[New-Poetry] Re: FYRP: Divine Comedy

[Anny Ballardini]

Re.:
"Take what you can use and let the rest go by."
>     --Ken Kesey

I'll get:
"Pile on."


From: "Halvard Johnson" <halvard at earthlink.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 9:49 PM


> Oh my, this is the conventional anthology critique: "But where are
> X and Y and Z?"
> 
> "Who are the great funny poets?" is an interesting question, although
> I'm not sure that the comic is always funny.
> 
> I'll nominate Shakespeare for starters.
> 
> Pile on.
> 
> Hal
> 
> "Take what you can use and let the rest go by."
>     --Ken Kesey
> 
> Halvard Johnson
> ================
> halvard at gmail.com
> halvard at earthlink.net
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
> http://www.hamiltonstone.org
> 
> On May 26, 2007, at 2:09 PM, Crisman Cooley wrote:
> 
>> Mx. Gough speaks truly, aye, verily, verily-- but has neglected  
>> some seriously funny boox, to wit: Lucius Apuleis, _The Golden  
>> Ass_, L. Sterne, _Tristram Shandy_, M. Twain, _Hucky Finn_, T.  
>> Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ ...
>>
>> Who are the great funny poets?
>>
>>> Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 10:08:01 -0500
>>> From: Halvard Johnson <halvard at earthlink.net>
>>> Subject: [New-Poetry] FYRP: Divine Comedy
>>>
>>> Ignore this at your peril.
>>>
>>> Hal
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>> Issue 134 , May 2007
>>> Divine Comedy
>>> by Julian Gough
>>>
>>> The Greeks understood that comedy (the gods' view of life) is
>>> superior to tragedy (the merely human). But since the middle ages,
>>> western culture has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic.
>>> This is why fiction today is so full of anxiety and suffering. It's
>>> time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh
>>> Julian Gough's comic short story "The orphan and the mob" (published
>>> in Prospect, March 2006) has won the 2007 National Short Story prize
>>> What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and
>>> dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?
>>>
>>> Well, let's go back a bit first. Two and a half thousand years ago,
>>> at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was
>>> superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we
>>> sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our
>>> endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our
>>> inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods
>>> watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent,
>>> repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to
>>> give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We
>>> became as gods, laughing at our own follies.
>>>
>>> Many of the finest novels?and certainly the novels I love most?are in
>>> the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais,
>>> Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller's
>>> Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5.
>>>
>>> Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic
>>> and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy
>>> as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar. The
>>> Booker prize leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented
>>> Rabelais in his comic masterpiece Money. The best English novel of
>>> the 1980s, it didn't even make the shortlist. Anita Brookner won that
>>> year, for Hotel du Lac, written, as the Observer put it, "with a
>>> beautiful grave formality."
>>>
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>>>
>>> The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the
>>> writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big,
>>> difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must
>>> be in the tragic mode. When Amis addressed the Holocaust in his minor
>>> novel Time's Arrow (1991), he switched off the jokes, and the energy,
>>> and was rewarded with his only Booker shortlisting.
>>>
>>> But why this pressure, from within and without? There are two good
>>> reasons. The first is the west's unexamined cultural cringe before
>>> the Greeks. For most of the last 500 years, Homer and Sophocles have
>>> been held to be the supreme exponents of their arts. (Even Homer's
>>> constant repetition of stock phrases like "rosy-fingered dawn" and
>>> "wine-dark sea" are praised, rather than recognised as tiresome
>>> clich?s.)
>>>
>>> The second reason is that our classical inheritance is lop-sided. We
>>> have a rich range of tragedies?Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides (18
>>> by Euripides alone). Of the comic writers, only Aristophanes
>>> survived. In an age of kings, time is a filter that works against
>>> comedy. Plays that say, "Boy, it's a tough job, leading a nation"
>>> tend to survive; plays that say, "Our leaders are dumb arseholes,
>>> just like us" tend not to.
>>>
>>> More importantly, Aristotle's work on tragedy survived; his work on
>>> comedy did not. We have the classical rules for the one but not the
>>> other, and this has biased the development of all western literature.
>>> We've been off-centre ever since.
