"The literary aspiration toward holistic vision" is a doomed mission for novelists, which I suppose makes it beautiful in its tragedy. That's a term I'll steal happily, thanks for it!
In what you've read of current criticism, who are the critics who best balance style and substance to reflect on novels' vision of life in their reviews?
I think of Leo Robson when he does career-summary/re-evaluation type essays on writers for the New Yorker or New Statesman, for example on Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, or, appropriately for this post, Joseph Conrad. Since I mentioned her above, Ann Manov shows how it can done in service to a hatchet-job (I don't mean this pejoratively) in her review of the latest John Boyne Holocaust novel. William Giraldi is always good too. In the older generation, there are Coetzee's and Ozick's criticism, as well as Joyce Carol Oates—probably no coincidence that novelist-critics are skilled at this, since they know the process from the inside. For a negative example, James Wood, though I admire his intellect and severity, only seems to do this, but is often too focused on the micro-climate of the sentence and misses the narrative architecture.
Love the defense of Said here. I remember watching a discussion between, I think, Cornel West and Judith Butler in remembrance of Said. West spent a lot of time asking how a radical like Said could have liked a Tory like Jonathan Swift. While he was performing a litany of dialectical moves to try and fit it all together, I wanted to shout at my laptop: “because Said wasn’t really a radical!”
Re: Conrad - you mention in a footnote that you’ve read all the major Conrad works. Having read no Conrad at all, I was wondering: what are the major works? Where should I begin?
Thanks! I don't even think he called himself a radical. On Conrad, Heart of Darkness really is the place to start. It's the most influential, the most talked-about, the most taught, the most famously film-adapted. Plus, it's really short. After that, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent are the most celebrated. Lord Jim shares H of D's experimental narrative structure (and partial narrator) and is about a white man's heroism and non-heroism in Southeast Asia. Nostromo is a more conventionally narrated panoramic realist novel about corruption, dictatorship, and revolution in South America. The Secret Agent is a relentlessly ironic narrative about anarchists and terrorists in London; it's probably the most fun and contemporary of all his works. The short novels are good too—The N------ of the Narcissus, Youth, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow-Line. The ones I haven't read include his first, Almayer's Folly, and later works reputed to be lesser, like Victory and Chance.
I'd almost recommend starting with Nostromo. Heart of Darkness, short though it is, can come almost *too* burdened with the weight of its subsequent resonances. Nostromo, though somewhat uncharacteristic for the structural reasons John Pistelli lays out, is the work that made feel I finally *got* Conrad; after that I saw everything else with fresh eyes. Just my two obols. (On the eyes, I suppose -- for the ferryman, over these dark waters.)
Thank you both for the recs! I ended up reading Heart of Darkness due to the reasons John Pistelli laid out and was completely seduced. I picked up Nostromo years ago at a library sale, so now I know to read that next.
I was thinking about the aspects of Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche that seem or can be read as reducing culture to biology, like those passages in Twilight of the Idols where N talks about civilizational decline as the physical exhaustion of a people. I believe the online right picks up on this aspect as part of their general reassertion of "natural" hierarchy. There's a whole other aspect to Nietzsche, though, emphasizing the creative act and the creation of values that recalls Romantic appeals to the shaping power of the poetic imagination. I should probably keep my mouth shut about Schopenhauer (I haven't read that much), but his upholding of art as reprieve from the blind and hungry will is all the more glamorous from the otherwise pessimistic vision it offsets, which obviously chimes with nobly ironic modernist visions like Conrad's and Mann's. I hope that answers the question. Thanks, Alice!
"The literary aspiration toward holistic vision" is a doomed mission for novelists, which I suppose makes it beautiful in its tragedy. That's a term I'll steal happily, thanks for it!
In what you've read of current criticism, who are the critics who best balance style and substance to reflect on novels' vision of life in their reviews?
I think of Leo Robson when he does career-summary/re-evaluation type essays on writers for the New Yorker or New Statesman, for example on Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, or, appropriately for this post, Joseph Conrad. Since I mentioned her above, Ann Manov shows how it can done in service to a hatchet-job (I don't mean this pejoratively) in her review of the latest John Boyne Holocaust novel. William Giraldi is always good too. In the older generation, there are Coetzee's and Ozick's criticism, as well as Joyce Carol Oates—probably no coincidence that novelist-critics are skilled at this, since they know the process from the inside. For a negative example, James Wood, though I admire his intellect and severity, only seems to do this, but is often too focused on the micro-climate of the sentence and misses the narrative architecture.
Love the defense of Said here. I remember watching a discussion between, I think, Cornel West and Judith Butler in remembrance of Said. West spent a lot of time asking how a radical like Said could have liked a Tory like Jonathan Swift. While he was performing a litany of dialectical moves to try and fit it all together, I wanted to shout at my laptop: “because Said wasn’t really a radical!”
Re: Conrad - you mention in a footnote that you’ve read all the major Conrad works. Having read no Conrad at all, I was wondering: what are the major works? Where should I begin?
Thanks! I don't even think he called himself a radical. On Conrad, Heart of Darkness really is the place to start. It's the most influential, the most talked-about, the most taught, the most famously film-adapted. Plus, it's really short. After that, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent are the most celebrated. Lord Jim shares H of D's experimental narrative structure (and partial narrator) and is about a white man's heroism and non-heroism in Southeast Asia. Nostromo is a more conventionally narrated panoramic realist novel about corruption, dictatorship, and revolution in South America. The Secret Agent is a relentlessly ironic narrative about anarchists and terrorists in London; it's probably the most fun and contemporary of all his works. The short novels are good too—The N------ of the Narcissus, Youth, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow-Line. The ones I haven't read include his first, Almayer's Folly, and later works reputed to be lesser, like Victory and Chance.
I'd almost recommend starting with Nostromo. Heart of Darkness, short though it is, can come almost *too* burdened with the weight of its subsequent resonances. Nostromo, though somewhat uncharacteristic for the structural reasons John Pistelli lays out, is the work that made feel I finally *got* Conrad; after that I saw everything else with fresh eyes. Just my two obols. (On the eyes, I suppose -- for the ferryman, over these dark waters.)
Thank you both for the recs! I ended up reading Heart of Darkness due to the reasons John Pistelli laid out and was completely seduced. I picked up Nostromo years ago at a library sale, so now I know to read that next.
John, if Schopenhauer and Nietzsche do not leave room for the chaos of the soul, how would you account for their abiding importance to artists?
I was thinking about the aspects of Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche that seem or can be read as reducing culture to biology, like those passages in Twilight of the Idols where N talks about civilizational decline as the physical exhaustion of a people. I believe the online right picks up on this aspect as part of their general reassertion of "natural" hierarchy. There's a whole other aspect to Nietzsche, though, emphasizing the creative act and the creation of values that recalls Romantic appeals to the shaping power of the poetic imagination. I should probably keep my mouth shut about Schopenhauer (I haven't read that much), but his upholding of art as reprieve from the blind and hungry will is all the more glamorous from the otherwise pessimistic vision it offsets, which obviously chimes with nobly ironic modernist visions like Conrad's and Mann's. I hope that answers the question. Thanks, Alice!
A satisfying answer. Cheers, John