Fw: [mcelroy-l] Guardian article on US meta-fiction

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: bumbum72000 
To: josephmcelroy at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 3:34 AM
Subject: [mcelroy-l] Guardian article on US meta-fiction


[Also posted to Gaddis and Am_Post]


Strangely no mention of McElroy but this should be of interest:


Anyone read Burns' article. It's pretty contentious, in fact it's 
somewhat of a hatchet job, but there are definitely some interesting 
observations. I don't particularly agree with most of his points. In 
fact I see nothing wrong with DeLillo's and Pynchon's writing, which 
I prefer to the more stodgy traditional British and Irish fiction 
(with many exceptions). The article is so long that I'll post the url 
here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4796888-99930,00.html

Some of the juicier quotes I liked are below:

DeLillo, like his immediate contemporary Thomas Pynchon and, before 
Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, has always been a cerebral, concept-driven 
writer, and experimental in a sense. He belongs to the generation 
which produced the metafictions of William Gass, William Gaddis, 
Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme. Sometimes surreal, sometimes 
parodic, these were invariably rebarbative, wilfully "difficult" 
texts, each trying to establish an avant-garde position out beyond 
realism. One of the most highly regarded of them, the proto-
postmodernist John Hawkes, said, "I began to write fiction on the 
assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, 
setting, and theme." The metafictionists' formal concern was with 
language - words and phrases and sentences simply as sources of 
sounds or as spatial objects or sometimes as nonsense - and with 
ideas. [I love this!]

although the words he [DeLillo] was reading were smart, beautifully 
put-together ones, they were just words - not words telling a story, 
or describing any kind of emotion, just unspooling words, abstract, 
drifting on the air like a piece of free-form jazz. Or - the 
criticism most consistently levelled at DeLillo - like the dream-
language of a Cyborg; "cold" and "heartless" like a computer. 


Why does the American voice, "the American image of voice", as Harold 
Bloom calls it in The Western Canon , the voice that the history of 
the last half-century has been told in, all of a sudden sound so 
pale, so stale and grating? I found some of the answer in an essay by 
James Wood, published earlier this year in the New Republic magazine. 
Its title was "Can literature be simple?", and it took Flaubert and 
Chekhov as the twin poles of literature-as-style and literature-as-
content. Flaubert, Wood wrote, "was not only a sick modern, but one 
who infected everyone who came after him . . . Even simplicity, after 
Flaubert, is no longer innocent, but is a simplicity that has become 
weary of congestion . . . The great artists of complexity, such as 
James and Mann and Proust, are always giving us a great deal - of 
themselves, of their intellects, of their prose, of their gathered 
data. But one way of looking at the simplicity of Chekhov and [the 
Sicilian writer] Verga is to note how much they subtract, how little 
they give us, how often they invite us to fill their bareness with 
our own feeling." [Checkhov's stories didn't do it for me, I must 
say. I'd take Mann and Proust any day, but am tempted to throw in 
Bowles as a concession.]

Brian

http://www.tobypress.com/books/dance_geometry.htm
http://www.elasticpress.com/sound_of_white_ants.htm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20031119/780aabf5/attachment.html>