>>>
>>> But of course Europe in the middle ages was peculiarly primed to
>>> rediscover tragedy: the one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one
>>> book, and that book was at heart tragic. All of human history, from
>>> the creation, was a story that climaxed with the sadistic murder of a
>>> man by those he was trying to save, whose fatal flaw was that he was
>>> perfect in an imperfect world. The nicest man ever, he is murdered by
>>> everybody. Not only is this tragedy; it is kitsch tragedy, overegged,
>>> a joke. It cannot survive laughter, it is too vulnerable to it. And
>>> the Bible, from apple to Armageddon, does not contain a single joke.
>>>
>>> The church spoke with one voice because it was on such shaky
>>> foundations. The largest and richest property empire of all time had
>>> somehow been built on the gospel of the poor. All other voices had to
>>> be suppressed, even dissenting gospels. Only once a year, in
>>> carnival, on the feast of fools, could the unsayable be said. A fool
>>> was crowned king, and gave a fool's sermon from the altar that
>>> reversed the usual pieties. But these speeches could not be written
>>> down or circulated. They existed in the air, for a day, and were
>>> gone. By the late middle ages, the paralysis was almost total. If you
>>> change one word of the old Vulgate Bible, the whole thing comes under
>>> suspicion. All you could hear was a single voice reading a single
>>> book, the Vulgate, a Latin translation from a Greek original. When
>>> Erasmus finally retranslated the Bible, threw it open to
>>> interpretation, he caused a crisis that ultimately tore the church
>>> apart.
>>>
>>> The problem is not specific to Christianity. Islam has always had a
>>> problem with comedy at its expense, as Salman Rushdie showed in The
>>> Satanic Verses. In Medina, in year two of the Hijra migration, with
>>> Mecca not yet fallen, the Prophet asked the faithful to kill the
>>> Jewish-Arab poet Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf for reciting his poems satirising
>>> the Prophet (and joking about Muslim women). The faithful obliged.
>>>
>>> It is interesting, but unsurprising, that all the satirists murdered
>>> and allegedly murdered on Muhammad's orders were, among other things,
>>> Jewish. With its vigorous tradition of Talmudic debate, and with no
>>> Jewish state to stifle or control that debate, Judaism never fell
>>> into the paralysis of the younger monotheisms. It was, to put it
>>> mildly, never state-approved. Judaism, excluded from the
>>> establishment in so many Christian and Muslim nations, has
>>> consequently produced a high proportion of the world's great
>>> satirists, comedians and novelists. And, in Yiddish, it produced
>>> perhaps the world's first compulsively comic, anti-authoritarian
>>> language, with its structural mockery of high German.
>>>
>>> In Christian Europe, the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical
>>> texts occurred when the habit of submission to authority was at its
>>> most extreme. When printing was invented, no one thought to use it
>>> for anything other than the Christian Bible, for that was the myth of
>>> Europe, the one true myth.
>>>
>>> As writers began moving cautiously away from the theological shore,
>>> they still felt the need for a holy book to guide them, to tell them
>>> how to write. Aristotle's Poetics provided that. If you wanted to
>>> write tragedy or epic, here were the rules. You need not think for
>>> yourself. It's particularly sad to see the narrowness of subject
>>> matter and style in the pictorial art of the era?Madonna after pink-
>>> cheeked Madonna, saint after martyred saint. So much talent, all
>>> wasted doing the Renaissance equivalent of Soviet realist art.
>>>
>>> And then something astonishing happened: the invention of the novel
>>> privatised myth, because the novel, invented after Aristotle, did not
>>> have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a
>>> she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form.
>>> The fool's sermon could be published, could live on. All you learned
>>> from Rabelais or Cervantes was to mock everything sacred, all that
>>> went before. Including them.
>>>
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>>>
>>> And the reaction was fierce. Rabelais was jailed for his wild
>>> comedies. Voltaire, praised for his early tragedies, was jailed for
>>> his satires. Cervantes apparently started Don Quixote in a debtors'
>>> prison. All had to flee town on occasion for fear of worse. Printing
>>> had to be done abroad, in secret, and the books smuggled to their
>>> destinations. The early years of the novel look remarkably like a
>>> guerrilla war, as pro-Bible forces try to put down the insurgency of
>>> the novel across Europe. Both were fighting for the same piece of
>>> territory: the territory inside your head.
>>>
>>> Now a man could invent his own myth and spread it across the world.
>>> And the reader, head bowed over the novel, could have a vision
>>> without religion: a full vision, transmitted through space and time
>>> by marks on paper, using the novelist's arts.
