’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offence
To send this ’sletter, than mislead our sense.
N.B.:
This month’s salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, November 30 to discuss the topic, “Is order more important than justice?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In Vulture, Adam Moss interviews Jonathan Franzen and looks through his notes for The Corrections (2001). Franzen:
The next thing that changed was I read another book in manuscript, which was Underworld (1997), by Don DeLillo—three volumes of manuscript just in time to take with me on a vacation. That was the spring of ’97. I was one of the first people who got to read it, and I sat on the beach in Mexico and read it. And of course it is a magnificent thing—there’s no writer I revere more than DeLillo—but we’re very different writers. And it brought home: I’m not a writer like him. What’s more, there are things I can do that he can’t do.
I’d lost my father just about exactly two years earlier, which I’d experienced as this intense liberation. It remains one of the happiest days of my life, the day he died, just in terms of sheer exhilarating joy, partly because he was finally released from the sheer hell he’d been in. But no less, I was free. I was still in my 30s. And suddenly I was [also] liberated from the father [figure] of Don.
[I made some notes on The Corrections as a move away from the systems novel in WRB—Aug. 21, 2024. Franzen’s split between the “Big Social Novel” (his capitalization), which aims to “capture the way large systems work,” and the sort of character-driven novel represented by The Corrections comes across to me as protesting too much. In the specific case, no novel with the Chip-in-Lithuania saga is free of some systems novel tendencies. In the general case, it feels very limited to the latter half of the twentieth century, as if much of the business of the nineteenth-century realist novel wasn’t depicting how and why large systems work through their interactions with the novels’ characters and the characters’ existence within them. And—not to get into “was Jane Austen a realist”—even her novels are concerned with the operations of the marriage market. If Franzen means how large bureaucracies work, then maybe, but that’s an even further limitation. I think that the core of the issue here is Franzen’s feeling that his first two novels (which, to be fair, I haven’t read) aren’t very good, and so he designed his conceptual edifice around his belief that The Corrections is him figuring out what he should have been doing the whole time. —Steve]
In The Paris Review, an excerpt from a book on Renaissance libraries (The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, by Andrew Hui, December 3) about a list of fake books in Pantagruel:
The Renaissance also gave birth to the studiolo, the private study or personal library coveted by all well-heeled cultural elites. From Petrarch to Machiavelli, from aristocrats to cardinals, well-read humanists engaged in a gentle sort of competitive rivalry to curate a bespoke room of one’s own. The study was grounded in bibliophilia: a love of books, it was believed, uplifted the soul. Fiction responded by highlighting the negative side of bibliophilia. Some of the great characters in Renaissance literature have their lives upended by books: Don Quixote reads so many chivalric romances that he becomes mad; Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is exiled to an island on account of his readerly obsession; Doctor Faustus spends too much time in his study and sells his soul to the devil. In an era of discoveries and upheavals, these bibliophiles’ readings and identities are so entangled that they lose their grip on reality. Overwhelmed by the confusion of atlases, catalogues, and encyclopedias, they take their world to be their library, and the library to be their world.
Pantagruel shares with these book-besotted men an epistomania, an overwhelming appetite for knowing it all. My sense is that Don Quixote, Prospero, and Faustus were invented to show how noble minds can be overthrown by their own libraries. But Pantagruel is quite different from this distinguished company, for Pantagruel enters an institutional library—and only briefly at that—and exits unscathed.
[We linked to a piece on imaginary libraries in WRB—Oct. 26, 2024 and an interview in which Eliot Weinberger discusses the idea that he invents his sources in WRB—Aug. 3, 2024. Personally, I would encourage you to take the world and the WRB to be identical—“whatever in creation exists without my recording it in the WRB exists without my consent.” —Steve]
In The Yale Review, Merve Emre on education in The Magic Mountain:
Many layers are necessary for the concealment of this magic to succeed. We endure monologue after monologue: from Dr. Krokowski, the earnest psychoanalyst; from Settembrini, the Enlightenment “organ-grinder”; and from Naphta, the authoritarian Jesuit. Their long, dense, overelaborate, and largely impersonal speeches impart to the novel an educative function that stands as the pride and the privilege of the humanist tradition. “One should not deny the humanist his position as an educator—indeed it cannot be denied to him, for he alone preserves the tradition of man’s dignity and beauty,” Settembrini proclaims to Hans Castorp. “Absolutely no other type of educator has ever emerged.”
Yet if criticism is to serve as an X-ray, it must not be used diagnostically to separate the novel’s intellectual surfaces from its emotional depths, to distinguish what is diseased from what is healthy. Our X-ray should be read dialectically to reveal how the novel’s distinct genres struggle with and bleed into each other, how they overlap and interpenetrate to make up the magical formula of its emergent world. Only then can we appreciate how the supreme brilliance of Mann’s prose lies in his disciplined, almost fanatical, commitment to the entanglement of everything, even things that might normally be assumed to rebuff each other—illness and health, waking life and dream, love and pedagogy.
[Behind the paywall: Steve on antiheroes and coming-of-age novels, as well as twentieth-century novels, going to Italy, personal ads, republishing classics, opera, Yeats, 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.]
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