In search of literary gossip
Pages from the Goncourt Journals (1850s, 1860s) – The Goncourt brothers
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The Goncourt brothers were Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, both French Naturalism writers. They jointly wrote their long Journal des Goncourt from 1851.
Substituting pathology for psychology, their impressionist style had an intense and original precision. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goncourt_brothers [Dec 2006]
My previous post which mentions Eugène Sue got me thinking about Stephen King. Sue was one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century, yet he is now forgotten. King is one of the more popular novelists of the 20th century (according to the Index Translationum he is currently the 10th most popular novelist). Will his work be forgotten 100 years from now? Googling for “Stephen King” and “Eugéne Sue” brings up this quote on the best literature site on the net: Kirjasto:
Thomas M. Disch has noted that “readers of such current melodramatists as Stephen King or Anne Rice ought to be highly receptive to Sue’s grand excesses” (Horror: The 100 Best Books, ed. by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, 1988). —http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/esue.htm [Dec 2006]
Even if Anne Rice or Stephen King are forgotten in 100 years, horror fiction does not need ‘great‘ writers to survive. Horror is perpetually re-written. Horror and sex are at the center of the death-of-the-author-theories. Just as Faust was a reproduction of Don Juan, the writings of King and Rice are reproductions of The Mysteries of Paris and Dracula. Such is the nature of intertextualness. What some people perceive to be “great literature” is often no more than fanboyism and fashion. [Dec 2006]
P. S. Doing the same search “Stephen King” and “Eugéne Sue” brings up Dumas and John Grisham. The context is the serial novel as it was published in two Parisian cheap, advertising-based newspapers in 1830s France: La Presse and Le Siècle. “There was serious money to be made: the papers would pay up to 100,000 francs for the exclusive rights to a novel by a top-ranking author. The most popular and highly regarded of these were not necessarily writers who have held on to their places in the literary Pantheon: who now reads (or has even heard of) Frédéric Soulié or Eugène Sue?”
Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, “La Nausée” was worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters – Barbusse, Céline and so forth. Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst, and still farther back there is old Eugène Sue, to whom the melodramatic Russian owed so much. –Nabokov, Sunday, April 24, 1949 in The New York Times Book Review
Nabokov states that La Nausée “belongs to that tense-looking … type of writing”. If, as we may suppose, this type of writing did not end with the publication of La Nausée, who are its descendants? Bret Easton Ellis for example?
Although Nabokov derides two of my favorite authors (Céline and Dostoevsky), he shares my dislike for Sartre. From the same review:
Sartre’s name, I understand, is associated with a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy, and since for every so-called “existentialist” one finds quite a few “suctorialists” (if I may coin a polite term), this made-in-England translation of Sartre’s first novel. La Nausée (published in Paris in 1938) should enjoy some success.
Peter Lubin on suctorialism:
Suctorialist was first and last used (by Nabokov) in an April 24, 1949, review of a French novel for one who “reads and admires such remarkably silly nonsense as the ‘existentialists’ rig up.” An ugly word, an ugly idea, and we may leave it, along with that novel, back in 1949.
Some unrelated eyecandy:
In Consultation (1924) – Joseph Schippers
Death of Orpheus (1866) – Emile Lévy
Underground : L’Histoire (2001) – Jean-François Bizot
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Frontispice des Amours jaunes, dessin par Tristan Corbière
image sourced here.
In his 1913 essay The Serious Artist, Pound discusses two types of art; The “cult of beauty” and the “cult of ugliness”. He compares the former with medical cure and the latter with medical diagnosis, and goes on to write “Villon, Baudelaire, Corbière, Beardsley are diagnosis.” – “beauty is difficult”: Cantos LXXIV, LXXX
Two monkeys smoking pipe
Etching by Coryn Boel (1620–1668), after David Teniers
From symbolising sensory pleasure to poking fun at the follies of mankind: Lucy Cutler on the role of the monkey in art
To contemporary eyes man has become the naked ape, but this was not always the case. The similarities between monkeys and men have always been recognised, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries monkeys formed part of the great chain of being and, like men, occupied a position between angels and animals. They were linked to the angels above by virtue of sharing their faculty of reason, while also being linked to the animals below through the experience of the senses. Monkeys and apes also became emblematic of man’s baser nature; dependent on or trapped by sensory pleasure. —http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/stories/cutler_monkey.html
[Dec 2006]
The Booty (pre-1893) – Georges Rochegrosse
Etched by Eugene-Andre Champollion, sourced here
Rochegrosse (1859–1938) is above all else the painter of Flaubert’s Salammbô, which he illustrated in great detail with absolute accuracy but a complete lack of understanding. The antique pictures which the artists of the fin de siècle offer us are more often than not laborious reconstructions and pretexts to depict nudes. Dreamers of Decadence, Philippe Jullian, page 140.
French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel died in 2006. She was Freud Professor at the University College of London, and Professor of Psychopathology at the University of Lille. She is best known for her connection of the ego ideal to primary narcissism, her extension of this theory to a critique of utopian ideology and her theories on the relationship between art, creativity and perversion.
From Jahsonic:
Related: abnormal psychology – psychoanalysis – creativity – perversion
By the time of the student rebellions of May 1968, she had become a political conservative. In their anonymous 1969 book L’universe contestationnaire (reworked and published in English in 1986 as Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion), Chasseguet-Smirgel and her husband/co-author Béla Grunberger argued that the utopian political ideology of the student demonstrators, as well as of their Freudo-Marxist avatars Herbert Marcuse and Gilles Deleuze, was fueled by primary narcissism, the desire to return to the maternal womb. Further, that the very term “Freudo-Marxism” was oxymoronic–one could not reconcile the reality principle with the Communist utopia. Chasseguet-Smirgel’s analysis of Wilhelm Reich, the Freudian dissident who became an insane systematizer of the libido, explains why his orgonic theory collected followers despite its apparent wackiness.
