Heh heh, thanks for reading David!
James snuck into that piece at the last minute and I suppose without adequate provision. I had a vision of a social contract between James and his readers about what would qualify as "interesting" - subtleties of gentry manners, international questions between two privileged nations, etc. And it occurred to me that one of the first things the early modernists did was break with that social contract. Thinking of the Dublin A-Z street layouts in Joyce, the distended hellfire sermon in Joyce, Stein's Three Lives, excurses of Lawrentian psychology, Alcools, Dada - I'm sorry that's a ragbag of a list - but what occurred to me in all those cases was that they deliberately courted the bourgeois dismissal "boring - and pointless". I.e. a dismissal from the point of view of the social contract exemplified in the Art of Fiction. Maybe I shouldn't characterize it as bourgeois, but it seemed to me that one of the important things achieved by these early modernists (and probably, behind them, Freud) was to show that the Interesting is a carefully chosen field, i.e. chosen to comfortably maintain one's peace of mind, to promote enjoyable mental wanderings along familar paths from which all unpleasant views are screened. Obviously this is a topic that is becoming ironic at my own expense, when I'm diverting myself with Spenser. So enough about that.
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