WRB—Aug. 21, 2024

“poetic jib-jab”

The Washington Review of Books is like a beer tap left turned on—jolly fine stuff all running to waste.

N.B.:

The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, will take place on September 28. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.

To do list:

[We’re playing the hits. —Steve]

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram;

• Order one of our famous tote bags or mugs, and let us know if you would be interested in a hat;

• And, of course,

Links:

• In The Sewanee Review,

  Brandon
  Taylor on moral worldbuilding in novels:

  I have said this before, but something happened in the 2000s, and the outside world lost its coherence. Maybe it was 9/11. Maybe it was the cratering of the economy. Maybe it was the looming climate crisis and the perpetual threat of the end of the world. But it truly did seem that there was, in that period, a renewed interest in the power of subjectivity to shape reality. The consensus was dead.

  It is for this reason that character died. How can there be such a thing as character in a novel if our narrators have no belief in the idea of a coherent world? In the novel of consciousness that has defined our time, there are no characters. It’s all vapor, a consciousness gently misting through rooms. No one wants to believe in a narrator strong enough to say how a person is. Because no one believes they know how a person is. We can’t imagine such a thing as a character being stable from morning to the afternoon. We can’t imagine a personality being described, defined, articulated in words. Consequently, our novels only speak of what they have direct authority over, which is the drama of the self.

  [I—who for my sins was born in 1999—have always found it strange that 9/11 seems like it killed the systems novel instead of spurring it on. Some of this is, no doubt, coincidence; a younger generation of writers, obligated to conduct their generational patricide, saw the systems novelists as the obvious target. But the justification for these patricides is never just “it’s our turn.” There is always some specific way the old forms and old approaches are failing to reckon with the world as it is now. And the systems novel, whatever its faults, is surely suited for a time when, after the ’90s, History reasserts itself. (Consider Franzen’s The Corrections, published on September 1, 2001. The Lithuania sections are the weakest as literature, but the ideas animating them feel, with hindsight, predictive.) The younger generation of writers, “interested in capturing consciousness on the page,” are, I think, responding not to 9/11 or the financial crisis but the experience of using the Internet. Taylor says they depict “the ways a mind drifts and turns its focus upon different, seemingly mundane things.” Consciousness has been captured on the page before, obviously. But this experience of one mundanity after another, all experienced (whatever their connections to the outside world) alone in one individual consciousness, somehow producing changes within that consciousness—is this not the experience of using the internet? —Steve]

• Henry Oliver
  on Philip Larkin:

  In his finer moments, this is the reactionary Larkin I admire: witty, self-effacing, narrowly aesthetic, honest, mildly disappointed that his ideology didn’t work. Subtly aware that modernism was a success, even if not to his taste. Bloody funny about Rupert Brooke.

  That spirit is concomitant with the Larkin who wrote: “My ideal writer wd be a mixture of D. H. L., Thomas Hardy, & George Eliot.” The Larkin of minor sorrows who wrote to a friend, when a student: “The days are like a beer tap left turned on—jolly fine stuff all running to waste.” The Larkin who could joke in his letters, “Ted Hughes is coming here to read in the autumn: tickets £1.50 but for £4.50 you can go to a reception and ‘meet Ted Hughes’ . . . Feel like walking up & down outside with a placard reading ‘Meet P. L. for £3.95.’ I really must arrange to be away that evening.”

  [It’s probably just a question of religious belief, but it makes me laugh that Larkin and Pound loved Hardy while Eliot . . . did not. —Steve]

• In Poetry, Camille Ralphs on Chaucer’s influence:

  This, perhaps, is Chaucer’s great innovation in our literature, surpassing even the invention of the decasyllabic English line that found its way to iambic pentameter: a level narrative playing field, inviting interaction and discussion. His is not a divine but a Balzacian human comedy, intended to describe and chaperone the ambulant, sometimes somnambulant, pilgrims on their way through living, whose journey inevitably ends abruptly. (Honore de Balzac’s Comedie Humaine is also desperately ambitious—and unfinished.) Matthew Arnold wrote that Chaucer “lacked high seriousness.” Chaucerian analects may be relatively hard to come by, but in dialects, sociolects, and idiolects he has no peer. Dramatic writers like Shakespeare couldn’t have done it without him.

[Behind the paywall: Steve on Annie Ernaux and envy, Julia on putting together a syllabus, A Course in Miracles, Fredric Jameson, the verse novel, Joni Mitchell, independent bookstores, performative reading, Marianne Moore, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]