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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, January 26, 2008
This section leapt out of a review of The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt:"The Indian Clerk is the latest adornment of an increasingly fashionable literary sub-genre: what might be called the fictive biography. At least half a dozen of them have appeared in the last half-decade, from David Lodge's Author! Author! (chapters in the later life of Henry James) to Julian Barnes's Arthur and George (Conan Doyle and the Edalji affair) and Benjamin Markovits's ongoing Byron trilogy. In most cases the reader's interest in these real lives, painstakingly set out in the pages of something advertised as a novel, is trailed by a mild anxiety about the form."
One might also have mentioned that this is something that seems to apply to both the 'literary' and 'popular' strains of writing, with thrillers written in the last few years featuring the likes of Freud and Marlowe as their protagonists. The review also neglects to mention that Lodge's novel was issued at roughly the same time as Colm Toibin's The Master as well as a number of other novels about Henry James. This review by Terry Eagleton summarises some of the complexities of this affair:"Lodge argues in The Year of Henry James, his record of the affair, that James has always been both a writer's writer and a critic's writer. Since Lodge himself is both together, the allure in his case proved doubly strong. But as he points out, James also created some of the most memorable women characters of the period, which makes him fit meat for the feminists; and queer theory gets a look in, too, as gay critics debate exactly how repressed his (probable) homosexuality was. In any case, novels about historical figures have become fashionable in the past decade or two, as Lodge reminds us, and a lot of these have been writers on writers.
There's another reason, however, for this rash of Henriads, which one wouldn't really expect Lodge to note. In a post-political age, writers are more likely to be enthused by exquisite states of consciousness or the intricacies of personal relationships than by more workaday matters; and the aloof, fastidious James, a man famously described as chewing more than he could bite off, appears to fill this bill exactly.
The appearance, however, is mostly illusory. Few writers have been so haunted by the themes of power and possession. James's unfathomably subtle mind is materialist to its roots. Lodge admires him because he's all about "consciousness", but he is even more about ownership and exploitation. His fictions may be full of delectably cobwebby sentences, but they are also populated by bloodied victims and monstrous predators, and what drives them is a force as mysteriously elusive as art, known as money. It's this interaction between artistic (or moral) beauty and the brutal workings of power which make James so magnificent an artist. Lodge, Toibin and Hollinghurst, one suspects, want the beauty without the brutality."
In part, one might be generally dismissive of this sort of writing as a form of escapism in the way historical fiction often is. But this is something that takes place against a backdrop of biography being one of the most widely practised forms of modern writing. It does seem to suggest a certain inadequacy to the form of the realist novel, an attempt to marry the dramatic principles of that form to the solidity of non-fiction, without having to venture as far as Sebald's experiments in non-fiction (after all, Sebald often wrote about figures like Stendhal or Fitzgerald) or the likes of Capote and Wolfe.Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 10:34 am
