Category Archives: literature

Music is the essence of Romanticism

“Music is the essence of Romanticism,” says Colin Wilson in Private Passions interviewed by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3’s about his taste in music. He adds that Nietzsche wanted to be a musician but then decided against it because it would have been too dangerous for him.

Via Stephen’s This Space who admits being a bit ~~ashamed~~ embarrassed of having read so much Wilson.

Some more quotes from this programme:

“You can’t put philosophical ideas into music, the only thing that interests me.”

“Ritual in the Dark is a novel about a sadist, and I used Prokofiev as a leitmotif because it was a dark piece of music.”

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Joycean, Ballardian, …

Unfutz on Auctorial descriptives

Kafkaesque, Phildickian, Hemingwayesque, Orwellian, Joycean, Shavian, Ballardian, Shakespearean, Dickensian, Jamesian, Faulknerian, Brechtian, Pinteresque, Mametesque, Lovecraftian, Tolkienesque (or Tolkienian), Proustian, Seussian.

Any others?

Yes, there is Bataillean and Bretonian, Pirandellian, Beatlesque, Sadean (not to mention sadistic), Borgesian, Bellmeresque, Byronic (an interesting one because of its -ic-suffix), Freudian and platonic.

Once an author has been ‘adjectivized’ he has become a stereotype. Nevertheless, it is the ultimate compliment and the surest sign of longevity.

Wikipedia has:

Auctorial descriptives are a series of adjectives based on authors’ names, such as Kafkaesque, Brechtian, Joycean, Orwellian, Pinteresque, Sadistic/Sadism, Machiavellian, and Draconian.

More?

Pure examples of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art

Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room on one of my favourite subjects, by way of John Carey, one of my favourite nobrow art and literature critics whose The Intellectuals and the Masses was one of the more enlightening reads of 2006:

I’m currently reading John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts?, a book designed to provoke all art-lovers into a steaming maelstrom of outrage. …

Carey will ultimately dismiss the distinction between high and low art as impossible to maintain, but I think we can do something better than that with it. First of all we have to stop seeing the categories of high and low as being mutually exclusive. Quite a lot of operas, for instance, will include elements of farce, or romance, or pantomime, just as a television cartoon ostensibly for children, like The Simpsons, is a fantastic example of relentlessly subversive, parodic, allusive elements disguised under a sugary outer coating. So it’s incredibly rare, in my opinion, to come across a pure example of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art. What we get is far more complex and mixed up than that. The way I would distinguish between those high and low elements, is to see ‘low’ or commercial or mass media art as being formulated in order to satisfy the desires and expectations of its audience. Take Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance books, for instance. … The whole point of these books is that they comfort and reassure readers by providing them with exactly what they want. By comparison, we might define those ‘high’ elements of art as the ones that challenge or question our expectations, whether they be about the world we live in, or the way that an artwork ‘ought’ to be put together […]

I like litlove’s analysis of what makes the difference between high and low culture:

Low art comforts, satisfies and reassures audiences’ expectations
High art challenges and questions audiences’ expectations

But I disagree with the statement “it’s incredibly rare to come across a pure example of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art.” I believe that the overwhelming majority of cultural artifacts lack this ambiguity, unresolvedness and ambivalence; this simultaneous jarring and soothing I desire so. Coming back to the proposed low art/high art definitions, the keywords are audience and expectations, but also — from the perspective of the author — demanding (of the audience), which reminds me somewhat of Walter Benjamin’s assessment:

The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. –WAAMR, Walter Benjamin, 1936

The keyword in Benjamin’s quote is demanding:

As I wrote in the introduction of my Literature/literature page:

Literature is a term (like taste, culture, quality and style) that carries its own value judgement: Literature (with capital L, also called literary fiction) is associated with serious, complex, difficult and demanding works like Modernist literature (e.g. James Joyce) and experimental novels (e.g. Nouveau Roman).

On the other side of the spectrum are popular fiction and genre fiction, which are perceived as easy, accessible and of low literary merit.