>>>
>>> The novel, when done right?when done to the best of the novelist's
>>> abilities, talent at full stretch?is always greater than the
>>> novelist. It is more intelligent. It is more vast. It can change your
>>> entire internal world. Of course, so can a scientific truth. So can a
>>> religious experience. So can some drugs. So can a sublime event in
>>> nature. But the novel operates on that high level. Sitting there,
>>> alone, quite still, you laugh, you murmur, you cry, and you can come
>>> out of it with a new worldview, in a new reality. It's a controlled
>>> breakdown, or breakthrough. It's dangerous.
>>>
>>> The resistance of the monotheisms to comedy has another, more subtle,
>>> cause. The comic point of view?the gods'-eye view?is much more
>>> uncomfortable for a believer in one all-powerful God than it was for
>>> the polytheistic Greeks. To have the gods laughing at us through our
>>> fictions is acceptable if the gods are multiple, and flawed like us,
>>> laughing in recognition and sympathy: if they are Greek gods. But to
>>> have the single omnipotent, omniscient God who made us laughing at us
>>> is a very different thing: sadistic, and almost unbearable. We do not
>>> wish to hear the sound of one God laughing. The western comic novel
>>> has often had a harsh, judgemental edge. Swift has a hint of Yahweh
>>> about him. But the recent death of God has freed a lot of space for
>>> the comic novel. Science has given us a high, impersonal, non-
>>> judgemental perspective from which to regard ourselves (brilliantly
>>> used by Vonnegut in books like Breakfast of Champions). The various
>>> eastern philosophies give us other high vantage points. Indeed, both
>>> physics and Zen can handle laughter, and are superb tools for writing
>>> the western comic novel because they do not require absolute faith
>>> and they do not claim absolute certainty. With freedom from a death-
>>> obsessed monotheism and new tools, new places from which to view
>>> humanity, we should have entered a golden age of comedy.
>>>
>>> Some writers seized the chance. Evelyn Waugh became perhaps the
>>> greatest English novelist of the 20th century by applying a flawless,
>>> deadpan, comic technique to everything from modern manners to modern
>>> warfare. PG Wodehouse developed the purest comic style of his age
>>> but, unlike Waugh, felt no need to apply it to real life. The great
>>> comic writers do survive, but are seldom seen as great till much
>>> later. The tragic bias remains deep in the industry. And the more
>>> original the comic masterpiece, the harder it is to get it through
>>> the filters of western commercial publishing. Flann O'Brien's The
>>> Third Policeman, one of Ireland's three greatest novels, could not
>>> find a publisher in the author's lifetime. John Kennedy Toole's A
>>> Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by 36 publishers, and Toole
>>> eventually killed himself. Only a decade after his death was it
>>> published. Publishing is a form of authority too.
>>>
>>> No, the novel has not, in general, been able to seize its freedom?it
>>> has not gone comic. This has consequences. An unnecessary tragic
>>> bias, in something so powerful, will cause a great deal of avoidable
>>> suffering. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, with its
>>> revoltingly sentimental suicide note, depressed a generation and
>>> caused a wave of fashionable suicides across Europe. (They even
>>> dressed in the same blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat.)
>>> Autobiographical novels are particularly revealing of the bias in the
>>> culture: in real life Goethe felt no need to kill himself after his
>>> heart was broken, but when he wrote a book about it, it had to be a
>>> tragedy and the hero had to die. A comedy would have been far more
>>> suitable. It might even have led to a cheerful late 18th-century
>>> Europe. But no, he gave us the furrow-browed Romantics.
>>>
>>> Tragically (or comically, depending on your temperament), the bias
>>> caused by Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and the church
>>> continues today. The youthful brow remains furrowed.
>>>
>>> It would be useful to look at a representative cross-section of the
>>> finest young novelists of the US, the largest and most diverse of the
>>> English-speaking nations. A big job, but luckily Granta has just
>>> carried out the task for me, and announced its Best of Young American
>>> Novelists 2, a list of 21 talents. In his summing up, the chair of
>>> the judges, Granta editor Ian Jack, mentions death, sorrow,
>>> uncertainty and anxiety. "All I know is that we read many books
>>> infused by loss and a feeling that present things would not go on
>>> forever." (These writers are mostly in their twenties and early
>>> thirties!) At the end, Jack regrets the absence from the list of
>>> Joshua Ferris, "whose first novel? had the singular distinction among
>>> all these writers of making me laugh aloud quite often."
