GRGR(5) Katje: in close up

[rj]

Terrance squirms:

> 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.

I think my point stands that in distinguishing between "novelists" and
"Critical Theorists and Literary Critics" as you did (see below) you
were in fact making a discrimination to the effect that it was the
latter group only who were voicing the idea, as Paul phrased it, of "the
novel's being in decline as an art form." Further, it was an idea which
you seemed to be dismissing out of hand, ridiculing, and the deliberate
capitalisation of the C.T. and L.C. category seemed to me to be a
further condescending embellishment. I pointed out the example of John
Barth, but we could go back to Forster and Lawrence and James and
Dickens and any number of other examples which reveal your distinction
to be an illusory one. Alain Robbe-Grillet? Umberto Eco? Ezra Pound?
J.B.S. Haldane? Further, I contend that in *all* instances there is a
theory of art imbedded within the artefact, even if the artist isn't the
one to explicate this in critical terms.

> YUP! But it wasn't novelists talking, it was Critical Theorists and Literary
> Critics. And the "decline" began after the war or Post Modern.

Other demurs you raise are similarly off-base:

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

But you don't say what the "huge difference" is. You question merely to
discredit. You offer no substance.

> Yes, it began as I mentioned after WWII.

What, exactly, "began"? Is the ""decline"" real or is it just the
invention of "Critical Theorists and Literary Critics" as you previously
insinuated? And, again, dismissing all post-1945 critical theory and
much of the fiction in a glib half-sentence isn't very charitable.

And then, this claptrap:

> 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 each other, 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.
>  
> Our disagreement on this subject opens to other even more
> fundamental differences. This is due to the fact that both
> of our positions are shared by others today and have been
> debated, not as some would have it, recently-- PostModern,
> but in every century since Aristotle, Plato, The Sophists,
> and Democritus-each representing a school of thought, argued
> theirs.
> 
> Terrance-with a can of worms.

Unfortunately, I can't have a dialogue with you when you take refuge in
Plato and Aristotle because they are outside my available terms of
reference. It is an area of expertise that you possess that I don't and
I respect you for it. But, as you admit, philological referencing isn't
necessary to this discussion at all. I can't even quite see what the
point you're trying to make is anyway. So what if the same arguments
have been going on over and over? Plato and Democritus &co were just
these guys, y'know. What's the big deal? And, I gotta say, it does get a
bit annoying when all those unfamiliar and undefined boxes are
constantly thrown up into one's face (the Poets and the Philosophers and
the Ontics and the Semantics and the Sophists and the Klingons), and, by
so doing it is then assumed that the discussion has been satisfactorily
concluded. It's like a bridge game where you keep trying to trump in
with a bowling ball.

best, no offence intended