Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
More on Bolano’s Journalist
Steve Mitchelmore finds this while making a broader point about Joyce vis a vis modernism:
Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kakfa and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every ‘letting go’ has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.
It is perhaps a weakness of Joyce and not just a fact about him that he is such a godsend to the academic community. For there is ultimately something cosy and safe about Ulysses: underlying it is the belief that the mere accumulation of detail and complexity is an unquestioned good. Far from being ‘the decisive English-language book of the [twentieth] century,’ as Kenner suggests, it is perhaps the last great book of the nineteenth.
These remarks strike me at an interesting time, wherein I’m re-reading Pynchon and not finding him wholly to my liking. I think there are certain similarities with Joyce. Pynchon’s way of “letting go” is always situated within a certain set of ideas he wants to get across. Some stretches of Pynchon’s work are quite brilliant, so brilliant in fact that one is encouraged to just break them out of the novel and enjoy them on their own, since, in the context of the larger work, they always end up reducing themselves back to that grand design.
This, I think, gets back to my main critique of David Foster Wallace, who also seemed unable to let his work simply be. (Perhaps there is something to these massive novels of information. I would say that, like Joyce, Wallace and Pynchon harken back to the 19th century more than people who are obsessed with reading them as postmodernists seem to think.) Infinite Jest succeeds, in my opinion, on the fact that it got away from him despite his best efforts to pin it down to certain certainties he wanted to express.
You Might Also Like:
More from Conversational Reading:
- Can Always Count on Lev I see that the esteemed "critic" Lev Grossman makes that GQ article on Pale King look like a genius work. . . . continue reading,...
- James Joyce Died Today in 1941 Having written Ulysses about the day, I wanted to write this book about the night. . . . Since 1922 my book has been a...
- William Deresiewicz on The Pale King Deresiewicz's candor is refreshing, but why the "it may be heresy"? It's not. He's absolutely right. For all the postmodern nonsense people want to strap...
- Building a Better Book No, I really don't think this is going to make the Kindle lose sleep, but the “flipback” book might have some cool uses. Here's what...
- Consider the Lobster The Consider the Lobster reviews are coming fast and furious. One of them is up on kottle.org. (via Dave) Here’s the money quote: A common...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
That’s an interesting distinction, one similar to what Wood applies to Bernard/Kraz in his New Yorker piece.
I don’t, however, see one way or the other as a superior idea. It’s possible free-floaters do more to expand what our language can do, and the more grounded show us new possibilities of attaching language to real life experience. For me, Joyce is great precisely because he not only does both of these things, but he’s the best at both.
I think this is a staggeringly wrong-headed comment of Steve’s. Joyce is the ultimate in letting go. He lets any idea superimpose itself on the structure and content of his final two works, allowing all thoughts, schemata, and systems to conjoin in contradiction with one another, such that the work grows beyond the limits of Joyce’s own thought. I am convinced this was his intention, but it being conscious and concerted does not make it any less open-ended. Proust, Beckett, and Woolf are far more “closed” in their admission of meaning than Joyce, and I say that as a great lover of all three. (Kafka is as open-ended, in his own way, while I can’t count myself a huge admirer of Eliot.)
Oh drat, I meant to link to this explication of Joyce as an example of what I’m talking about: The Linear and the Circular in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
To be fair, the remarks about Joyce, wrongheaded or not, are Josipovici’s, not Mitchelmore’s.
about which also, fwiw:
http://grandhotelabyss.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/josipovici-vs-joyce-1/