Julie
Stéphane Mallarmé, *Petit Air*
I
Any solitude Without a swan or quai Mirrors its disuse In the gaze I abdicate
Far from that pride’s excess Too high to enfold In which many a sky paints itself With the twilight’s gold
But languorously flows beside Like white linen laid aside Such fleeting birds as dive Exultantly at my side
Into the wave made you Your exultation nude.
A few reflections.
What struck me most is how little resistance the novel actually needs in order to defeat its protagonist. There is no spectacular repression here, no obvious villainy. What Carol encounters is something quieter and, for that reason, more difficult to grasp: a social order that reproduces itself through the everyday, through habit, through what simply goes without saying. As she realises in the end, there is no individual, it is all institutions, the crystalised and natural-seeming landscape that binds her feet.
It used to be common, as Mark Schorer notes, to align Sinclair Lewis with Flaubert, to read Main Street as the American Madame Bovary. But the comparison only really holds if we shift its ground. Emma Bovary is destroyed by her fantasies, by the mismatch between imported desire and provincial reality; Carol Kennicott, however, is not simply deluded. Her aspirations, aesthetic, reformist, vaguely utopian, are not in themselves incoherent. Indeed Main Street is what happens when the Bovary problem is no longer primarily psychological, but socio-historical. It is then a text that should be read much more historically. Carol herself, is not a revolutionary in a political sense, and finds herself catechised by a suffragette for having no political power. Instead, she is but an aesthethic reformer, and an symptomatic bearer of diffuse pregressive ideals. It is a kind of minor utopian consciousness. She carries a utopian impulse that cannot find a viable form within the social totality she inhabits. Importantly, she fails not simply because the town is traditionalist, but because the social structure she inhabits has no mechanism to absorb or translate her impulses. Her critique therefore remains individual and stylistic, instead of the 20th century collective and systematic rebellion.
Gopher Praire, should be read beyond it as mere setting, instead, as a model of a total system. It encompasses an economic order (small-town capitalism), an ideological apparatus (respectability, conformity, gender roles), and a cultural regime (taste, architecture, conversation). To Carol, it appears closed and unyielding, but this very closure is not timeless. It is historically produced and sustained, presenting itself as natural and inevitable. As Lewis himself observed, the modern city might be harsh, yet the cruel city could be made to yield. The small town, by contrast, 'would not for a minute concede one inch of its bleak and rigid tyranny.' Hence, Carol isn't just fighting conservatism, the Puritan traditionalism, but instead a form of life that has naturalised its own limitations.
This tragedy is to be understood by the historical moment. A time of intense optimism about American life. Progressive reform, new artistic movements, and intellectual ferment, from Henrik Ibsen to H. G. Wells, from Freud to Bernard Shaw, had created a sense that a new social and cultural order was imminent. Indeed when Carol herself asks, and gives voice to the expansive, almost boundless aspiration, "What do we want?", it is not merely the modest reform, nor "an age of tranquility and charming manners," she wants not to "enthrone good taste again." Instead she wants everything. A total transformation of life itself. A boundless demand that cuts across class and role. This was a reality in New York or Washington, it is not a reality in Gopher Prairie, and so the demand has nowhere to go. It cannot be translated into institutions, movements, she has no one to discuss poetry, European revolution, or whatever else with at night. So it remains hers, and remains powerless. Followingly, we see the slow wearing down of Carol. She becomes a working woman with no work. Her libidinal energy becomes directed into domestic routines, that neither require nor reward her capacities. Her adaption erodes her soul. Though her temporary departure suggests that another life is imaginable, her return marks the persistence of the structure that had defeated her in the beginning, an unchanging structure, where "we'll become civilised in merely twenty thousand years or so." Indeed she realises the town remains what it was. She no longer hates the town, she has given up, and finds that her utopian desire has dissipated into the quiet continuity of the everyday.
A conspectus over Fredric Jameson's oeuvre; highly recommend to anyone who finds theory interesting, it is not necessary to have read his oeuvre to find benefit in this text, if not the very opposite! A wonderful homage that needs a second edition to account for his later works. Truly Jameson, one of the last renaissance men.
I've read a decent chunk of both A Farewell to Arms, and Men Without Women. Hemingway, unfortunately writes in his usual terse, boring, and consequently dry manner. With nothing but the same amount of flatness he himself purports to have. One could say he is an author within a time period, writing from a certain perspective, and that's for men with fragile egos. His overbearing masculinity makes him write one dimensional women-as-pets characters, where his sexism comes to shine. I've read now four different books of his, and I think one was too many. The Old Man and the Sea was okay, but frankly, one would be better off not reading it.