>>>
>>> No loud laughter in the whole top 21. Twenty-one Apollos, and not one
>>> Dionysus.
>>>
>>> "Why so sad, people?" as Zadie Smith asks.
>>>
>>> Well, it's just a habit by now. It's so ingrained in our culture that
>>> it has become an unexamined default position. What makes it much
>>> worse is that it is now being coached, reinforced. All of the writers
>>> on the Granta list attended university creative writing programmes.
>>> All, in other words, have submitted to authority. This is a
>>> catastrophe for them as novelists.
>>>
>>> The novel cannot submit to authority. It is written against official
>>> language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the
>>> novel has begun to take?it is always dying, and always being born.
>>>
>>> If the literary novel has calcified into genre, the new novelists
>>> need to break its underlying, often unspoken rules. To not just
>>> question, but to overthrow authority. The novel, at its best, cannot
>>> even submit to the authority of the novelist: Gogol burnt his follow-
>>> up to Dead Souls because, on reading the book he had just written, he
>>> was shocked to find that he profoundly disagreed with it.
>>>
>>> But the universities are authority or they are nothing. As the west
>>> has grown secular, the university has, quite organically, taken over
>>> from the church as a cross-border entity claiming universality,
>>> claiming to influence the powerful but not to wield power.
>>> "Education" is the excuse for a self-perpetuating power structure
>>> now, just as "religion" was the excuse then. The modern universities
>>> could claim to have no single ideology, but the same could be said of
>>> the Vatican under the Medicis, or the Borgias.
>>>
>>> The problem is not that the universities are malevolent; they are
>>> not. They have no sinister intent in taking over the novel,
>>> professionalising it, academicising it. Like most of those who
>>> colonise territories that were getting on fine without them, they
>>> believe they do no great damage, they believe it's for the novel's
>>> good, they believe they are benign, idealistic and quite a bit
>>> cleverer than the natives. As ever, none of these beliefs is entirely
>>> true.
>>>
>>> The literary novel, by accepting the embrace of the universities, has
>>> moved inside the establishment and lost contact with what made it
>>> vital. It has, as a result, also lost the mass audience enjoyed by
>>> Twain and Dickens. The literary novel?born in Cervantes's prison
>>> cell, continued in cellars, bars and rented rooms by Dostoevsky,
>>> Joyce and Beckett?is now being written from on high. Not the useful
>>> height of the gods, with its sharp, gods'-eye view of all human
>>> classes, all human folly, but the distancing, merely human height of
>>> the ruling elite, just too high up to see what's happening on the
>>> street below.
>>>
>>> Luckily this situation is self-satirising. Campus authority generates
>>> campus comedy. The senior academic novelist is trapped in the small
>>> world of the university, cut off from the big world, embodying
>>> authority yet still driven to write. In this situation the novel, if
>>> it is to live, must turn against the novelist. Malcolm Bradbury and
>>> David Lodge, writing novels at night, attacked their day-selves,
>>> their academic selves, as absurd buffoons whose work was meaningless.
>>> And the novelist in them was right.
>>>
>>> The university model, any teaching model, of necessity implies that
>>> there is a Platonic ideal novel in some other dimension, which has
>>> all the characteristics that make for novelness and that the more of
>>> these attributes a novel has, the more like a perfect novel it is.
>>> This concept works for the tragic, it works for the epic, it works
>>> (less well, but it works) for the lyric, it does not work for the
>>> novel because, as Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, the novel is the
>>> only post-Aristotelian literary form. It is not bound by classical
>>> rules. It is not bound by any rules. The novel is not a genre. The
>>> novel is always novel. The novel is always coming into being. The
>>> novel cannot be taught, because the novel does not yet exist.
>>>
>>> This professionalisation will make poor writers adequate. And will
>>> make potentially great writers adequate. Great novelists write for
>>> their peers. Poor novelists write for their teachers. If you must
>>> please the older generation to pass (a student writing for an older
>>> teacher, a teacher writing to secure tenure), you end up with
>>> cautious, old-fashioned novels. Worse, the system turns peers into
>>> teachers. Destroyed as writers, many are immediately re-employed,
>>> teaching creative writing. This is a Ponzi scheme.
