A Note on Links
More Essays by Milan
Speaking of Distraction
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Another Review of The Novel: An Alternative History
The Orange Eats Creeps
The Unconsoled and the Annihilation of Plot
Right now I'm in the midst of Rex
The narrator of Rex simply idolizes Proust. He loves him so much that he won't even say Proust's name: he just calls him the Writer. And he thinks that everything knowable in the world can be found within In Search of Lost Time
Now, in contrast to the Writer is the Commentator, who kind of resembles the omega to Proust's alpha. The narrator eventually drops enough hints that we understand that the Commentator is none other than Borges. Essentially, where the Writer holds the power of creation, the Commentator can only create by commenting on what has come before. While it's clear that Rex's narrator sees the Writer as clearly superior to the Commentator, he does admit that the latter has a little something to his credit (though not nearly as much as the Writer does). Again, it's hard to say just what is meant by calling Borges the Commentator, but my brief explanation gives the basic idea.
Though I have some issues with this schema, these are nonetheless wonderfully fascinating archetypes to try and fit writers into, not in the least because their exact boundaries remain unclear. As I was mulling this over through the weekend, I came to the conclusion that they roughly correspond to modernist/postmodernist (at least as understood by someone like Enrique Vila-Matas), as well as to Harold Bloom's concept of the strong and the weak poet (but this does get a little complicated, since Bloom would probably say that everyone, strong or weak, a commentator to a certain degree, with Shakespeare, and perhaps some of the ancients, being the Writer).
In light of what I'm about to say, I want to be clear that I'm not using Writer or Commentator in a pejorative way. They're simply descriptive terms that I find interesting, and possibly useful. And so, with that disclaimer in mind, I now ask you: which of our contemporary (or near-contemporary) authors fit into the category Writer, and which fit into the category Commentator?
Here are my own highly debatable guesses.
| Writer Proust Philip Roth Cormac McCarthy Steve Erickson Kazuo Ishiguro William T. Vollmann Norman Rush Haruki Murakami Richard Powers |
In Between
Don DeLillo |
Commentator Borges Nicholson Baker Enrique Vila-Matas Aleksandr Hemon David Foster Wallace Salman Rushdie |
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)
Muy interesante. Tengo mis dudas. Veo claro al sitio que quieras llegar cuando dices que DeLillo está in between (sobre todo por la voz de White Noise y la de Underworld). No lo tengo tan claro con Sebald. Quizá su autoficción ensayística despiste, pero diría que está más cerca de Vila-Matas que de Roth (del Roth novelístico, claro, no del Roth de The Facts). La presencia de Saunders me desconcierta.
Creo que otro in-betweener sería Fresán. La voz de Fresán es harto interesante porque se mueve entre la especulación de Vila-Matas y la descripción totalizadora de Proust. Sería otra conexión muy estimulante.
Lots to think about here! I wonder how (or whether) this could line up with Barthes’ distinction between “readerly” (lisible) and “writerly” (scriptible) texts—recently put to good use by Steven Moore, in The Novel: An Alternative History (at least the introductory chapter, which I picked up at MLA).
Matt,
That’s another interesting way to think about the dichotomy. Though I must add that after reading (and liking very much) S/Z, I’m still not completely clear on what Barthes meant by “readerly” and “writerly”
S/Z itself has been a while for me—and Moore makes it clear that he’s adapting to for his own purposes. What’s interesting is that his history presents the “writerly” text as the over/underdog, the perversely neglected star of the history of the novel. Does the writer/commentator schema also lead to mistakes about priority? Actually, I think Rex is genuinely about that, at least in part.
It’s ironic Proust is the epitome of the non-commentator because – given the definition of commentator here – he is also clearly commentating on what went on before: think of the old title translation, remembrance of things past. Yet of course he is also creating or rediscovering the past as he writes; and only by writing can he do so.
Unfortunately this kind of taxonomy will also be prejorative as people value creativity over commentary because they have a romantic notion of a separation and tend to laud those authors who write in denial of the impossible separation or are unable to contain it in the work itself – Dickens for example – and sniff at writers like Vila-Matas who include everything in their work. Literature is part of the world too, albeit a strange part.
I agree with S.M. above. That dichotomy collapses as soon we think it through. Proust comments obsessiely and relentlessly on Art, Literature and essentially provides an entire theory of the within his novel. This of course is one of his innovations. Meanwhile, Borges, the supposed commentator, is now regarded as a one of the great innovators, generating new forms for fiction.