Friday Quotes

This is my translation. El tunel, Ernesto Sabato (Seix Barral, 1948):

"My theory," he explained, "is as follows: in the 20th century, the political novel
represents what the chivalry novel did in Cervantes’s time. Moreover: I think
you could make something equivalent to Don Quixote: a satire of political novels.
Imagine an individual who has passed his life reading political novels and has become
crazy with the belief that the world functions like a novel by Nicholas Blake or Ellery Queen.
Imagine that at length this poor sap finally sets out to discover crimes and proceeds
through life as would a detective from one of these novels. I think
you could make something entertaining, tragic, symbolic, satirical, and beautiful."

The New Novel, Vivian Mercier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971):

Simultaneity is another aspect of time by which Joyce was greatly fascinated. One remembers the
cloud that casts a chill over both Stephen and Bloom, who are separated by many miles of Dublin and many
pages of Ulysses, or Stephen’s being caught sight of from the mourners’ coach as he is leaving
Sandymount Strand, many pages after his seaside soliloquy is over. Above all, one remembers the
"Wandering Rocks" episode, in which the doings of people all over Dublin are coordinated in relation to
time. This was a dise of Joyce that Virginia Woolfe imitated meticulously in Mrs. Dalloway. . . .

But there is another kind of simultaneity, as Finnegans Wake reminds us. At every moment of that book,
past, present, and future are simultaneously "present" or at any rate implicit. Proust’s Marcel, in
his moments of involuntary memory, sees the present invaded or occupied by the past, but he can still distinguish
which is which; it is not so with the dreamer or the reader of Finnegans Wake.