A lot to chew on here. I watched Wuthering Heights two weeks ago, and admired its squelches while hating a) its length and b) every aspect of the portrayal of Nelly. I think the phrase "Fennell and her collaborators likely meant nothing consciously by the casting" speaks to how clumsy she is in general with tone and subtext.
Morrison (in the novels of hers I've read, which isn't every one) has never been clumsy. I don't read much literary criticism, but after reading Sula and Moby-Dick in relative proximity, I found "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" extremely fascinating. She's so much easier to read than most critics, and her takes on Melville and Faulkner definitely resonated with my own.
I find Bellow to be a little harder to swallow, but that could be because I need to get even older and more cynical to make Henderson make sense to me or that I can't ever unhear the Tolstoy of the Zulus thing. I did the same thing with HTRK as I did with Herzog: stopped reading.
What I've started reading is Prue Shaw's Essential Commedia while filling in the parts she doesn't cover with an audio version of the poem in Italian with a translated version (Mandelbaum) side by side, and it's bringing me back to reading Chaucer line by line in college. Approaching the text without Shaw (especially the Longfellow version) has led me to give up on the Commedia multiple times before now. I can't imagine reading and enjoying it as much when I was young as I do now, though. I also haven't felt like I ever needed to hear the original in the language as much as in in Dante with his terza rima. Shaw does a great job of summarizing the parts she's not glossing, but it's a Great enough book that I want to savor it a little more than just reading Shaw lets me do.
Thanks! Yes, Dante is beautiful in Italian even if you don’t know Italian. (I don’t quite know Italian, but sort of.) Curiously, this is the appeal of Bellow for me, it’s the language first. His novels really feel formless, though, and are easy to put down and not pick back up, but the style just works for me, and the essential humanism, which is true if not the only truth, however it worked out in his politics.
I'd reread Augie March, and The Victim, which is maybe the least humanist and most Kafkaesque of his novels that I've read, but which I found more compelling since he's writing against type.
It's funny I only skimmed The Victim because it was so against type! I should go back to it. I still need to read Humboldt's Gift among the big ones first though.
I've been reading the Woman of Letters blog for a while now. While I am surprised to see a writer who apparently thinks he cannot type the title, "The Artificial Nigger," and makes a weird claim about Camara Laye being a "literal Nazi" (a meaningless phrase), would appraise her work so effectively, I suppose that goes to show how appealing it is.
Thank you, I think! I meant my first claim to be tongue-in-cheek. I mean, I could have typed it, obviously. Regarding the second claim, I wasn’t making a personal ideological determination; the man supposed to have ghostwritten the book attributed to Laye was literally convicted of being a Nazi collaborator. (I believe, but the article I read this in is no longer online.)
I see.... but I'm not sure how exactly accepted this notion of the novel being ghostwritten is. It's at least a disputed point. (Also, was Morrison writing about the book after the allegations were made?) Furthermore, Francis Soulie's being a "Nazi collaborator" is already different from being a Nazi. I see that a New Yorker article referred to him as such. What is the evidence? What did he do? Is this another Paul de Man fake controversy?
The whole story is told in Christopher Miller's Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). It's not clear what Morrison knew, since her intro to the NYRB Classics edition preceded by one year the Anglophone monograph that laid out the case, though according to Miller the ghostwriting had been acknowledged for years in Francophone letters, and Wole Soyinka and Leopold Senghor had questioned the novel's authorship almost immediately. Miller himself wrote to NYRB to alert them of the issue, but received no response. The ghost writer was a convinced National Socialist and self-described royalist, probably more committed than the young opportunistic de Man, though, as with de Man, his later work could be read as a complex form of atonement. All these facts matter less to me than the broad point about how Morrison was misled in her quest for an essential "blackness," precisely because this authenticity is not (to my mind) available in written language.
Thanks for the info. I am not suggesting that these side issues detract from your argument. But this censoriousness that is so common now in elite and academic circles (e.g. a white man cannot say the n-word even when naming a work that uses the word or reciting a work; the notion that De Man's philosophy is undermined by his decisions made during wartime) does impel me to take a writer's work less seriously. The snarkiness of my original comment was driven by disappointment at finding such interesting writing but then coming across this tabloid-journalism obsession with the outward moral failings of writers. It never seems to end, e.g. the supposed controversy a few years ago about Milan Kundera. It all seems to point toward a way of cheaply dismissing a writer.
