Babel by Doré

“In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.” –Robert Smithson, 1968

Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature (2006) – David P. Barash [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Adultery in literature is a theme I first explored after having seen the French film Jules et Jim (1962). It suddenly occurred to me that a number of classics in European literature deal with female infidelity. Among them are The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Ulysses (come to think of it, these were all written by male authors impersonating as it were, female protagonists). While searching for these terms I came across a review of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature (2006) which deals with the representation of human nature in literature. Having a perennial interest in thematic literary criticism, would Ovaries provide useful pointers? I’ve been combing the web on the subject, but haven’t found anyhing yet. Has someone published a taxonomy of human nature as it is presented in narratology? A list which includes love stories, adventure stories, … etc with their number of variations? Maybe some of the poststructuralists?

Would works such as Jean-Pierre Richard’s Littérature et Sensation (1954) Horst Daemmrich’s Themes and Motifs in Western Literature be an answer to my question?

I just cleaned up my Kathy Acker page and came across this 1996 interview with American author Dennis Cooper. If you read Dennis ‘s blog you will understand why his work is generally classified as transgressive fiction.

From the interview:

Q:

There was this group of writers during the 70s and 80s called “New Narrative.” Steve Abbott and Kevin Killian among them. How do you fit in with them? How are you different? What is the New Narrative all about?

DC:

No one ever figured it out. There was a group of people, but there was never anything to be involved with. People started to characterize that group of people that way. I mean, I like all those people, including Bob Gluck and Dodie Bellamy. I like all their work. I think that it never went anywhere because no one could figure out what it was. Steve Abbott invented the term. All the work was independent and experimental I guess, and it’s somehow involved with autobiography in a funny way. We all like each other’s work. Sometimes, Kathy Acker is in the group, and sometimes she’s not. And sometimes Lynne Tillman. It’s a real blurry category. There is this new book coming out about New Narrative, this year. It’s an academic book, so maybe they’ll tell us what it is.

Q:

Is it like the Nouveau Roman?

DC:

Except that the Nouveau Roman is a little bit more specific. They at least had a credo. I don’t think we have any credo. Nouveau Roman writers were all interested in the objective voice. Wasn’t that their thing? I always thought that they were like that at the beginning. They all gave up on it. All of them sold out, or became better. I think that you’re right: they’re a little more alike then we are. I may be wrong. Maybe it’s not for me to say.

Q:

I read recently a letter you wrote to Kevin Killian. I guess you were writing Closer at the time. Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis had come out and you panicked. Could you talk about that?

DC:

Where did you read that? At Kevin’s house? It was published? Oh yeah! It freaked me out. It was weird. It came out and all of my friends said “Don’t read this book, because it will really freak you out, because he writes so much like you” So I didn’t read it. Then I finished Closer. Then I read it, because I was finished with my book, so I figured whatever. And I was really freaked out about it. Now I see the difference, but at the time I thought “Oh, this kid has done all this stuff that I’m doing, and this book is a big success, and my work is so artsy compared to this.” I started to get weird. It really did freak me out. It seemed serious. When I read it, I thought that this was a serious book. There had never been a book like Less Than Zero. He did capture a certain thing. I was certainly impressed with it. Consequently, I have no interest in him at all.

What’s interesting of Acker and Cooper is their interest in French literature and French theory. One of my theories is that the course of 20th century philosophy was — I’ve sort of said this before with regards to American art criticism– as follows: After WWII, French theory, which was about to become the hippest on the ‘scene’ (see existentialism) was very much infatuated with the German philosophers of the pre-WWII era. And then subsequently American Academia fell in love with French academia (poststructuralism, postmodernism, third wave of feminism and deconstruction).

While I was in Amsterdam I asked the people in a philosophy bookstore: “If Slavoj Žižek and Sloterdijk are my two favorite philosophers, who would the third be?” They came up with Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Alain Badiou.

Of Enzensberger I know nothing.

Of Alain Badiou I know that he teaches at European Graduate School, the most ‘postmodern’ university in the world, and I found the following quote over at my site:

Alongside new developments in European horror films, there are also significant developments in their theorisation, such as the application of work by Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou. —source