The Washington Review of Books is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its Managing Editor had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
Links:
In The Critic,
on modern art making its way to Britain:Why did Paris produce so many daring and dynamic innovators, like Manet and Baudelaire? Though they’ve differed in their emphases, theorists of art such as Walter Benjamin, T. J. Clark and Peter Bürger have been in broad agreement regarding, firstly, the causes of the early modernist ferment, and secondly, its role in Paris’s becoming what Benjamin called “the capital of the nineteenth century.” A powerful current of anti-establishment revolt was part of the legacy of the Revolution, and the mixture of that with the conditions in the city resulting from Napoleon III’s ambitious, 17-year programme of urban renewal—enacted by controversial Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann—had proved explosive. It was the need to give expression to the political, economic, sensory, chemical-biological, mental and spiritual upheavals of the rapidly modernising capital that had produced those convulsive waves of innovation in the visual arts and in literature. In his well-regarded, Baudelaire-influenced theoretical text The Painting of Modern Life (1985), T. J. Clark offers this summation: ”Something decisive happened in the history of art around Manet which set painting and the other arts upon a new course. Perhaps the change can be described as a kind of skepticism, or at least unsureness, as to the nature of representation in art.”
By the time of the fin-de-siècle period, typically dated 1880 to 1900, this unsureness with regard to representation had been joined by other pressing doubts as to the reality of progress, and even whether a world which seemed so weary, and apparently in such cultural, moral and even biological decline, had a future at all (for the most pessimistic, fin-de-siècle meant fin-du-monde). Modern art expressed both this deepening sense of crisis (a crisis of which it was a morbid symptom, according to its detractors) and hopes for overcoming, transformation and renewal.
[Later Heron ponders why modern art emerged in France and not Britain, and suggests that one reason is that “throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods these institutions, foremost among them the Royal Academy, had maintained a firmer grip on art production and discourse than their counterparts in France.” This is surely part of the story, but it’s not all of it; as Heron says, modernist innovation happened not just in the visual arts but also in literature, and the initial wave of modernism in English literature featured a lot of doing things French writers had already done, but this time in English. As Moul noted a couple weeks ago:
I think it’s fair to say that the more you read of Jules Laforgue and his contemporaries, the more derivative Eliot’s earlier poetry seems. The features of Eliot’s style in poems like “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which for Anglophone readers are so redolent of the jaded horror and ennui of immediately post-war modernism, sound in French like the voice of the 1880s and 1890s.
(The poetry Eliot published in 1915 is not quite like his post-war work, but it has far less to do with English poetry in the 1880s.) And we have the modernists’ word for it too. Joyce said that Ulysses was influenced by Édouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés (1887). And in his ABC of Reading Pound offers a “sequence of authors through whom the metamorphosis of English verse writing may be traced,” which after naming twenty mostly English poets (the exceptions being François Villon, Gavin Douglas, and Mark Alexander Boyd) he switches to French and ends his list with Théophile Gautier, Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, and Laforgue. And the “skepticism, or at least unsureness, as to the nature of representation in art” Heron mentions has its literary equivalent in the symbolists, from whom English poets were lifting ideas even before modernism; as Pound also says in the ABC of Reading: “Did the ‘’90s’ add anything to English poetry, or did they merely prune Swinburne? and borrow a little from the French symbolistes?” —Steve]
In Lit Hub, Ed Simon on how Cervantes’ time as a captive shaped Don Quixote:
For all of his reading has driven Alonso Quixano insane, the implications of which are often skillfully occluded in some of the more romantic misrememberings of the novel. The pretend knight isn’t eccentric or idiosyncratic, a delightful oddball or harmless weirdo—he’s quite literally psychotic. Which is to say that to dream the impossible dream is one thing, but to pretend that it’s reality is quite another. Quixotic and Quixotism, the adjectives derived from the character’s name, refer not to the liberatory nature of literature but to the delusions of all-encompassing worldviews, the inability of the mad to grapple with our soiled and fallen existence. That we like spending time with Don Quixote is what makes the novel a tragedy as much as a comedy.
Among the saddest scenes in literature is when the knight, on his deathbed, passes into sanity, with his faithful squire trying to still convince him of the fantastical nature of a reality that is anything but. But though it’s an error to embrace only the sentimental readings of the novel, so would in only taking the opposite tact. After all, as Moore reminds us, “Whatever else it may be . . . [it] is unquestionably about the art of fiction.” Don Quixote’s greatness is that it exists in this tension while offering no reconciliation.
[The only argument I can remember hearing against Don Quixote’s greatness is something like “it revels in its pointless cruelty way too much.” This may be true, but in a sense it’s true of basically every novel and usually made less explicit. There are plenty of novelists who are something like a kid using a magnifying glass to carefully examine an ant and oh, no, would you look at that, it just happened to catch the sun and it just happened to burn the ant, how terrible. And novels especially love being cruel to the witless oafs, incompetent social climbers, and debilitated fantasists who spend their time reading novels. (Or prose romances, as the case may be.) —Steve]
Reviews:
In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Dustin Illingworth reviews a translation of a novel by Laura Vazquez (The Endless Week, translated from the French by Alex Niemi, September 30):
Vazquez writes in short, declarative sentences that quickly pile up into surprising structures. It is a prose style that easily mingles humour and horror, the whole of it marbled with subtle but utterly convincing melancholy. Her writing is difficult to quote because its effect is always cumulative and tied to a madcap sense of pace. Individual sentences may lack beauty or profundity but only because they are waypoints, the breadcrumbs of some larger assemblage of meaning or perception. They possess the brisk, energized, granular observation of Adderall-heightened attention. (Jonathan pops pills throughout the novel, at one point suffering a horrific panic attack.) It can at times give The Endless Week a cartoonish surface, an impossible elasticity governing the characters’ thoughts and actions. But such distortion is inseparable from the experience of their daily lives. The text’s absurdist qualities—think Beckett’s virtuosic stalling or the vaudevillian pessimism of Barthelme—throw the grounded agony of its characters into ever starker relief.
[More novelists should speak of their passion for De rerum natura. I support Vazquez in doing so. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
Against personal essays, and also against impersonal essays
I request somebody review a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake
A Poem by Andrew Marvell with striking images and prefigurements of Emily Dickinson
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
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