Thursday, January 22, 2009

* Ineluctable modality of the visible:

Part I Chapter 3 read by 2/9
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4 comments:

  1. zacharyJanuary 24, 2009 at 4:39 PM

    Not nearly as daunting as promised. More thoughts later, though I'm feeling more and more confident about getting through this book without wanting to pull my hair out.

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  2. AnonymousFebruary 2, 2009 at 1:46 AM

    Gah. Switched to an annotated text here but got the rhythm now, I think. Symbolic imagery seeming a bit heavy handed to anyone else? Mom, mother, mom. Dead, drowned, dead.

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  3. UnknownFebruary 4, 2009 at 6:07 PM

    Between this and endorsing Cliff's Notes I'm coming across as a real phony here, but I'm finding it really hard to not just skim the stream of consciousness parts.

    The temptation is to say that they're just too self-indulgent, but I guess that only holds true if you're writing like that in 2009. A hundred years ago, Joyce was asking the question "Can you write a novel like this?" It was pretty exciting at the time, but after a century of other writers answering with a resounding YES, reading the original strikes me as a little tiresome.

    Along these lines, you might be interested in Dale Peck's EPIC savaging of Rick Moody, written for The New Republic:

    http://www.powells.com/review/2002_07_04.html

    QUOTE:
    Again, this is not meant to malign [post-modern] writers. I don't want to suggest that they are uniformly talentless or misguided; or that there is a conspiracy among them, or among them and the editors of The New Yorker or Harper's or The Paris Review; or that they invest any of their energy in excluding others from the upper echelons of the literary world. All I'm suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.

    This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything. It is a tradition that has turned the construction of a novel into a purely formal exercise, judged either by the inscrutable floribundity of its prose or the lifeless carpentry of its parts, rather than by the quasi-mystical animating aspect of literature that even a rational Englishman such as Forster called "prophecy."

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  4. zacharyFebruary 7, 2009 at 10:29 AM

    I'm not skimming, but I'm sure as hell reading summaries before I tackle each section. Life is way too short to go into navel gazing shit like this on armed.

    We're supposed to dislike Stephen right?

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