>>>
>>> During their second year, students are offered teaching appointments
>>> to teach introductory undergraduate creative writing workshops (ENL
>>> 5F or ENL 5P) in their genre or are hired as literature TAs or GSRs.
>>> (From the website of the English department at the University of
>>> California, Davis)
>>>
>>> The damage this is causing to novel, writer and audience is
>>> particularly advanced in America. The last 30 years have seen the
>>> effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a
>>> career path. As they became professional, writers began to write
>>> about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write
>>> about writing.
>>>
>>> And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away
>>> from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of
>>> the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary
>>> prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible.
>>> Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out.
>>> This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe
>>> for novelists, and the novel.
>>>
>>> Lastly, a series of thesis units, which is your writing time guided
>>> by your thesis committee members, will fulfil the required 36 units.
>>> (From the website of the English department at the University of
>>> California, Davis)
>>>
>>> Much of their fiction contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety.
>>> Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none, to generate
>>> suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to
>>> frown rather than smile; and their work fills with a self-indulgent
>>> anxiety that could perhaps best be called "wangst."
>>>
>>> To teach is to imply that one would not otherwise learn. Do we teach
>>> children to breathe? The illusion that there is a solution comes from
>>> the illusion that there is a problem. There is not. The forest is
>>> open. Strike out.
>>>
>>> The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his
>>> predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not
>>> say. Flaubert's poetics does not devalue Balzac's, anymore than the
>>> discovery of the North Pole renders obsolete the discovery of
>>> America. (Milan Kundera, "The Curtain")
>>>
>>> If I don't like what the novel is doing, do I have any suggestions as
>>> to what it should do? Perhaps.
>>>
>>> The novel grows by theft and observation, both of real life and of
>>> other "newer," yet often more conservative art forms. (Cinema was a
>>> tremendous influence on Joyce.) The problem with the novels of, say,
>>> John Banville is that, although brilliantly written, they steal only
>>> from other novels (and a few oil paintings). His is a universe in
>>> which the internet does not exist, and television scarcely exists.
>>> Yet new art forms, and their delivery systems, change the way we read
>>> the novel, and therefore must change the way we write it. This is not
>>> a catastrophe; it is an opportunity. We are free to do new things
>>> with the novel, which could not have been understood before now.
>>>
>>> My generation, and those younger, spend a lot of time taking in
>>> information not in long, linear, structured, coherent, self-contained
>>> units (a film, a novel), but in short bursts, with wildly different
>>> tones. A youth spent channel-hopping and surfing the internet rewires
>>> the brain. (So does a youth spent reading critical theory: be
>>> careful.) See 10,000 Hollywood movies and the journey of the hero
>>> becomes utterly predictable: you can see the plot twists and ending
>>> coming from the start. Traditional story may have been broken by this
>>> overload: certainly it suffers from repetitive strain injury.
>>> Television has responded to this crisis. The novel has not.
>>>
>>> A comparison between The Simpsons and a soap opera is instructive. A
>>> soap opera is trapped inside the rules of the format; all soaps
>>> resemble each other (like psychologically plausible realist novels).
>>> What the makers of The Simpsons did was take a soap opera and put a
>>> frame around it: "this is a cartoon about a soap opera." This freed
>>> them from the need to map its event-rate on to real life: they could
>>> map its event-rate on to cartoon life. A fast event-rate is
>>> inherently comic, so the tone is, of necessity, comic. But that is
>>> not to say it isn't serious. The Simpsons is profoundly serious. And
>>> profoundly comic. Like Aristophanes, debating the war between Athens
>>> and Sparta by writing about a sex strike by the women of Athens and
>>> beyond.
>>>
>>> With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has
>>> more ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the
>>> same year. The speed, the density of information, the range of
>>> reference; the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes?they
>>> make almost all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and
>>> almost empty of ideas.
>>>
>>> The Sopranos took a more subtle approach to the problem of the broken
>>> hero, the broken heroic saga, by deconstructing the hero through
>>> psychoanalysis, inside the frame. Twin Peaks and Lost have taken a
>>> more ostentatiously radical, metafictive approach to the breakdown of
>>> story.