Jahsonic.com aims to show that good works can be found in high and low literary genres, and the more interesting works are to be found where high and low intersect (Cervantes, Stephen King, Simenon, Georges Bataille, …). [Oct 2005]

Litlove’s invoking of romantic fiction also reminds me of a recent post by TeachMeTonight who is teaching a romance fiction class and who demonstrates that there is still a divide between literary fiction and genre fiction and thus between low and high culture:

This quarter at DePaul I’m teaching a brand new class on popular romance fiction. … In a curiously appropriate twist, my course competes for students this quarter with another Senior Seminar for majors: a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s as though my colleague Jim and I had agreed to divide the literary world between us, with one course focused on what is perhaps the most highly-regarded novel of the 20th century (indeed, the book voted “best novel of the century” a few years back) and the other devoted to the most popular genre of the 20th century. By some odd coincidence, the students in my course are all women. I guess the boys have better things to do. […]

A final post by cultureby.com which divides cultural critics in those who defend and reject high/low culture:

Be it resolved:

that commercial culture is compromised culture

Pro:

F.R. and Q.D. Leavis
Robert and Helen Lynd
Richard Hoggart
Helmut Minow
John Berger
Christopher Lasch
Neil Postman
Noam Chomsky
Hilton Kramer
Stuart Ewen
Christopher Lasch
Thomas Frank
Benjamin Barber

Contra:

Lloyd Warner
Herbert Gans
John Carey
John Docker
Warren Susman
H.S. Bhabra
Robert Thompson
Tyler Cowen
Charles Paul Freund

See also: culture war – ‘high culture’ – ‘low culture’

I was advised on all hands not to write this book

Oscar Wilde

I was advised on all hands not to write this book, and some English friends who have read it urge me not to publish it.

“You will be accused of selecting the subject,” they say, “because sexual viciousness appeals to you, and your method of treatment lays you open to attack.

“You criticise and condemn the English conception of justice, and English legal methods: you even question the impartiality of English judges, and throw an unpleasant light on English juries and the English public—all of which is not only unpopular but will convince the unthinking that you are a presumptuous, or at least an outlandish, person with too good a conceit of himself and altogether too free a tongue.”

I should be more than human or less if these arguments did not give me pause. I would do nothing willingly to alienate the few who are still friendly to me. But the motives driving me are too strong for such personal considerations. — from the introduction to Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions (1916) – Frank Harris

Of human hunting

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

The French title to the film adaptation was Les Chasses du comte Zaroff , as depicted here on the cover of French magazine Midi- Minuit Fantastique, issue 6 of June 1963

Excerpt from the story, where the protagonist finds out what general Zaroff actually means:

“I wanted the ideal animal to hunt,” explained the general. “So I said, `What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?’ And the answer was, of course, `It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason.”‘

“But no animal can reason,” objected Rainsford.

“My dear fellow,” said the general, “there is one that can.”

“But you can’t mean–” gasped Rainsford.

“And why not?”

“I can’t believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke.”

“Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting.”

—–The Most Dangerous Game (1924) is a famous short story by Richard Connell

I can’t see Borges yet

That Donald Cammell has been influenced by Borges may be further illustrated by two more examples. His 1977 film Demon Seed – a visionary but unsettling work where an AI named Proteus attempts to conceive a child with a human woman – contains a scene where a programmer discusses the paradox of Shi Huang Ti, as related by Borges in The Wall and the Books. The second example is more grim, as it involves Cammell’s suicide. After shooting himself in the head with a shotgun, he remarked to his wife that he “couldn’t see Borges yet.” He died a few moments later, with the ambulance on its way to his home. —themodernworld.com

Borges and film (also at themodernworld)

Highest rated films based on stories by Borges (IMDb)

A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him

Borges largely preferred genre fiction to literary fiction:

