Game Over for Art?

[Michael Bailey]

Art Vandelay?
On Oct 9, 2013 1:55 AM, "Fiona Shnapple" <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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