----- 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.
|