'but the keynote of grotesquery, the prose’s rotten bouquet of all the excretions, sebum and semen and shit, tend to provoke another question entirely: in this waste land, this fecal screen kingdom, where shall the soul be found?'
On the Girardian reading of Gasda, I was lucky enough to catch the final production of Zoomers this past May which in many ways follows the hellish levels of self-consciousness you adduced in Dimes Square, but which ends with a character dropping the needle on Dylan's "Precious Angel." Not to dumb down the play's acute psychological observations and handling of class dynamics (and I happily admit I only have a dim memory of the whole contour of the performance), but it did very much feel like a dramatic rehearsal of the Girardian escape through Christianity. Though, like Paglia noting Whitman's tyrannic eye, I should say that Dylan's song (as great as it is, and certainly even better for this tension) is a desperate plea for salvation from his heavenly paramour as if he were forcing himself towards salvation and not passively giving himself up on the cross. I suppose it's more or less often the case that when artists want to appear at their most self-abnegating is when they are most obtrusive.
More importantly, and on the topic of "review," I recently read Matthew Arnold's essay on Byron and I think you've admirably performed here what he considers the critic's most important role: "Surely the critic who does most for his author is the critic who gains readers for his author himself, not for any lucubrations on his author; —gains more readers for him, and enables those readers to read him with more admiration."
Thank you! Generally agreed on the self-abnegation, but it is a lot easier, formally speaking, for a novelist, who doesn't have to stage himself in the process of abnegating the self, as a lyric poet like Whitman (or Dylan) does. The critique of the underlying will to power still applies, I'm sure—maybe applies even more because the novelist can hide behind the novel—but that critique always applies one way or the other, and one writes all the same!
I don’t think you would particularly enjoy Robert Musil, but you should give him a try at least! The man without qualities (the parts of it I’ve read at least is lament/joke about the evacuation of meaning in modernity in a style I don’t think you especially care for: I think his closest American equivalent is probably Gaddis, although Musil is more ironic, not as indignant about the deformations of commerce. I think Gaddis in a characteristically American way still believed in that which had nominally been disproven, whereas I’m not really sure Musil believed in anything, though I haven’t read the door stopping biography I’m sure exists. Still, give it a try-the ironic nihilism of the book, the fact that we know the campaign will fail, that the entire world will be destroyed by the world war, lends the book a quality of almost bemused cosmic horror that should be experienced!
I will definitely give him a try! I don't think I will enjoy him either, but I'm open to it. I also need to read Gaddis beyond his last, short novel...
Yeah I *really* think you’ll dislike The Recognitions, but im also very curious to see what you make of it. Both the American answer to Ulysses and somehow its opoosite in terms of attitudes toward modernity.
I was dismayed when philosopher-provocateur Agnes Callard wrote recently that TMWQ is to be interpreted as a warning about the hollowness and futility of a life lived with a roving, aphoristic consciousness like Ulrich's—and here I had been impressed that Musil, seemingly alone, had captured what feels like real consciousness as it is lived! But maybe it's the fault of the times, and not ourselves, the times having no compelling philosophical or political structure with which to ground thought. Maybe America has finally reached that level of hollowness and wastedness that had come to Austria-Hungary already by 1913! Although Musil makes it seem not half-bad, at least far superior to the fascistic grand narratives that followed. Hopefully we can just dwell in the aphoristic murk for a while.
Yeah, there's an early chapter in TMWQ called "If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility" or something like that, and in a certain sense the book is an exploration of that fact. Also the paradox that Ulrich actually has plenty of qualities (BTW a better translation of "Eigenschaften" would be "characteristics"), but they all seem to blend into each other, creating a sense of paralysis.
Just imagining Bloom's grumbling when reading that Sleepers takedown in Paglia's dissertation...
'but the keynote of grotesquery, the prose’s rotten bouquet of all the excretions, sebum and semen and shit, tend to provoke another question entirely: in this waste land, this fecal screen kingdom, where shall the soul be found?'
Great lines.
Thank you!
On the Girardian reading of Gasda, I was lucky enough to catch the final production of Zoomers this past May which in many ways follows the hellish levels of self-consciousness you adduced in Dimes Square, but which ends with a character dropping the needle on Dylan's "Precious Angel." Not to dumb down the play's acute psychological observations and handling of class dynamics (and I happily admit I only have a dim memory of the whole contour of the performance), but it did very much feel like a dramatic rehearsal of the Girardian escape through Christianity. Though, like Paglia noting Whitman's tyrannic eye, I should say that Dylan's song (as great as it is, and certainly even better for this tension) is a desperate plea for salvation from his heavenly paramour as if he were forcing himself towards salvation and not passively giving himself up on the cross. I suppose it's more or less often the case that when artists want to appear at their most self-abnegating is when they are most obtrusive.
More importantly, and on the topic of "review," I recently read Matthew Arnold's essay on Byron and I think you've admirably performed here what he considers the critic's most important role: "Surely the critic who does most for his author is the critic who gains readers for his author himself, not for any lucubrations on his author; —gains more readers for him, and enables those readers to read him with more admiration."
Thank you! Generally agreed on the self-abnegation, but it is a lot easier, formally speaking, for a novelist, who doesn't have to stage himself in the process of abnegating the self, as a lyric poet like Whitman (or Dylan) does. The critique of the underlying will to power still applies, I'm sure—maybe applies even more because the novelist can hide behind the novel—but that critique always applies one way or the other, and one writes all the same!
I don’t think you would particularly enjoy Robert Musil, but you should give him a try at least! The man without qualities (the parts of it I’ve read at least is lament/joke about the evacuation of meaning in modernity in a style I don’t think you especially care for: I think his closest American equivalent is probably Gaddis, although Musil is more ironic, not as indignant about the deformations of commerce. I think Gaddis in a characteristically American way still believed in that which had nominally been disproven, whereas I’m not really sure Musil believed in anything, though I haven’t read the door stopping biography I’m sure exists. Still, give it a try-the ironic nihilism of the book, the fact that we know the campaign will fail, that the entire world will be destroyed by the world war, lends the book a quality of almost bemused cosmic horror that should be experienced!
I will definitely give him a try! I don't think I will enjoy him either, but I'm open to it. I also need to read Gaddis beyond his last, short novel...
Yeah I *really* think you’ll dislike The Recognitions, but im also very curious to see what you make of it. Both the American answer to Ulysses and somehow its opoosite in terms of attitudes toward modernity.
I was dismayed when philosopher-provocateur Agnes Callard wrote recently that TMWQ is to be interpreted as a warning about the hollowness and futility of a life lived with a roving, aphoristic consciousness like Ulrich's—and here I had been impressed that Musil, seemingly alone, had captured what feels like real consciousness as it is lived! But maybe it's the fault of the times, and not ourselves, the times having no compelling philosophical or political structure with which to ground thought. Maybe America has finally reached that level of hollowness and wastedness that had come to Austria-Hungary already by 1913! Although Musil makes it seem not half-bad, at least far superior to the fascistic grand narratives that followed. Hopefully we can just dwell in the aphoristic murk for a while.
Yeah, there's an early chapter in TMWQ called "If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility" or something like that, and in a certain sense the book is an exploration of that fact. Also the paradox that Ulrich actually has plenty of qualities (BTW a better translation of "Eigenschaften" would be "characteristics"), but they all seem to blend into each other, creating a sense of paralysis.