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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, August 02, 2004
The latest edition of Prospect has an odd piece on how British interest in European fiction dwindled, to be replaced by an interest in North & Latin American or Commonwealth literature:"(a) shift in British literary outlook away from European modernism and the successors of Sartre and Camus, our last continental icons, and towards the American postwar realists - Updike and Roth, Mailer, Bellow and Morrison... That aesthetic break - the schism of form - between British and continental writing has little to do with native taste or British "insularity," but emerged from a condition of history. In Warsaw in 2001, I interviewed the Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki in his Stalin-era flat. To Poles who had experienced Hitler's war and had then to deal with Stalin's communists, he said, conventional narrative made no sense. "My generation time and again had to face the possibility of their lives being threatened. Traditional narrative structure could not express the psychological insight of the situations we found ourselves in."
What took them there was America's own vitality, an evolving narrative force in which one can see an unbroken vital line stretching from Scott Fitzgerald's America in The Great Gatsby to Thomas Pynchon's in Mason & Dixon. History had caused continental Europe's faith in narrative to falter in its stride; in the US (as, variously, in Latin America and the Commonwealth) there was no pause in the gallop. A great, unbordered expanse of narrative lay all around."
It's a somewhat peculiar argument, if only because the move away from traditional narrative predated the second world war and because earlier British writers, such as Virginia Woolf and Lawrence had shared this alongside Gide and Pessoa. It would probably be easier to make a case that it was Britain whose 'vital line' was broken, with the end of the second world war leading to markedly more traditional writers like Burgess, Murdoch and Greene, at precisely the same period Europe produced Sartre and Camus.
Nonetheless, that Britain has tended to look more towards the US in recent years seems as unarguable as it always has been unfathomable from my perspective. Whenever I have looked through the pages of Faulkner, Hermingway, Updike, Roth, Mailer, Bellow, DeLillo and Morrison I've always found myself facing something as alien in its mindset as medieval literature (in the case of Mailer and Hemingway an especially bellicose individualism would certainly be the cause, with even the more popular literature of Coupland seeming to replace European anti-bourgeois romanticism with dreary American pioneer individualism). When I consider the rich fusion of realism and symbolism in nineteenth century American fiction, such as Hawthorne and Melville and then consider the dull realism of twentieth century American fiction, the merits of traditional narrative seen less assured.
Equally, if I am to think of the contemporary writers I most admire they tend to be European; Kundera, Houellebecq, Ballard, Eco, Pamuk, Goytisolo or from the Commonwealth; Coetzee, Lessing or Gordimer. The most significant literary innovation of the second half of the twentieth century, magical realism (a belated means of codifying surrealism into narrative) originated in writers such as Borges and Marquez but was adapted by many of those above or with writers like Carter and Winterson. The one place it did nto find any purchase was the United States, which did indeed keep on ploughing the same furrow it had always done.Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 7:45 pm
