Game Over for Art?

[Fiona Shnapple]

At least, his Art.

Not the Death of the Novel? Again?

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
>  But I had probably best attempt a little to glance in
> each direction; since it comes to me again and again, over this
> licentious record, that one's bag of adventures, conceived or
> conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of
> one's story. It depends so on what one means by that equivocal
> quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to
> the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself.
> I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a dramatist,
> and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as
> really the more objective of the two.
>
> HENRY JAMES.
> Preface, The Ambassadors
>
> I don't want to argue that readers need to do anything, but the kind
> of emotional involvement that rejects this work because of its
> apparent flaws in judgement, even to racist or misogynist hangups of
> an old embarassment, is unfair to the author, to the art, and, to
> one's own reading of the work. I don't to blame the reader for her
> need for a different kind of speed, or romance, or whatever, but this
> is not a book to read for such qualities. Here, we have, like it or
> not, an aesthetic and intellectual work that challanges the reader by
> couching its pleasures in Sloth.
>
> Though the book has laughs, these are few and frightening, sublime
> even, or graoners and boners that playfully and paradoxically pun with
> us so that, like comic relief in tragedy, we are released from the
> building tension for a moment, only to have the tragic themes
> hightened, inexhorably dragged to the Grave.
>
> This novel is about Death. It's quite serious, grave serious. Because
> P is talking about Game Over for Art.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l