Creativity and Perversion (1996) – Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Otto Kernberg Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
…the number of perverts involved in the field of art is probably much greater than the average for the population in general…. It can be supposed … that the pervert inclines in some particular manner to the world of art. –Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, 1984
And at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Chasseguet-Smirgel [Dec 2006]
Dan Green of The Reading Experience does not like Stephen King. I’ve read this before, in fact, according to Google, it is the 24th time that he or one of his readers call upon Stephen to discuss the strengths of literary merit. Every time someone displays a patronizingly superior attitude towards Stephen King, my nobrow instincts rise up and I feel the snobbishness as if it was directed towards me. In his latest post Dan even goes so far to say that “film adaptations of [Stephen] King’s fiction such as Brian De Palma‘s Carrie and David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone are infinitely superior to the novels on which they’re based, which in my opinion don’t rise above the level of poorly written, sub-gothic trash. (There, I’ve said it.)”
This is probably the first time I’ve read in a highbrow literary blog that a film is superior to the novel and it is of course — at least with reference to The Dead Zone and Carrie –, pure bollocks (there, I said it.). But at the same time I can understand Dan’s position. For example, I’d love to be able to watch the 1967 film adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, rather than reading it.
But I wonder: why do I defend Stephen King? I defend him because I used to be an avid reader of King and because he writes in the tradition of the “limit experience”. The tradition of transgressive fiction. He writes about states of the human condition which transcend the everyday life. He makes you curious of what life can and can’t be about.
Now is a good time to be a bit more specific about the nobrow concept. Frank McLynn will come to my aid. He calls Kingsley Amis a phoney because he maintains that: “[it is] impossible to enjoy and appreciate Westerns, film noir or private-eye fiction of the Raymond Chandler kind and acknowledged literary heavyweights like Melville, Conrad, Dostoevsky and Zola.”
But is Kingsley Amis really a phoney because he feels that?
Being nobrow is about knowing the entire corpus of literature. If you only know two colors, let’s say green and blue, you can’t call yourself an expert on colors. Likewise, if you only know highbrow literature, you can hardly call yourself an expert on literature or literary merit. The first thing you need to know when you claim to have any taste at all, is the corpus. And this is indeed the big paradox of the nobrow position. You can only call yourself nobrow if you know the corpus of both high and low culture. And then you have to make your own choices. If you only know high culture, you are not nobrow. If you only know low culture, you are not nobrow. In practice, this means, that for being a nobrow person, you come from the highbrow position.
This, however, does not mean that I am against a canon of sorts. Being in education, I recognize the need for a canon, for a curriculum. And I suppose that we all want to define our own literary canons. And my plea is include King in the 20th century literary canon, just as we’ve included Bram Stoker from the 19th literary canon and Sade from that of the 18th century. Please do not exclude literature from the canon on grounds of its content.
I’m not saying that Dan and other Stephen King bashers despise Stephen King’s books solely on the basis of their content (otherwise critics such as Dan wouldn’t like the films based on his novels), but I do get the feeling that most of this rejection is for a large measure based on content related rather than style related criteria.
Which reminds me of Susan Sontag’s On Style:
It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. … In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature. … Many critics appear not to realize this. They think themselves sufficiently protected by a theoretical disclaimer on the vulgar filtering-off of style from content, all the while their judgments continue to reinforce precisely what they are, in theory, eager to deny.
I stumbled on the document excerpted below by researching the 1934 quote by André Breton “Have professed absolute surrealism“, and it got me to modify my page on Surrealism and give more prominence to my perennial favourite and “dissident surrealist” Georges Bataille.
Apparently American modern art criticism as professed by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster has been much influenced by Bataille. Although I should add that it has not only been Bataille who influenced American art and literary criticism; the whole of French theory has had an enormous — and by some much bemoaned — influence on postmodern American theory, much like German theory was influential in post-war France.
When considering Spanish Surrealism, André Breton’s Freudian-based models of automatism and subconscious manifestations predominantly occupy the majority of the attention given. While these frameworks are at least partially relevant within the scope of the early twentieth-century poetry and art, other models that have been overlooked deserve due attention. Namely, the philosophical approximations concerning informe (formlessness), “the excremental,” and “the ethnographic” as developed by the French thinker Georges Bataille–a renegade surrealist–are of great importance and need elucidation. Even though critics such as Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster have elaborated on these Bataillean motifs in their examination of contemporary art, the influence of these theories in early twentieth-century Spain has not been extensively examined. The contention here is that Bataille’s ideas of the twenties and thirties amplify our understanding of the literature of the poets of the literary Generation of 1927 in Spain, many of them so-called surrealists. In Michael Richardson’s words, “Bataille’s understanding concentrates on elements [like ethnography and informe] within surrealism that few critics have recognized, and thus gives us a new perspective on what surrealism may mean”.
… This dialogue [between France and Spain] is evident when considering Hispanic avant-gardists such as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alejo Carpentier, and others, who continually cross borders and establish a correspondence between the Parisian, Hispanic, and Catalan artistic ambiences. Of particular interest here is a detailed examination of this rethinking of the surreal (in Bataillean terms) in one of the most disputed works of the period on the Spanish front: Federico García Lorca’s 1929 collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York. –David. F Richter via ~david.f.richter/Informeing%20Lorca2.pdf