>>>
>>> Meanwhile, the internet is rapidly becoming Borges's library of
>>> Babel, Rushdie's sea of stories: everything is turning up there, in
>>> potential promiscuous intercourse with everything else. Everything is
>>> happening all at once, in the same place, with no hierarchy. It's as
>>> though space and time have collapsed. It's exhilarating, and
>>> frightening. Who's capturing that in the novel? Because the novel is
>>> the place to capture it. The novel has freedoms which television has
>>> not. It can shape and structure multiplicity and chaos in ways the
>>> internet cannot.
>>>
>>> Novelists can take from these new art forms new structures and
>>> techniques for telling stories, as Joyce did from cinema. But who
>>> has? Weirdly, the modernists have a more accurate take on now than
>>> the most recent Booker winners. Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up
>>> of a Google translation of everything ever. But John Banville and
>>> Anita Desai read like nostalgia (for Nabokov, for Dickens, for
>>> traditional virtues, for the canon). They feel far less contemporary
>>> than The Waste Land?which is what Bakhtin would call a novelised
>>> poem: a poem that escapes Aristotle's Poetics and hitches a ride on
>>> the energy of the novel. As Baudrillard should have said:
>>> postmodernism never happened. Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the
>>> novel's wheels have spun in the sand.
>>>
>>> So steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James.
>>>
>>> Realistic texture and a cartoon event-rate with a broad range of
>>> reference: is this a revolutionary new way of writing the novel? Of
>>> course not. It's ancient. Voltaire, for example, did it in Candide.
>>> But we keep forgetting. The novel is constantly pushed by the culture
>>> towards worthiness, towards Aristotle's Poetics, towards tragedy. The
>>> next great novel will do to the contemporary literary novel what
>>> Cervantes did to the chivalric romance. It's not that contemporary
>>> literary novels are bad. Line by line, book by book, they're often
>>> wonderful. But in the same few ways. Who needs more of that?
>>>
>>> You may think that to praise The Simpsons at the expense of Henry
>>> James makes me a barbarian. Well, it does, but I'm a very cultured
>>> barbarian. The literary novel has gone late Roman. It needs the
>>> barbarians. It secretly yearns for them. It's leading them on. How
>>> many novels influenced by Henry James very politely fought it out for
>>> the Booker in 2004?
>>>
>>> GS Frazer, writing about Henry James in 1964, said: "The novelist
>>> must recognise that the foundations of the world he walks are
>>> dangerously shifting, that we are living in a world of rapid and
>>> disturbing change, so that we can neither say with certainty when
>>> some new pattern of relative stability will emerge, nor what sort of
>>> pattern it might be. Yet the task of the novelist also, since the
>>> human heart hungers after permanence, is to project some image of
>>> permanence and to give the novel a coherence that life at large does
>>> not? possess."
>>>
>>> This is completely wrong. The task of the novelist is precisely the
>>> opposite: not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture
>>> the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that
>>> chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel, self-
>>> renewing, self-destroying, always the same, always new, always?
>>> novel? is the art of permanent chaos.
>>>
>>> And to clarify: I don't want everybody to write comedies. I just
>>> don't want everybody to write minor, anxious, banal tragedies,
>>> without thinking about why they've chosen such a crowded mode. Why
>>> all cluster under the one tree when there's a forest to explore? We
>>> do not live in tragic times. We do not live in comic times. We live
>>> in novel times.
>>>
>>> Ah well, this praising of comedy at the expense of tragedy has gone
>>> on forever. Let us go back to Greece, before Muhammad, before Christ,
>>> and let someone else have the last word. In Plato's Symposium,
>>> Aristodemus, a bit pissed, has just woken up to find "? there
>>> remained awake only Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, who were
>>> drinking out of a large goblet that was passed around, while Socrates
>>> was discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear all the discourse,
>>> for he was only half awake; but he remembered Socrates insisting to
>>> the other two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of
>>> tragedy, and that the writer of the one should also be a writer of
>>> the other. To this they were compelled to assent, being sleepy, and
>>> not quite understanding what he meant. And first Aristophanes fell
>>> asleep, and then, when the day was dawning, Agathon."
>>>
>>> "America loves a successful sociopath."
>>> --Gary Indiana
>>>
>>> Halvard Johnson
>>> ================
>>> halvard at gmail.com
>>> halvard at earthlink.net
>>> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
>>> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
>>> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
>>> http://www.hamiltonstone.org
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> New-Poetry mailing list
>>> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>>>
>>>
>>> End of New-Poetry Digest, Vol 35, Issue 35
>>> ******************************************
>>>
>>
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>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 
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