Category Archives: literature

The Abduction of Europe (1993) – Cees Nooteboom

Abduction of Europa (1908) – Félix Vallotton

I’m currently reading Cees Nooteboom‘s 1993 essay bundle De Ontvoering van Europa (Eng: The Abduction of Europe), dedicated to the question of a European identity.

I read Nooteboom’s Rituelen while in my twenties and I had largely forgotten about him. It strikes me now how he is probably one of the foremost intellectual writers of Europe and also a true European in the sense that he divides his time between Amsterdam, Berlin, and the Spanish islands. Petri Liukkonen says that he “has been frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature”.

Here is my translation of an excerpt on France’s fear of American cultural imperialism (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Dallas and Dynasty):

… if we give Europe’s indigenous cable television moguls a chance, we will soon enough prove that we are capable of producing television series equally bad as those in America, and that the French secret weapon of MacBaudrillard and MacDerrida is wreaking just as much havoc at American universities as harmless McDonald’s in Europe.

See also: Rituals at the Existence Machine and All Soul’s Day at This Space.

P. S. : It’s interesting to note that the concept of abduction as it relates to the mythological figure of Europa is interchangeable with the terms rape and seduction. The Wikipedia article states that “the [latter] two being near-equivalent in Greek myth.” I had encountered this before when reading about Don Juan who is depicted as either a seducer, rapist or murderer, depending on who’s doing the analysis. The American Production code (the forerunner of the MPAA, the current American film rating system) said of the depiction of seduction and rape (intimately locating them in one entry): “They should never be more than suggested, and only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown by explicit method.”

Admittedly I may be influenced too much by 1990s feminist discourse in locating these similarities, but here is one more pointer: History of Rape, Abduction, and Seduction in European Art and Literature

What is realism in literature?

Parents: realism – literature

Truth (1870) – Jules Joseph Lefebvre

By definition, fiction is “untruth.” Since untruth is contrary to truth, and because truth is a virtue, does that not make untruth found in fiction a vice? –anonymous catholic quote

 

In literature realism refers to verisimilitude of narrative (whether or not a story is believable) or to verisimilitude of characterization (whether or not the characters are believable). Verisimilitude was introduced in literature when – in the latter half of the second millenium – the novel replaced the romance as primary literary genre.

The novel or the modern novel introduced realism in fiction, at a time when much fiction was marked by fantasy (romances such Amadís de Gaula, Le Morte d’Arthur). The devices used to introduce realism were the epistolary technique (Pamela), true adventure (Crusoe) and psychological development of the characters (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black). Literary realism as a full-fledged literary movement (first called realism and then naturalism) came into being in Europe in the 19th century. In France the movement’s main exponents were Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola, in Scandinavia there was August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen and in Russia Chekhov. The novelist George Eliot introduced realism into English fiction; as she declared in Adam Bede (1859), her purpose was to give a “faithful representation of commonplace things.” Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were the pioneers of realism in the United States.

See also: realism in film – realism in literature – realism in the visual arts

“Will I disturb your writing if I vacuum?”

Woman: “Will I disturb your writing if I vacuum?”

Bukowski: “Nothing can disturb my writing, it’s a disease.”

Via The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) – which arrived in the mail yesterday. I don’t find it as enjoyable as 1001 Books I’ve been raving about but in contrast to the latter, it has more cross-media references to music and film. Notably absent are Ian McEwan and Iain Banks. Also, mostly 20th century literature.

The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) – Michaela Bushell, Helen Rodiss Paul Simpson [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Renunciation of a vocation

Having read about Rimbaud’s life (and how he had stopped writing altogether) in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, I re-read The Aesthetics of Silence by Susan Sontag. It’s incredible how Sontag – who was only 34 at the time this essay was published – reaches an impeccable style and an enormous lucidity. An excerpt:

The scene changes to an empty room.

Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. —…

The essay is published in the bundel Styles of Radical Will, which also features the seminal The Pornographic Imagination (1967).

Amazon connections

Dear reader,

Nerval by Nadar

Of all online recommendation engines, Amazon’s ‘customers who bought this also bought this’ has proven itself the most useful. Allow me to illustrate what I mean. A while back I added The Other Side (Dedalus European Classics) to my Alfred Kubin page which brought The Maimed (1923) by Hermann Ungar to my attention.

The Maimed connects to Hell by Henri Barbusse, Dark Spring (1970) by Hans Bellmer companion Unica Zürn, Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (1932) by Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo, The Obscene Bird of Night (1970) by Chilean writer José Donoso, Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, Moravagine (1926) by Blaise Cendrars (who once called the French cinematic serial Fantômas “the modern Aeneid”), Aurelia by French writer of the fantastique Gérard De Nerval and decadent classic Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont.