Yes, I see your point. I know you're new to my by now sickeningly voluminous work, but I write about this subject a lot, in both fiction and nonfiction, usually with various strategies of destabilizing irony that I had to develop inside the censorious institutions you mention. (My personal view is that of course major artists and thinkers are monsters, it's puerile to expect otherwise, one wants testimony from the verge not from the suburbs, though the suburbs are no moral paragon either. When I point out Morrison's sometimes neglected monstrousness, I am complimenting her!) I wrote about it, for example, here:
I see… I was quick to judge. I live in a college town in a Republican state, which seems to mean I am surrounded by peevish people whose politics and morals are annoyingly sanctimonious and Puritanical (in other words, taking exactly the wrong approach to swaying those opposed to them), so I get sensitive when confronting signs of it. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed your work so far. I too have a problem with being voluminous in my writing, though in my defense I’ve always stayed an amateur.
That’s an interesting thought about whiteness Morrison’s criticism, which I need to read more of, have found occasionally troubling in ways that nonetheless elucidate the ways in which her novels are occasionally troubling (the words “metaphysical, blackness” and the slight rape apologia in Birth of a Nation’Hood come immediately to mind.)
Re: white culture- I would need to really think about the charge that suburban culture is what is being thought of. (Part of the difficulty IMO is that people of a certain persuasion say white when they tend to mean *bourgeois,* and another type says bourgeois when they really mean something like *Das Volk*.)
I have almost no sympathy for their position, but I do sort of understand how the white nationalists could still feel oppressed, downtrodden, etc. even with a regime that is the friendliest any has been to them since before World War II, that views them as a vital coalition partner not to be alienated etc, given that they still upon the stand before congress can’t just say what they think etc.
Yes, I see what you mean about her criticism: that's the Jung-in-a-Marx-mask (i.e., volk-in-a-class-mask) effect. She says she's only writing about the image or dream of blackness in the white writers' imagination, not about blackness, but it lets her evoke some of what she wants to say about blackness, I think. This is most hilariously problematic in her frequent endorsement of that novel The Radiance of the King as authentically African, a novel not only written by a white man but by a literal Nazi (and her reading of Henderson echoes her reading of that book when it comes to a white protagonist reversing Conrad by discovering his universal humanity in Africa). I wrote about it here:
Re: the suburbs they were sort of built to be "white," which meant partly effacing all the differences among white classes/religions/ethnicities still operative in the cities to create a commonality, usually through media as well as material culture and the built environment. So I don't mean "white" as a volk or a class but literally a culture in the sense of fashion, food, consumption, music. TV and the mall and the various reactions against them basically.
A lot to chew on here. I watched Wuthering Heights two weeks ago, and admired its squelches while hating a) its length and b) every aspect of the portrayal of Nelly. I think the phrase "Fennell and her collaborators likely meant nothing consciously by the casting" speaks to how clumsy she is in general with tone and subtext.
Morrison (in the novels of hers I've read, which isn't every one) has never been clumsy. I don't read much literary criticism, but after reading Sula and Moby-Dick in relative proximity, I found "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" extremely fascinating. She's so much easier to read than most critics, and her takes on Melville and Faulkner definitely resonated with my own.
I find Bellow to be a little harder to swallow, but that could be because I need to get even older and more cynical to make Henderson make sense to me or that I can't ever unhear the Tolstoy of the Zulus thing. I did the same thing with HTRK as I did with Herzog: stopped reading.
What I've started reading is Prue Shaw's Essential Commedia while filling in the parts she doesn't cover with an audio version of the poem in Italian with a translated version (Mandelbaum) side by side, and it's bringing me back to reading Chaucer line by line in college. Approaching the text without Shaw (especially the Longfellow version) has led me to give up on the Commedia multiple times before now. I can't imagine reading and enjoying it as much when I was young as I do now, though. I also haven't felt like I ever needed to hear the original in the language as much as in in Dante with his terza rima. Shaw does a great job of summarizing the parts she's not glossing, but it's a Great enough book that I want to savor it a little more than just reading Shaw lets me do.
Thanks! Yes, Dante is beautiful in Italian even if you don’t know Italian. (I don’t quite know Italian, but sort of.) Curiously, this is the appeal of Bellow for me, it’s the language first. His novels really feel formless, though, and are easy to put down and not pick back up, but the style just works for me, and the essential humanism, which is true if not the only truth, however it worked out in his politics.
I can't agree more with your review of The Adventures of Augie March in the way you define Bellow's language as a form of heroic realism: https://johnpistelli.com/2018/02/10/saul-bellow-the-adventures-of-augie-march
I'd reread Augie March, and The Victim, which is maybe the least humanist and most Kafkaesque of his novels that I've read, but which I found more compelling since he's writing against type.
It's funny I only skimmed The Victim because it was so against type! I should go back to it. I still need to read Humboldt's Gift among the big ones first though.
I've been reading the Woman of Letters blog for a while now. While I am surprised to see a writer who apparently thinks he cannot type the title, "The Artificial Nigger," and makes a weird claim about Camara Laye being a "literal Nazi" (a meaningless phrase), would appraise her work so effectively, I suppose that goes to show how appealing it is.