André Maurois … wrote, “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges had read everything, and especially what nobody reads anymore[emphasis mine]: the Kabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound — he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas — but it is vast.” Maurois was mostly correct; Borges read everything, but there was a lot he didn’t finish, including “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Madame Bovary,” Proust and Thomas Mann. A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him (the major exception being the French symbolist poets, especially Paul Valéry). The last great modernist of 20th century literature drew his primary inspiration not from other modernists but from styles and modes of literature (fables, folk tales, ancient epics) that had become proud words on dusty shelves and from writers of prose and poetry such as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton (particularly the Father Brown mysteries), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Irish fabulist Lord Dunsany, and Argentine “gaucho” poets, writers who, for one reason or another, Western literature had relegated to the twilight realm of the praised but unread. He preferred genre literature to the deep-dish classics. –“Borges: A Life” by Edwin Williamson via http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2004/08/27/borges/index_np.html?pn=3 [Jan 2007]

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) – Marquis de Sade

Related: French literature – novel – Marquis de Sade – 1790s

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) – Marquis de Sade
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
A new edition with a cover by Tomer Hanuka (Google gallery)

Philosophy in the Bedroom (La Philosophie Dans le Boudoir) is a play written by the Marquis de Sade in 1795 in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Depending on one’s point of view, it is either a philosophical work laced with erotica, or just pornography.

No Borges, no Verne, no Wells

One of my favourite reads of last year was Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970). It introduced me to a whole range of primarily French 19th century literature and its dissection of genre is one of the best you’ll find anywhere. The book has its shortcomings too, but these have more to do with the tautological nature of genre construction which is inherent in the notion of genre itself (see here).

I also read Borges’s The Book of Sand last year and I am currently re-reading it. Borges is a master of mixing the real with the imaginary and I was surprised to find no mention of Borges in The Fantastic.

So I did a search for Borges+Todorov and stumbled on this article by Lew on the excellent Depauw website where I had spent time before. From Lew’s assessment of Todorov’s book, the keyword is “sample”:

Since structuralism in literary studies is largely of French origin, this attempt to ruin its reputation takes as its motto the words of a Frenchman, Pierre Bertaux: “At one time it was hoped that the beginnings of a formalization of the humanities analogous [to that of the sciences] could be expected from structuralism. Unfortunately, it appears today that precisely the loudest advocates of structuralism have let it degenerate into a mythology—and not even a useful one.” I fully agree with this verdict. However, inasmuch as it is difficult to expose in a single article the barrenness of a whole school of thought—one moreover which has spawned divergent tendencies, since every author has his own “vision” of the subject—I will limit myself to dissecting Tzvetan Todorov’s book The Fantastic. The author begins by deriding the investigator who would, before proceeding to description of a genre, engage in endless reading of actual works. Todorov’s “sample” of works discussed, as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy: all of SF is represented by two short stories. We get, instead, E.T.A. Hoffman, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka—and that is about all. What this structural account proclaims to us as the bounds of the fantastic is really quite an antique piece of furniture: the bed of Procrustes. –Stanislaw Lem via http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/4/lem4art.htm [Jan 2007]

The two of us should take a walk together

“Ulrica invited me to her table. She told me that she liked going out for walks alone. Recalling a joke of Schopenhauer’s, I replied: ‘The two of us should take a walk together.'” —Jorge Luis Borges in Ulrica

Ulrica is a short story that deals with casual sex, 1970s style, published in The Book of Sand.

There has been discussion of Borges’ attitudes to sex and women. Estela Canto, who had known Borges since 1944, asserted in Borges a contraluz (1989) that Borges’ attitude to sex was one of “panicked terror”. According to Canto, Borges’ father had arranged a meeting between his son and a prostitute, out of a concern that a nineteen-year-old Argentine boy should not be a virgin. –Wikipedia

Sex and women are two very problematic components in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges: the absence of these two elements, which seems so casual and unremarkable, really highlights the strangeness of their exclusion. For example, scenes of sexual acts are almost totally lacking in Borgesian writing (Emma Zunz’s sexual encounter with an anonymous sailor is the most notable exception) and even the most veiled suggestion of erotic activities is limited to only a very few stories. –Herbert J. Brant, The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges’ “El muerto” and “La intrusa”

There are, however, instances in Borges writings of heterosexual love and attraction. The story “Ulrica” from The Book of Sand tells a romantic tale of heterosexual desire, love, trust and sex. –Wikipedia