Appreciate the response to my 'pro' side of the MFA discussion in the Republic of Letters. The adverb thing irked people the most. When I say "I'm especially hard on my adverbs," I'm just saying I pay a lot of attention to them. Is this the right move? Could this be better? I recently took another pass editing a story of mine and found three adverbs within a single short paragraph, looked them over, and thought, Keep!, and moved on. I liked the rhythm of the paragraph. Getting rid of those adverbs would've betrayed that rhythm.
I'm very in the middle on these things. I learned a lot from Carver, but I learned a lot from Faulkner. (I think the strict adherence to a single POV maxim is absurd.)
Thanks! And sorry I had to use your piece as the straw man for my weekly content creation. That's all reasonable. I totally, completely, utterly agree that adverbs should be cut if (for example) they're meaningless intensifiers, whereas other times they add rhythm or color.
But how can you be so wrong about The Ambassadors!? It is one thing to blame Alice Munro's well-structured short stories for MFA stuff, but is poor Henry James to blame for the restricted third person POV they evidently teach people? You can't reduce him to the techniques imitators extract from his books (although he's unfair to the Russians etc. but everybody's unfair).
Strether isn't a passive sensorium, his sense of himself as a moral and aesthetic being depends on Chad and Madame de Vionnet, and theirs comes to depend on him. He does act, giving up two chances at marriage in order to protect their strange three-sided relationship (of which Chad proves unworthy), above all for Mme. de V.: how could he marry Maria Gostrey when he's truly in love with her!
Well, you said it, "his sense of himself," which is all we get from the book! (And only one sense is really involved: vision.) I revere James, I agree it's a fascinating sensibility, a version of modern sainthood, and I think the whole experiment was worth trying, but I don't like it as much as e.g. Portrait of a Lady, a staging in the round of superficially different but fundamentally similar renunciations (how could she leave Osmond when she truly doesn't love him? etc.). I do think the derivation of systematic third-person limited from late James is the standard genealogy given in literary histories and textbooks, but the blame is with those who make rules, not artists making experiments. On the main question, I have not yet begun to be wrong!
fwiw I feel like an exaggerated focus on James’ technique makes people neglect what he does with it. In particular the way in which moral personalities are almost co-constituting in his late fiction doesn’t really have a parallel in either James’s own earlier fiction or in later work influenced by James.
Solipsism doesn’t loom large in James because although there’s plenty the characters don’t know, it isn’t as if they know their own consciousness or what may be their own illusions better than they know other people.
Personally finding Hergé more interesting than the latest round of MFA discourse, I’ll just note that he lived long enough into the era of postmodernism that it’s possible to look at the last three or so books as attempt to subvert the earlier works, already beating someone like Chris ware to the punch. The last completed book ends following a revolution in a fictional South American country with the same jackbooted thugs from the previous regime in new uniforms patrolling the same favela, Tintin having done nothing more than shuffle the local leadership to be more agreeable to his own survival. Oddly there is a comparison to late James in that if you grew up reading these books the way I did, this means they are to varying extents not that satisfying or good to read as a child, but as art objects to examine at as an adult, they are fascinating
Thanks! I'm familiar in the abstract with Hergé's trajectory, mostly from Tom McCarthy's very entertaining book applying high theory to Tintin, so that makes sense. The critique of the treatment of Native Americans in Tintin in America is pretty acute, but it partakes of noble savagism and "Romantic anti-capitalism" of a kind that makes one nervous in an author of that era, so I feel like outright postmodern cynicism is a step up for him. As I think McCarthy points out, it's the identical ideological itinerary of Paul de Man, and they were both publishing in the same Nazi-occupied Belgian newspaper at the same time during the war.
(I read the first five or six volumes with "research brain" in my 30s because I had to teach a History of Comics class, but for whatever reason I didn't grow up with Tintin, was somehow barely even aware of him until adulthood. I did discover bandes dessinées in my adolescence, but through a stash of Heavy Metal comics—pretty far from Tintin!)
Nonwithstanding the origin of the comic in a far right, almost fascist (the Belgian equivalent of Vidkun Quisling was a colleague) catholic magazine, which yes, is apparent in those first three or four volumes, Hergé seems mostly to have been a kind of very unsophisticated middle class European lib-antifascist in a mostly superficial and sometimes troubling (IE; the depiction of the Japanese as malevolent caricatures in the Blue Lotus) way in the late thirties, very (partly for self interested reasons-he made the mistake of continuing to be published in official channels during the occupation and accusations of collaboration followed him for the rest of his life) anticommunism after the war, but also somewhat reflexively anti-American.
