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----- Original Message ----- From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 5:16 PM Subject: Re: "Innocence" >I was looking for a descriptive term for this; "comic book realism" > was the closest that came to mind - the stylisation, the ever-present > awareness of and gestures towards a pulp media context (horror movies > and so on); the hard-boiled, sardonically un-PC Frank Miller aspect; > the morose delectation in the face of violent passions and acts. These > are Houellebecqian traits as well, although sex is more his thing than > violence. > > I suspect you could do pretty well as a comic book writer. I'm serious > - and I'm quite a fan of those sorts of comic books... > > Dominic > I am too. Every semester in my intro creative writing courses, I cite graphic novels as models of compressed, suggestive narrative, and it distresses me that few students are aware of them. For some years I've imagined a collaboration - a comix version (or "illumination") of some of my poems. But I've made no effort to contact someone in the field; really I don't know whom to approach, or how. Houellebecq is one of two novelists each of whose new works I automatically read (the other is Steve Erickson). Currently I'm halfway through "The Possibility of an Island." In a sense, sex isn't H's thing, love is; but love for him is the great impossible. Consciousness is kept from aspiring to it by obsessive narrow selfish reasoning. Market calculation as Kantian category, a synthetic a priori -- H's repudiation of political hope does not make him less politically revealing. The mind in H is trapped by its own lucidity in the horizon of the body - a horizon mercilessly defined by age, inadequacy, and death. It's a vision more medieveal than postmodern. I intersect with it at some points but I'm more of a romantic.