Category Archives: literature

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony

My copy of Praz’s The Romantic Agony arrived Thursday, with an introduction by Frank Kermode and the famous Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c.1485) by Memling on the cover. At times it reads as the gossip pages from the Decadents. Here is a quote on the supposed impotence of Baudelaire:

“[The] case of Baudelaire’s exotic exclusiveness will be understood, and of his strange conduct towards Madame Sabatier, and it can be why so many people give credit to the rumour reported by Nadar. (Baudelair’s impotence, generally admitted in this case, is denied by Flottes.)” pages 153 and 187 of The Romantic Agony.

It seems that I was wrong about Praz’s ‘panning’ of the decadence of late romantic literature. In his introduction Praz that it is his aim to describe the what-is-ness of this sensibility (morbidity and perversion) in romantic literature.

The Arcades Project arrived in the mail today

Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927 – 1940) arrived in the mail today. See my entry at Jahsonic as well as my previous blog entry.

The first thing to catch my eye was this Coetzee review on the back cover:

“[The Arcades Project] suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And [Benjamin’s] call elsewhere for a history centered on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime…”What does The Arcades Project have to offer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind’s trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, polished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects…and glimpses of Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a ‘magic encyclopedia’…[A] magnificent opus.”
–J. M. Coetzee, The Guardian

More appraisals from Harvard University Press

I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London

A friend of mine, who is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day, as if between jest and earnest,–” Fancy! since we last met, I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London.”

“Really haunted?–and by what? ghosts?”

“Well, I can’t answer that question; all I know is this–six weeks ago my wife and I were in search of a furnished apartment. Passing a quiet street, we saw on the window of one of the houses a bill, ‘Apartments Furnished.’ The situation suited us: we entered the house–liked the rooms–engaged them by the week–and left them the third day. No power on earth could have reconciled my wife to stay longer; and I don’t wonder at it.” —The House and the Brain, also know as The Haunted and the Haunters (1857) by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton via here.

Lytton is famous for his cliché first sentence: “It was a dark and stormy night”

See also: haunted – horror fiction – 1857

Serendipity

Searching for kafka+gogol+nose+metamorphosis (inspired by Todorov’s likening of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Gogol’s The Nose) I re-find Alan Gullete. And via Alan I find Danill Kharms whose photograph below is striking to say the least.

Daniil Kharms, photo credit unidentified

Daniil Kharms (1905 – 1942) was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. Kharms lived in debt and hunger for several years until his final arrest on suspicion of treason in the summer of 1941. He was imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1. and died in his cell in February, 1942 — most likely, from starvation. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniil_Kharms [Nov 2006]

Via Alan Gullette http://alangullette.com/lit/absurd/ who I’ve mentioned before here. His literary entry page features pages supernatural, surreal, absurd, et al literature.

There is now only one fantastic object: man

Quoting from Todorov’s book on the fantastic, page 173, Todorov seems to hold that Sartre has a similar view on fantastic literature to his own:

“According to Sartre, Blanchot and Kafka no longer try to depict extraordinary beings; for them,

there is now only one fantastic object: man. Not the man of religions and spiritualisms, only half committed to the world of the body, but man-as-given, man-as-nature, man-as-society, the man who takes of his hat when a hearse passes, who kneels in churches, who marches behind a flag.

The quote by Sartre is taken from his article on Blanchot’s récit Aminadab, published in Situations.

There’s no English equivalent of the French récit, which names a literary genre which tells of a single event. A few dense notes on what this word comes to mean for Blanchot in The Book to Come and elsewhere. —http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2006/06/what_is_the_rel.html

[Nov 2006]

Tolkien

Although I recently stated that I only want to do appreciative criticism, I want to investigate why I don’t like Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. I do like the fantastique and fantastic literature as defined by Todorov.

On a sidenote I’ve noticed that people who like Tolkien also like Harry Potter for which I have very little enthusiasm. Again, why?

Googling for Todorov (who is the leading authority on the fantastique) in combination with Tolkien brings up this:

Key critics such as Rosemary Jackson, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Tzvetan Todorov all see Tolkien as beyond their parameters. Jackson’s work is largely concerned with fantasy elements within realist literature, while Todorov and Brooke-Rose see Tolkien as a creator of secondary worlds, no longer a fantasy writer, but a creator of the marvellous, placing him outside their studies. –Sara Upstone via http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OON/is_4_23/ai_99848429

The keyword is marvelous, which according to Todorov does not belong in the fantastic/que category.

And googling for Tolkien and irrealism brings the Cafe Irreal:

[J].R.R. Tolkien, who not only had to create a whole new world from scratch, but one which he could only visit in his imagination. And yet Tolkien (and the various other genre fantasy and science-fiction writers) are not irreal writers. For, having imagined a new world, a Tolkien proceeds to make it so real and concrete for us (by giving it laws, mythologies and governments) that we could visit it, if it existed, like we would visit an exotic island — surprised by the customs of the people and the creatures that inhabit its jungles, but feeling very much as if we were in the category of the real. Like the realist writer, he tries to concretize the unreal. –G.S. Evans in IRREALISM AND THE DREAM-STATE via http://home.sprynet.com/~awhit/tirr_dre.htm [Nov 2006]

The key phrase in this little investigation is “Having imagined a new world, Tolkien proceeds to make it so real and concrete for us, … making it very much as if we were in the category of the real. Like the realist writer, he tries to concretize the unreal.” By doing so he takes out all the ambiguity, ambivalence, unresolvedness, unreliability and uncertainty that makes the fantastique what I find so attractive in it.

In the words of Jan Beardsly commenting on Todorov:

Todorov distinguishes the fantastic from two other modes, the uncanny and the marvelous. While these modes have some of the ambiguity of the fantastic, they ultimately offer a resolution governed by natural laws (the uncanny) or the supernatural (the marvelous). –Jan Bardsley via http://www.unc.edu/~bardsley/ghosts/todorov.html

A final quote on uncertainty by Todorov:

“The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty….The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (p. 25).

What is irrealism?

See https://artandpopularculture.com/Irrealism.

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire’s World provides English – language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet’s work. –from the publisher

Though it is often said Charles Baudelaire published only a single volume of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, this is untrue if you count his published prose poetry such as Spleen de Paris.

See also: Charles Baudelaire – modernist poetry

Black Hole (2005) – Charles Burns

Black Hole (2005) – Charles Burns
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Charles Burns (born September 27, 1955) is an award-winning U.S. cartoonist and illustrator. He is renowned for his meticulous, high-contrast and creepy artwork and stories. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles Burns [Nov 2006]

His work is similar to fellow Fantagraphics artist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World).

Charles Burns Google gallery

See also: graphic novel – the new flesh – illustration

There can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz

It has often been said that the unique nature of the Holocaust “challenges our imagination with a nearly impossible task” (Lawrence Langer). “There can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz,” Maurice Blanchot asserted. And Adorno: “After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation.” I believe that these words — these transformed fictional narratives — exist, and that they already existed before Auschwitz. Artaud hallucinating his own death or Bataille his own dismemberment, Simone Weil embracing the abjection of assembly line work or Céline carried away by an insane racist rage — these writers were not acting on their own either. By making the unimaginable their very subject, these artists provided us with that fraction of truth which scholars of the Holocaust are vainly seeking. — Sylvère Lotringer, The Art of Evil in FAT Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 1, 1994, 1995 via http://www.thing.net/~fat/vol1no1/sylvere.htm

Sylvère Lotringer is professor of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University and general editor of Semiotext(e). He frequently lectures on art.