Appreciate the response to my 'pro' side of the MFA discussion in the Republic of Letters. The adverb thing irked people the most. When I say "I'm especially hard on my adverbs," I'm just saying I pay a lot of attention to them. Is this the right move? Could this be better? I recently took another pass editing a story of mine and found three adverbs within a single short paragraph, looked them over, and thought, Keep!, and moved on. I liked the rhythm of the paragraph. Getting rid of those adverbs would've betrayed that rhythm.
I'm very in the middle on these things. I learned a lot from Carver, but I learned a lot from Faulkner. (I think the strict adherence to a single POV maxim is absurd.)
Thanks! And sorry I had to use your piece as the straw man for my weekly content creation. That's all reasonable. I totally, completely, utterly agree that adverbs should be cut if (for example) they're meaningless intensifiers, whereas other times they add rhythm or color.
No problem! I enjoy these weekly readings.
Thanks for the shoutout!
But how can you be so wrong about The Ambassadors!? It is one thing to blame Alice Munro's well-structured short stories for MFA stuff, but is poor Henry James to blame for the restricted third person POV they evidently teach people? You can't reduce him to the techniques imitators extract from his books (although he's unfair to the Russians etc. but everybody's unfair).
Strether isn't a passive sensorium, his sense of himself as a moral and aesthetic being depends on Chad and Madame de Vionnet, and theirs comes to depend on him. He does act, giving up two chances at marriage in order to protect their strange three-sided relationship (of which Chad proves unworthy), above all for Mme. de V.: how could he marry Maria Gostrey when he's truly in love with her!
Well, you said it, "his sense of himself," which is all we get from the book! (And only one sense is really involved: vision.) I revere James, I agree it's a fascinating sensibility, a version of modern sainthood, and I think the whole experiment was worth trying, but I don't like it as much as e.g. Portrait of a Lady, a staging in the round of superficially different but fundamentally similar renunciations (how could she leave Osmond when she truly doesn't love him? etc.). I do think the derivation of systematic third-person limited from late James is the standard genealogy given in literary histories and textbooks, but the blame is with those who make rules, not artists making experiments. On the main question, I have not yet begun to be wrong!
fwiw I feel like an exaggerated focus on James’ technique makes people neglect what he does with it. In particular the way in which moral personalities are almost co-constituting in his late fiction doesn’t really have a parallel in either James’s own earlier fiction or in later work influenced by James.
Solipsism doesn’t loom large in James because although there’s plenty the characters don’t know, it isn’t as if they know their own consciousness or what may be their own illusions better than they know other people.
I will keep this in mind for when I finally read The Golden Bowl
Personally finding Hergé more interesting than the latest round of MFA discourse, I’ll just note that he lived long enough into the era of postmodernism that it’s possible to look at the last three or so books as attempt to subvert the earlier works, already beating someone like Chris ware to the punch. The last completed book ends following a revolution in a fictional South American country with the same jackbooted thugs from the previous regime in new uniforms patrolling the same favela, Tintin having done nothing more than shuffle the local leadership to be more agreeable to his own survival. Oddly there is a comparison to late James in that if you grew up reading these books the way I did, this means they are to varying extents not that satisfying or good to read as a child, but as art objects to examine at as an adult, they are fascinating
Thanks! I'm familiar in the abstract with Hergé's trajectory, mostly from Tom McCarthy's very entertaining book applying high theory to Tintin, so that makes sense. The critique of the treatment of Native Americans in Tintin in America is pretty acute, but it partakes of noble savagism and "Romantic anti-capitalism" of a kind that makes one nervous in an author of that era, so I feel like outright postmodern cynicism is a step up for him. As I think McCarthy points out, it's the identical ideological itinerary of Paul de Man, and they were both publishing in the same Nazi-occupied Belgian newspaper at the same time during the war.
(I read the first five or six volumes with "research brain" in my 30s because I had to teach a History of Comics class, but for whatever reason I didn't grow up with Tintin, was somehow barely even aware of him until adulthood. I did discover bandes dessinées in my adolescence, but through a stash of Heavy Metal comics—pretty far from Tintin!)
Nonwithstanding the origin of the comic in a far right, almost fascist (the Belgian equivalent of Vidkun Quisling was a colleague) catholic magazine, which yes, is apparent in those first three or four volumes, Hergé seems mostly to have been a kind of very unsophisticated middle class European lib-antifascist in a mostly superficial and sometimes troubling (IE; the depiction of the Japanese as malevolent caricatures in the Blue Lotus) way in the late thirties, very (partly for self interested reasons-he made the mistake of continuing to be published in official channels during the occupation and accusations of collaboration followed him for the rest of his life) anticommunism after the war, but also somewhat reflexively anti-American.