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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.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Michel Houellebecq has written a characteristically provocative defence of HP Lovecraft:"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new, realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined notations, situations, anecdotes ... All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our "real life" days... Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.
Lovecraft, for his part, knew he had nothing to do with this world. And at each turn he played a losing hand. In theory and in practice. He lost his childhood; he also lost his faith. The world sickened him and he saw no reason to believe that by looking at things better they might appear differently."
Of course, Houellebecq has 'form' in this particular area, having attempted to reclaim Agatha Christie for the literary canon in the past. It reinforces his status as enfant terrible, even if his actual writing is more influenced by Camus than by Christie (horror and crime are reactionary genres to a large extent, presenting threats to the social order that are quickly subsumed, which doesn't quite seem to fit, for all of Houellebecq's reactionary pronouncements). Equally, such defences do little to hide the fact that Lovecraft couldn't write for toffee. His prose is truly terrible, being entirely worthy of comparison to William Topaz McGonagall. He influenced other horror writers like Derleth and more literary writers like Borges and every single one of them wrote considerably better than he did.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't want to dismiss Houellebecq's arguments; you only have to read some of the final passages of Atomised to understand that his sense of indifference to the world is perfectly sincere. At one point, I would have been rather more puritannical to such arguments; fiction served a representational function, as Hardy had suggested; "Art is a disproportioning — (i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportion)— of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities." While far from being overly wedded to realism, I would prefer a simpler view now, largely based around Shklovsky's ideas of making the familiar into the unfamiliar, ostanenie (after all, consider how much science fiction from Brave New World to The Handmaid's Tale revolves around the depiction of contemporary concerns rather than the projections of the future).
With this, I seem to have become more tolerant of the notion that art can be a means of escaping reality rather than representing it; it seems difficult to deny that Gormenghast or The Bloody Chamber is as canonical as Mrs Dalloway and Little Dorrit or that the same could not be said of Grimm, Poe and Hoffmann. One of the reasons why Houellebecq is one of the very few modern authors to have successfully written in a social realist vein is that he does so with little sense of social engagement, an indifference that Balzac and Zola were simply incapable of. Living at a time when many European societies see their cohesion and identity as being undermined by increasingly liberal economic structures, I rather suspect this is the only way the realist novel can be created in the present age.Labels: Fantasy, Literature, Realism
posted by Richard 1:36 pm