The above looks like a decent list of cult fiction.

When books by Dedalus are central, the connections turn out to be particularly undergroundish.

Do you want links to the names mentioned in this article? Click here if you do.

In the illusory babels of language …

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

Bio-Lit-Crit

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?

An interview with Dennis Cooper

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

Did Bach find Coetzee, or did Coetzee find Bach?

 

Stranger Shores: Literary Essays (2001) – J. M. Coetzee
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In an essay entitled ‘What is a Classic?’ Coetzee includes commentary on his early confrontation with the classics, and the political direction it might have lent him. Taking a cue from Eliot’s 1944 lecture of the same title [in which Eliot asserts that classic status can be known “only by hindsight and in historical perspective.”], Coetzee speaks of the classic in this way: “What does it mean in living terms to say that a classic is what survives? How does such a concept of the classic manifest itself in people’s lives?” This statement brings the classic from its supposed transcendental realm into the hurly-burly of history and makes it amenable not to passing fashions but to the sustaining values of each epoch. Whatever survives history’s ephemera, ‘that,’ according to Coetzee, ‘is the classic.’

In the first moment of aesthetic rapture upon hearing Bach, Coetzee muses: was the spirit of that culture ‘speaking to me across the ages … or … was [I] symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take me out of my class position in white South African society … of what I must have felt … an historical dead end? (10-11).

The novelist and essayist—now Nobel prize winner—JM Coetzee, in his provocative essay, ‘What is a Classic? A Lecture’ considers the possibility that we may read for self-centred, pragmatic reasons: the drive for economic and social power. He re-examines his first contact, as a young man, with a classic musical text which he felt, he says, ‘was speaking to me across the ages, putting before me certain ideals.’ Later in his life, he interrogates his response sceptically, wondering whether he was, in fact, ‘symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take (him) out of (his) class position in white South African society?’ He puts the question succinctly: ‘Was the experience a disinterested and … impersonal aesthetic experience or was it really the masked expression of a material interest?’ In his essay, Coetzee finally draws away from this sceptical account of his motives, but the doubt placed at the centre of the essay compels our attention. — Hermina Burns via http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1308292.htm

Amsterdam

I spent a couple of days with D_______ in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is about 200 kilometers from Antwerp.

Books are my thing these days and my first stop was Kok antiquarian books, where I found Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson; a German non-fiction book on popular literature called Trivialliteratur (1981) by Peter Domagalski; Robert Darnton’s excellent The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), a Dutch book titled Verboden boeken (1989) (Eng: Forbidden Books).

I got to see Oldboy, the second fim I saw by Korean director Park Chan-wook in his vengeance trilogy (I still have to catch Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). Just as a couple of months ago, I was very much impressed. It’s a film by a man who is locked away in a private prison for fifteen years without knowing why. When he is released he is contacted by the man who imprisoned him and the quest on why he was imprisoned begins. The film is sufficiently bizar and rather poetical (“when a man laugs, the world laughs with him, when a man cries, he cries alone”). Park’s films are unlike anything I’ve seen in European or American cinema over the last years, combining the spirit of European countercultural cinema of the 1960s and 1970s (a critique of Asian post-industrial society) with the transgressions of 1990s Japanese cinema (think Audition and Tetsuo). Chance would have it that a novel by Sylvia Plath (I’m reading The Bell Jar at the moment) is featured in the film (by a character who appropriately later commits suicide). Over at Wikipedia the film is described as Sophoclean tragedy because it has incest as plot element.

The Frans Hals museum:

The Monk and the Nun (1591) – Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem

This particular painting is an illustration on how the clergy has been satirized in the history of art and literature in a genre that today would be called somewhat irrevently ‘nunsploitation‘, but which can be traced to the 17th century epistolary novel Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) and in the visual arts to the work above.

Image sourced here. (follow link for a nice compilation on the naked breast in art)

We went to the Frans Hals museum where I saw a couple of paintings by Goltzius, Van Heemskercke and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem which were to my liking. Though Hals has been attributed as being a precursor to impressionism because of the hasty brushwork of his latter period — and a generally acclaimed artist — I wasn’t much impressed with Hals’s work, which mainly consisted of portraits of the elite of Haarlem. In the museum shop I found the amazing photorealistic paintings by Pieter Claesz.

Vanitasstilleven met nautilusbeker en pomander aan een gouden ketting (1636) – Pieter Claesz