And again, Ana, I can only echo "YES!" to what you've written!
I believe, at least for my native country USAmerica, that becoming 'famous'
or 'sanctioned' or 'well known', or of course 'a bestseller', defines our
writer aims.
In USAmerica, as well, we've a tradition supporting superficiality; we've
little history; we're a hodge-podge of ethnicities; we're loose in a big
pond of little identity-crises'ed fishes, making our own insignia, logoes,
impressa, shields, crests.
We seldom react to our perceived past going back more than a generation. An
abiding, divisive, brutal, long-accrued story belongs to others, not to us.
Our hate is contemporary; our philosophy is William James; our music is not
ours unless it's African-American, southern white, or native American, so we
denigrate these.
We haven't a THINKING tradition; we haven't a WORD-LOVE tradition. We have
a marketing, money-making tradition.
How, then, can we have excellent novels, short stories, plays, or poems? We
cannot, except for the exceptional: TS Eliot.
I love Chekhov's short stories. I love Lermontov, Gogol----but not Tolstoy
whose thought ran less subtly and less deeply than the others.
I enjoy your messages thoroughly!
Best,
Judy
2003/1/1 Ana Olinto <[log in to unmask]>
> alison, i think i should admit, with judy, that i usually don't read many
> novels - in my case, contemporary ones, i do read some earlier ones - and
> that, in consequence, i'm not the best person to talk about them - in my
> case,
> not about contemporary ones.
> but i think it would be also interesting to ask us why.
> i'm no, as my posts may suggest, sectarian. my favourite novelist may well
> be
> dostoievsky - the opposite of valéry; i prefer a good
> contemporary neo-classical musical composition than most - in fact all -
> contemporary musical "geniuses" i know.
> my favourite contemporary poet here in brazil is alberto cunha melo,
> despised by the avant-garde and self-confessed "neo-classic" who
> tastes like the past and for most of the time writes in octossylabes.
> i must admit that the reason i don't add contemporary novelists to my
> list of good contemporary artists is plainly because i don't read
> contemporary novels, and the reason for that is plainly that, contrary
> to listen to a cd and reading one poem, it takes a lot of time to do that.
> the contemporary novelists you cite may well be more contemporary
> - and better - than alberto da cunha melo's poetry - they most likely are.
> yet, i do worship dr. faustus.
> the question is, i tend to see as dispersive too much attention to too many
> -
> or too recent - novels. we should be whole, integral beings, and i think a
> philosophical grounding is as important - and in some aspects more - than
> art.
> i think hermann broch is the last novelist i see as fundamental. when you
> say
> someone has just written a novel which studies "silence and selfhood", i
> tend to
> think it would be more enlightening to write a philosophical treatise on
> such themes
> - in the manner of husserl, whitehead or bergson, three twentieth century
> philosophers of whom i'm fond, from completely different schools - or a
> philosophical "meditative" poem on them, such as eliot's four quartets is a
> meditative poem on the theme "time" - and i certainly wouldn't recommend
> her to
> write it in husserl's or whitehead's of bergson's or eliot's style, but,
> quite
> enthusiastically, in michele desborders' .
> what i'm questioning is not the talent or insights of all contemporary
> novelists,
> but the contemporaryness of the novel form. however unusual and surprising
> a
> novel may be, it does takes what frederick called a sustained "relentless
> cumulative
> power" to write one, and i'm questioning the presence of this power in
> today's
> world.
> it is not the narrative form that i see as out of fashion - though i do see
> the
> dancing, no-aim feeling as indispensable in a contemporary art book, but
> you
> can have a narrative - something which is closer to prose than to poetry,
> and that
> tells some story - with that characteristic - , but just a too coherent and
> too big
> narrative book.
> x-ana
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, August 09, 2009 6:26 PM
>
> Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism
>
>
> Hi Ana - I don't know about claims about what seems contemporary or
> modern, or that prose narrative isn't capable of contemporary
> purchase. I think story matters just as much now as it ever has. I've
> read some astounding novels in the past few months, from the lyric
> exploration of silence and selfhood in Michele Desbordes (who is
> extraordinary in my book, and whose books only came out in the past 10
> years, although to my sadness she died not so long ago) to the
> astounding mid-20th century polyvoice epic of Victor Serge to the
> wickedly funny and black fables of Arto Paaslini. Robert Pinget, WG
> Sebald, Thomas Mann (Dr Faustus), Christa Wolf. These are just names
> plucked out of a hat, but none of them work in the way you (or Nerval,
> who write some mean prose himself) describe.
>
> I do agree however that poetry is a lot like dance. At least, whenever
> I write about dance, I always end up talking about poetry. I tried to
> explore this in a piece on a work by choreographer Lucy Guerin, who
> lately has been working quite a bit with language -
> http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2008/10/miaf-corridor.html - which
> I'll take the liberty of quoting below, only because it's pertinent to
> this discussion:
>
> Like novels or short stories, theatre finds its poetic through
> narrative. The narrative might be displaced or distorted or multiple,
> or it might be absolutely linear; but however it appears, narrative is
> a tendency that the form must wrestle with, either to reject or to
> accept, to reveal or to distort. Poetry, on the other hand, need not
> deal with narrative at all: a poem might be an epic story like
> Paradise Lost, or it might be a vivid glimpse of a moment, as in Ezra
> Pound's In a Station of the Metro. It's up to the poet, a decision
> that can be freely asserted because of the nature of poetry itself.
>
> What is primary in both poetry and dance is its materiality. Just as
> poetry foregrounds the sensuous and rhythmic qualities of language, so
> dance celebrates the sensuous and rhythmic qualities of gesture.
