Bellow

[jd]

Reading about John Barth and Giles Goat-Boy, stumbled across this:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-truffle.html

"Mr. Barth acknowledges, too, that there are elements of farce in it.
"This frees the writer's hands to do things with language and plot
that would be unacceptable in anything realistic. One of the
interesting things about being a novelist at this hour of the world is
that one is working in a form that may be nearing the end of its line.
The realistic novel obviously has shot its bolt. The old masters of
20th-century fiction -- especially Joyce and Kafka in their various
ways -- brought prose narrative to a kind of ultimacy.

"But I don't know that I think this is a disaster for literature.
Genres come and go. The death of the sonnet wasn't the end of poetry.
And what's still more interesting is that a few people -- like Beckett
and the Argentinian, Borges, and Nabokov, for example -- have been
able to turn this ultimacy against itself in order to produce new
work."

Commenting that he agreed with Saul Bellow that being technically a la
mode is the least important virtue in writing, Mr. Barth added,
however, that he thinks being technically out of date a real defect.
"The cathedral at Chartres is a remarkable piece of architecture, but
if it were built today, it would be embarrassing -- unless it were
done tongue-in-cheek, deliberately, as an ironic comment." "

I think it's interesting since he seems to in some ways agree with
Bellow but is not so grim about it.

On 7/27/06, MalignD at aol.com <MalignD at aol.com> wrote:
> << You claimed that Bellow's alleged conservatism didn't "color his fiction".
> I can't agree with that, surely it would be hard to make that claim about any
> writer? In the case of Bellow though, it would be even harder. Look at Mr
> Samler's Planet for instance... >>
>
> I assume, but correct me if I'm wrong, you're referring to what some have
> seen as covert racism or a narrow, conservative response to change and
> integration.
>
> I don't agree with it.  Sammler is an elderly European Jew, living on the
> Upper West Side, disturbed by what he sees as a decline in civility and, to a
> degree, associating that with blacks.  I think that's true to the character he
> created, Sammler, and it would have been the worst sort of bow to political
> correctness to shy from it.
>
> That said, you may have something entirely other in mind.
>