GRGR(5) Katje: in close up

Wed Jul 7 21:09:14 CDT 1999

rj wrote:

> Paul, Terrance:
>
> >
> > > Referring back again to rj's point about P's demonstration of certain
> > > advantages of writing over film, wasn't there a lot of talk around '73 of
> > > the novel's being in decline  as an art form? We don't hear much talk of
> > > that nowadays, do we?
> > >
> > >                         P.
> >
> > YUP! But it wasn't novelists talking, it was Critical Theorists and Literary
> > Critics. And the "decline" began after the war or Post Modern.
>
> Not so!
>
> BARTH, John. The Literature of Exhaustion. Atlantic Monthly 220,
> August, 1967. (Reproduced in FEDERMAN, Raymond (ed.),  _Surfiction:
> Fiction . . . Now and Tomorrow_, pp. 19-33. Chicago: Swallow Press,
> 1975.)
>
> BARTHES, Roland. 'The Death of the Author' (1968). In _Image, Music,
> Text_. Translated and edited by Steven Heath. London: Flamingo, 1984
> (1977).
>
> It worries me that the distinction Terrance is making between
> "novelists" and "Critical Theorists and Literary Critics" is an
> artificial one at best, and somewhat discriminatory at worst. (Literary
> Critic is not an animal!) Don Barthelme also seems to be a case in
> point. (And it's marvellously convenient how those three names sit
> together so nicely in a bibliography!)

Now wait a minute. Discriminatory? No, not me. I have commented here on the
distinction between critics and artists: Plato's problem with the sophists, those
that teach art but can not produce it and artists that produce but can not teach,
and Aristotle's answer (and I agree with Aristotle), which demonstrates the
fundamental difference in their metaphysics and perceptions of Being,  I have
quoted from Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy Of Criticism, which I
recently re-read at the suggestion of a P-lister, this Introduction confirmed my
opinion that the distinction between Artist and critic is not artificial. T.S.
Eliot is the most obvious example, not in the 70s, but a clear and important
example, if for no other reason than that he excelled in both Arts, and his
influence on both critics and artists was and continues to be profound.

> Part of the whole thrust of
> Literary Theory since de Saussure and Shklovsky is that all text --
> critical, literary and 'factual' -- is narrativised and subjective.
> Moreover, Derrida's and Lyotard's stuff doesn't fit into either box
> (fiction/non) most of the time, and Barthe's S/Z is a whole heap of fun
> to read, much moreso than William Gass's ponderous literary blockbuster
> 'The Tunnel' imo. And if you don't think Pynchon's a "Theorist" or
> "Critic" then you're missing out on a lot of the substance of _GR_ (eg.
> the New Turkic Alphabet section, Mitch Prettyplace, the glorifications
> of German expressionist cinema, "See Ishmael Reed." Etc.) But I digress.

Pynchon a critic and theorist in GR? Now I see, we have a huge difference in this
idea of an Artificial distinction.

>
>
> The backlash against the species of critical *and* aesthetic despair
> that Paul mentions was quick. (Actually it was the mid-60s, but there
> had been a long build-up even before.)

Yes, it began as I mentioned after WWII.

> Ronald Sukenick's title story in
> _Death of the Novel and Other Stories_ (Dial, New York, 1969) was a
> swift postmodern rejoinder to Barthes and Barthelme and Barth. And what
> you'll find by about '73, in America as here, is an almost manufactured
> resurgence and critical valorisation of literary fiction, particularly,
> *new* *American* literary fiction, as a medium. The most obvious example
> of many is
>
> KLINKOWITZ, Jerome. Literary Disruptions: The Making of
> Post-Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois
> Press, 1975.
>
> Klinkowitzs opening chapter, subtitled The Death of the Death of the
> Novel, opens with the assertion that Fiction breeds its own
> continuity. (p. 1) And both Federman and Sukenick were working hard at
> the time to construct the literary manifestations of and cement them
> into this postmodern genre. For a lot of reasons I don't think they were
> at all successful, but that is neither here nor there. Meanwhile,
> others, like Pynchon, Gaddis and DeLillo, just went on hammering out
> masterful literary (/critical) narratives themselves. And, of course,
> Barth himself later recanted (The Literature of Replenishment:
> Postmodernism and the Rebirth of the Novel, Atlantic Monthly 245.1,
> January, 1980), though even this was not enough to resuscitate his
> ailing 'novelistic' voice.
>
> My point was about the hammering out of masterful literature.
> Literary/critical--like Snow White? Just a joke! We have a fundamental
> difference of opinion here, it has been here before, I am fond of distinctions
> of  kinds, not that they don't inform eachother, for example, Philosophers and
> Poets may argue from time to time (and it's very important to see when they
> argue and why--when distinctions are eased or removed), but Philosophers barrow
> from Poets and Poets barrow from Philosophers like teenage girls barrow clothes.

Terrance