Thank you, I think! I meant my first claim to be tongue-in-cheek. I mean, I could have typed it, obviously. Regarding the second claim, I wasn’t making a personal ideological determination; the man supposed to have ghostwritten the book attributed to Laye was literally convicted of being a Nazi collaborator. (I believe, but the article I read this in is no longer online.)
I see.... but I'm not sure how exactly accepted this notion of the novel being ghostwritten is. It's at least a disputed point. (Also, was Morrison writing about the book after the allegations were made?) Furthermore, Francis Soulie's being a "Nazi collaborator" is already different from being a Nazi. I see that a New Yorker article referred to him as such. What is the evidence? What did he do? Is this another Paul de Man fake controversy?
The whole story is told in Christopher Miller's Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). It's not clear what Morrison knew, since her intro to the NYRB Classics edition preceded by one year the Anglophone monograph that laid out the case, though according to Miller the ghostwriting had been acknowledged for years in Francophone letters, and Wole Soyinka and Leopold Senghor had questioned the novel's authorship almost immediately. Miller himself wrote to NYRB to alert them of the issue, but received no response. The ghost writer was a convinced National Socialist and self-described royalist, probably more committed than the young opportunistic de Man, though, as with de Man, his later work could be read as a complex form of atonement. All these facts matter less to me than the broad point about how Morrison was misled in her quest for an essential "blackness," precisely because this authenticity is not (to my mind) available in written language.
Thanks for the info. I am not suggesting that these side issues detract from your argument. But this censoriousness that is so common now in elite and academic circles (e.g. a white man cannot say the n-word even when naming a work that uses the word or reciting a work; the notion that De Man's philosophy is undermined by his decisions made during wartime) does impel me to take a writer's work less seriously. The snarkiness of my original comment was driven by disappointment at finding such interesting writing but then coming across this tabloid-journalism obsession with the outward moral failings of writers. It never seems to end, e.g. the supposed controversy a few years ago about Milan Kundera. It all seems to point toward a way of cheaply dismissing a writer.
Yes, I see your point. I know you're new to my by now sickeningly voluminous work, but I write about this subject a lot, in both fiction and nonfiction, usually with various strategies of destabilizing irony that I had to develop inside the censorious institutions you mention. (My personal view is that of course major artists and thinkers are monsters, it's puerile to expect otherwise, one wants testimony from the verge not from the suburbs, though the suburbs are no moral paragon either. When I point out Morrison's sometimes neglected monstrousness, I am complimenting her!) I wrote about it, for example, here:
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/i/152021567/preserved-in-its-corruption-vicissitudes-of-the-reprobate-genius
I see… I was quick to judge. I live in a college town in a Republican state, which seems to mean I am surrounded by peevish people whose politics and morals are annoyingly sanctimonious and Puritanical (in other words, taking exactly the wrong approach to swaying those opposed to them), so I get sensitive when confronting signs of it. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed your work so far. I too have a problem with being voluminous in my writing, though in my defense I’ve always stayed an amateur.
That’s an interesting thought about whiteness Morrison’s criticism, which I need to read more of, have found occasionally troubling in ways that nonetheless elucidate the ways in which her novels are occasionally troubling (the words “metaphysical, blackness” and the slight rape apologia in Birth of a Nation’Hood come immediately to mind.)
Re: white culture- I would need to really think about the charge that suburban culture is what is being thought of. (Part of the difficulty IMO is that people of a certain persuasion say white when they tend to mean *bourgeois,* and another type says bourgeois when they really mean something like *Das Volk*.)
I have almost no sympathy for their position, but I do sort of understand how the white nationalists could still feel oppressed, downtrodden, etc. even with a regime that is the friendliest any has been to them since before World War II, that views them as a vital coalition partner not to be alienated etc, given that they still upon the stand before congress can’t just say what they think etc.
Yes, I see what you mean about her criticism: that's the Jung-in-a-Marx-mask (i.e., volk-in-a-class-mask) effect. She says she's only writing about the image or dream of blackness in the white writers' imagination, not about blackness, but it lets her evoke some of what she wants to say about blackness, I think. This is most hilariously problematic in her frequent endorsement of that novel The Radiance of the King as authentically African, a novel not only written by a white man but by a literal Nazi (and her reading of Henderson echoes her reading of that book when it comes to a white protagonist reversing Conrad by discovering his universal humanity in Africa). I wrote about it here:
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/i/85804560/black-masquerade-the-kings-white-gaze
Re: the suburbs they were sort of built to be "white," which meant partly effacing all the differences among white classes/religions/ethnicities still operative in the cities to create a commonality, usually through media as well as material culture and the built environment. So I don't mean "white" as a volk or a class but literally a culture in the sense of fashion, food, consumption, music. TV and the mall and the various reactions against them basically.