They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other’s train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read the Washington Review of Books together.
Links:
Look, let’s get this out of the way. There’s a new Jonathan Franzen essay. It’s in the New Yorker; it’s about cats. Happy New Year, we’re happy to be back at it.
In the New Statesman, Nick Burns asks where have all the Toms Wolfe gone [Now shitposters, every one / When will they ever learn? / When will they ever learn? —Steve]:
Wolfe did not simply misunderstand the changes in American life and opinion—he also contributed to them. Before Wolfe was in favor of the novel—the social novel, at least—he was against it, exchanging broadsides with John Updike and Norman Mailer, arguing in his collection on the New Journalism that this type of non-fiction had managed to “wipe out” the novel as a significant literary form. He depicts the conflict between novelists and journalists in almost explicit class terms, between a louche, creatively spent aristocratic club and a wider group of scrappier, more middle-class scribblers eager to supplant them.
Today novelists have lost much of the prestige and cultural relevance they had in Wolfe’s time—as literature itself has become more professional, more consolidated in the hands of a few large companies—and it is not clear we are better off for it. The snobs who populated the art world Wolfe once mocked have largely disappeared as the landscape has given way to an open embrace of finance and technology on the one hand, and overt political display on the other.
The old mid-century liberal intelligentsia had trouble steering clear of hypocrisy, but they kept at bay the commercialized pabulum and, in some cases, outright philistinism now a notable presence in American cultural life. Wolfe’s bombardments helped erode the very ivory tower that once offered a place to him.
“Sometimes a work is translated from a second language into a third by a translator who doesn’t build from the original work. Instead, he or she works off the second language and produces a translation of a translation. In such cases, the second language, into which the work has already been translated, is called the relay language.” Steve Moyer writes about how Russian literature reached a Korean audience—by being passed through Japan:
Koreans began translating literature from Japanese in earnest starting in 1900, and the activity continued into the 1920s. One reason for Korea’s interest in Russian literature was proximity. Russia was a regional power, and conflicts such as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 brought Korea into closer contact with Russia. The reasons both the Japanese and the Koreans were especially sympathetic to Russian literature had much to do, too, with the regulation of political speech in czarist Russia, a rapidly modernizing Japan, and a cultural awakening in colonial Korea. In all three countries literature took on the role of freely expressing, or attempting to express, the hopes and desires of their peoples, or, as Tolstoy would have it, their emotions. It is a well-worn cliché to refer to translators as couriers of culture. Early twentieth-century translators in Japan and Korea, however, not only met that responsibility but raised the bar and, in Korea’s case, created the foundations of a national literature.
Two from the new issue of Liberties [It’s hot pink! The attentive may remember reading, in WRB Dec. 6, 2023, about Jane Austen: “even in her fifties she was still uncommonly fond of the color pink.” The latest issue of The Lamp is also hot pink. The new issue of the Cleveland Review of Books? That, too, is “a hot watermelon lava horse hello, a friendship mission in pink.” Our plan for the next issue of The End is, on the other hand, a mute, Sweet’n Low packet pink. Readers may rest, assured and without worry: the WRB will never be pink. —Chris]
Ryan Ruby on Proust:
Why read Proust? The other answer typically given is: self-improvement. In different ways this is the claim Phyllis Rose and Alain de Botton, among others, make on behalf of In Search of Lost Time. (Even Prendergast, a more sophisticated reader, does not avoid it entirely: “Is Proust good for you? Might he even, in controlled doses, have a useful function…?”) For Rose, reading Proust is a matter of demonstrating one’s social status. A pure product of mid-century upward mobility, having progressed from the daughter of a lower-middle class shopkeeper in Long Island via Harvard, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the pre-conglomeration publishing industry to tenured faculty at Wesleyan College and via marriage to the Babar-cartoon fortune, Rose is astonishingly, even embarrassingly forthright about her identity as a consumer (“I want therefore I am. I am therefore I acquire”), her meritocratic metrics of value (“I would not have reached this level of achievement had I not made reading Proust the central business of my life”), and her extra-literary reasons for reading In Search of Lost Time. The final line of her memoir approvingly quotes her mother, who would have preferred her to have written something more commercial, coming to terms with her instead of writing about Proust: “She saw the book’s potential, if not for making money, then for asserting our family’s intellectual and educational superiority to certain of her acquaintances, about whom she confided, ‘She’s not one of our class dear. She doesn’t read Proust.’”
[Phyllis Rose is so cool. Completely batty. I think about the time she described Paris as “a lovely, serene place where you drink a lot of coffee” several times a week. —Chris]
Helen Vendler on a final verse from Emily Brontë, Ashbery’s Three Poems, and the descent of poetry from divinity to abstraction:
Like Brontë, by whose strategies she was doubtless inspired, Dickinson thought long and hard about retaining enough sacred reference to make clear that she was engaged in stripping the Christian God of all supernatural credibility. Dickinson capitalizes, here, the “sacred” word “Mansion,” to reveal her allusion to the Christian belief in an afterlife. She is quoting Jesus’ promise as he bids farewell to his apostles: “In my father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you” (John 14:2). Yet how are the poets to retain a devotional tone while deleting from it any overt reference to theology, ritual, and religious narrative? How is the object of worship to be made convincingly abstract and yet able to install reverence by its (hidden) Christian allusions and a tone of veneration?
[One is reminded of the exchange between Nelly Dean and Lockwood about Catherine Linton in Wuthering Heights:
“Do you believe such people are happy in the other world, sir? I’d give a great deal to know.”
I declined answering Mrs Dean’s question, which struck me as something heterodox. She proceeded:
“Retracing the course of Catherine Linton, I fear we have no right to think she is: but we’ll leave her with her Maker.”
No one ever got the impression that Emily Brontë considered Lockwood to be particularly clever, or observant, or intelligent. —Steve]
[Ashbery always reminds me of the classic Tracey Daugherty story about being Donald Barthelme’s student and receiving the homework: “Find a copy of John Ashbery’s Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don’t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.” —Chris]
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