> Neither needs to be more than the dynamic and immediate movement of
> exchange between reader and page, singer and listener, audience and
> performer, and for each this contract is more easily grasped than in
> theatre or in novels, where the tending towards narrative and
> explication must be resisted with active violence.
>
> xA
>
> On Wed, Jan 1, 2003 at 7:02 PM, Ana Olinto<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> i think the last posts by dominic, frederick and alison touch the heart of
>> my question. i think valéry was right when
>> he saw something new and irreversible in nerval, poe and then baudelaire.
>> he defined prose as closer to walking, in which all our movements are a
>> consequence of aiming at some spot,
>> and poetry as closer to dance, in which all our movements are an end in
>> itself.
>> sappho's "more than a hero" is narrative, linear, but doensn't feel like
>> having, in its movements, an aim in mind -
>> or at least not in an emphatic way .
>> now, the difference between sappho and modern poetry is only one of
>> degree.
>> modern poets just intensified the
>> feeling of not aiming at anything.
>> this dancing, no-aim feeling can be seen as typical not so much of poetry
>> as
>> opposed to prose as of modern,
>> radically non-linear, as opposed to orthodox sensitivity.
>> that's why i do tend to see the novel form and even more the epic form as
>> not sufficiently contemporary - just as
>> the sonnet form, and, in music, the sonata form - the musical feeling of
>> aim
>> - or what francis bacon called what can
>> be seen, in painting, as a picture which "tells a story".
>> it is not necessarily much attention to sounds or even to the whole
>> texture
>> of words - not necessarily hermeticism
>> or even much complexity which makes a text feel contemporary (it's not a
>> question of a poetry versus prose
>> dichotomy). to my mind, it's the no-aim feeling.
>> chekhov said he usually composed a tale, and then threw away the beginning
>> and the end: that has to do with what
>> i'm calling no-aim. what makes chekhov so modern and almost contemporary
>> is
>> the no-aim feeling he gives us,
>> even writting in prose, and a very linear one - it is in its totality -
>> and
>> not just the totality of the tale, but also each of the
>> totalities which constitute each of its paragraphs - that it ceases to be
>> linear.
>> a good chekhov tale is not very different, structurally, from the best
>> longer narrative poems by elizabeth bishop - a
>> chekhov fan herself - but of course there is a lot of difference in style
>> -
>> and of course she intensified a lot the thing,
>> and cared a lot more about resourses more typical to poetry - thanks to
>> nerval, poe, baudelaire and their followers.
>> it's not so much a question of superficially "modern" resources, such as
>> playing with time structures or making
>> your narrative more fragmentary and saturated with "poetic", as opposed to
>> prosy, components: you can have all
>> flashbacks, word-games and local non-linearity and still direct us to a
>> closed aim.
>> i agree that "it is hard today for an intellectual to be clear what his
>> tribe values, goals, heroes and enemies are, or
>> about what one's 'tribe' is" and that the sustained "relentless cumulative
>> power" of traditional epics - and novels -
>> were possible thanks to that power, now dead.
>> this doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't have any philosophical grounding
>> today. on the contrary, i see as most negative
>> precisely the fact that any groundings are lacking in today's world, and
>> defining frontiers in art procedures - and here i
>> suspect frederik will agree with me - is a sign of some grounding.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 7:16 PM
>> Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism
>>
>>
>> I was thinking of gypsy tales, Eulenspiegel, Gilgamesh, folk tales...
>> (I'll pass over the "oral traditions are not literature" question,
>> which is very wobbly - there's lots to learn about story telling from
>> oral tales).
>>
>> I'd say the primary shape of epic is circularity. And Sappho's "How
>> like a god he seems to me" is a narrative as much as Homer is.
>>
>> I can't see that that the structural demands of story in prose and
>> poetry are very different. You have to tell a story in a way that
>> commands attention. I ended up thinking that was a primarily question
>> of rhythmic control, in the sense of large movements and at the level
>> of the sentence/line.
>>
>> I've never got linearity as applied to story, unless it means one
>> thing after another moving forward in literal time, as Hal suggests;
>> in which case lyric is definitely linear too. Every story goes
>> backwards and forwards, because it reflects how memory works - I can't
>> think of a single epic poem without divagations and distortions of
>> imagined time - the lnvocation of the muses in the present that begins
>> the Iliad or the stories of the gods, the bizarre leaps back and forth
>> in Beowulf, Aeneas's visits to the dead, Milton's sudden moving
>> description of his blindness in Paradise Lost, etc etc.
>>
>> xA
>>
>>>
>>> "simplest kinds of story telling (oral tales, say) are often far too
>>> fragmentary" - depends, I suppose, what you're thinking of. Marko the
>>> Prince and other oral epics of Serbia - very straightforward and Homeric.
>>> Likewise Gilgamesh, probably based on oral tales. And then the crucial
>>> term
>>> is "based on." I was talking about literature, not oral traditions.
>>>
>>> Vergil: Augustus and Rome. Tasso: aristocratic Catholic Europe. Camoes:
>>> imperial Portugal and expansionist Europe. Milton: the radical
>>> Reformation.
>>> Nazim Hikmet: the international proletariat. Tribes.
>>>
>>> The inherent requirements of narrative poetry are very different from
>>> those
>>> of the novel. "[Moving] forward and backward in space and time in ways
>>> that
>>> are not straightforward at all" gets in the way. Linearity (I'll drop the
>>> quotes), coherence, relentless cumulative power, are needed. Their
>>> absence
>>> - a refusal to differentiate between narrative and lyric - makes
>>> Walcott's
>>> Omeros unreadable. Their presence makes Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool
>>> lastingly enjoyable and useful, despite the relative triviality of its
>>> theme.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>
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