I think some people would disagree with my view, but I simply find his sexism unreadable when central characters are incredibly shallow - just like the rest of the story. Without going too in-depth on my own personal views on taste, and the subjectiveness of it, merely I'll say that quality, however, is not entirely subjective. If someone likes Hemingway, than by all means, read him. Enjoyment is not equal to quality a lot of times, and a think a lot of highbrow literature is terrible too. I do not mean to be elitist nor classist, but some books simply suck, sorry.
Into the garbage heap of history Hemingway goes.
I've read a decent chunk of both A Farewell to Arms, and Men Without Women. Hemingway, unfortunately writes in his usual terse, boring, and consequently dry manner. With nothing but the same amount of flatness he himself purports to have. One could say he is an author within a time period, writing from a certain perspective, and that's for men with fragile egos. His overbearing masculinity makes him write one dimensional women-as-pets characters, where his sexism comes to shine. I've read now four different books of his, and I think one was too many. The Old Man and the Sea was okay, but frankly, one would be better off not reading it.
I think some people would disagree with my view, but I simply find his sexism unreadable when central characters are incredibly shallow - just like the rest of the story. Without going too in-depth on my own personal views on taste, and the subjectiveness of it, merely I'll say that quality, however, is not entirely subjective. If someone likes Hemingway, than by all means, read him. Enjoyment is not equal to quality a lot of times, and a think a lot of highbrow literature is terrible too. I do not mean to be elitist nor classist, but some books simply suck, sorry.
Into the garbage heap of history Hemingway goes.
I wish much so to dislike this book, however I must admit it was quite good. A reaction summoned through the meeting with the abject, which was contained within these pages. I hate every character in this book - within reason, obviously there are actors and characters which are not as bad as others, merely they all irritate me for being miserable twats - while some are broken, abused throughout childhood and so on, their actions are not justified - as Goethe once put it, ‘Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.'. To be a good person is to be gentle, it is how you act towards the world, in the manner in which you do things.
Going from Frank Herbert's writing style to Ursula K. Le Guin was a shock which I found appaling to begin with. That faded and I enjoyed it.
However I felt there was little of food for thought, something about how the environment shapes society, war being the antithesis to civilisation, an exploration of gender yet lacking. Everything was just a bit lacking.
Nevertheless the prose was good enough for me to start ereyesterday and finish it today.
A few thoughts:
- “A slow lava flow of narrative.” = Loads of commas, 7-8 before a full stop.
- it's somewhat boring at times, especially when the characters have personal musings with no relation to the story, music theory? Right.
- I didn't really know what was going on half of the time?
- “Dark-skinned hooligans”, was apparently a misstranslation and supposed to be, “wild hooligans” or something like that.
- Valuska is really the idiot everyone thinks he is, I'd know I was inside his head.
- it's a book.
Der er to dele til medie, det ene er hvad der ligger i det, hvad der er tænkt og hvad kan tages fra det. Den anden del er hvad det for dig til at føle. [a:Susan Sontag 7907 Susan Sontag https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615556608p2/7907.jpg]'s [b:Against Interpretation and Other Essays 52374 Against Interpretation and Other Essays Susan Sontag https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436152896l/52374.SY75.jpg 2453262] inspirerede mig, at ikke at læse ind i det, men tage det som det er, at fravælge symbolisering, og leve med det reele.
“The principle, which demands uncontrolled freedom in action in all that only the agents themselves,” require by nature a synthesis of the opposite view. For by virtue of granting freedom of the highest order, freedom inherently becomes impoverished - the advantages given by luck of the draw (by nature of aforementioned freedom), in turn takes freedom away. Freedom that is not evenly distributed and is disturbed by privileges granted by birth and other such acts of luck, is not freedom for everyone, but only for some. In essence, that which only gives opportunity, and prosperity for some through fate, in turn, does exactly the opposite for others, by not being granted the same opportunity. The acceptance of a legacy in the world of schooling, the monetary advantages given by rich parents, and social connections through measure of nepotism; are intrinsically highly unfair, and is what we should aim to combat through social reform and legislation.
Dostoevsky wrote in A Writer's Diary that “Most decidedly, I did not succeed with that novel; however, its idea was rather lucid, and I have never expressed in my writings anything more serious. Still, as far as form was concerned, I failed utterly.” Vladimir Nabokov, who generally regarded Dostoevsky as a “rather mediocre” writer called The Double “the best thing he ever wrote,” saying that it is “a perfect work of art.”
