how do you mean? i've only read 'rings of saturn' and loads of people have already proven that the walk itself is not possible in the way he tells it. and the rest is his impressions on various things. like for example the bit where he's talking about conrad and HoD... it's presumably all historical fact based upon some authoritative references, but he shoots his own perspective all over it.
dematerialisation in literature
- Thread starter woops
- Start date
how do you mean? i've only read 'rings of saturn' and loads of people have already proven that the walk itself is not possible in the way he tells it. and the rest is his impressions on various things. like for example the bit where he's talking about conrad and HoD... it's presumably all historical fact based upon some authoritative references, but he shoots his own perspective all over it.
i cancelled him when he started his walking schtick copying big iain
have you read it? i really enjoyed it. i mean, who cares what the label is to some extent?
IdleRich
IdleRich
Of course Sebald is a novelist, stupid question.
Anyone read anything by Leonora Carrington or Ithel Colquhoun? Two British surrealist painters who fucked around with novels too.
Me too. Are there not two versions? A bit like with The Magus... I would like to check which one I've read and read the other.
Anyone read anything by Leonora Carrington or Ithel Colquhoun? Two British surrealist painters who fucked around with novels too.
Also I suppose if you're talking about BS Johnson then should mention Ann Quinn too, I think she was part of the same circle... and unlike with him I have actually read some of her stuff.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Surprised Tea hasn't mentioned him but At Swim Two Birds is a great book by the "fun Joyce" and I think JJ was actually a fan wasn't he?
Contrary to what I said before - well, not completely - but in terms of getting away from plot and character that unshackles itself far more than any Robbe-Grillet I've ever read.
Contrary to what I said before - well, not completely - but in terms of getting away from plot and character that unshackles itself far more than any Robbe-Grillet I've ever read.
IdleRich
IdleRich
I've never read her, I know Chris Krauss mentioned her a bit in that I Love Dick.
Actually Edmund, you should be talking about Anna Kavan here surely? She the one who actually dematerialised from her own life in a way that I find quite disturbing (changing her name to that of one of her characters - life imitating art for real).
Actually Edmund, you should be talking about Anna Kavan here surely? She the one who actually dematerialised from her own life in a way that I find quite disturbing (changing her name to that of one of her characters - life imitating art for real).
craner
Beast of Burden
Yes, I have. My friend Daria met her when she was writing an MA dissertation about Surrealism, alchemy and Leonara's writing in 2003. She went to Mexico to track her down and ended up running off with Carrington's nephew. She was prone to this sort of thing, therefore I believed her. When I knew her in London a few months before this Mexico thing happened, she tracked down Conroy Maddox and went to his flat to meet him.
She got a Distinction for her MA, and apparently her tutor made a pass at her.
version
Well-known member
To be fair, I've barely read any men either!
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Some interesting discussion under that Will Self article, buried under a pile of "Will Self you pretentious cunt with your big words" comments.
"Finnegan's Wake wasn't the end of the novel, but it might have signalled a dead end for one kind of novel, the self-consciously referential modernist one you describe. I've never been quite sure whether Finnegan's Wake is a novel or not.It seems like a collection of routines, quibs, puns, poetry, doggerel, a rag-bag of a bit of everything deliberately compressed to the limits of comprehension, but not structured or cohesive or even readable enough to be called a ' novel'. It has some amazing writing in it and some fantastic phrases and pages, but it's always struck me as a performance in the form of a book, or a giant collage, or a huge poem, or some kind of hybrid of all three in the form of words....
Writers who came later such as William Burroughs or Thomas Bernhard took this notion of writing as performance, comic routines, collage, etc, and went somewhere else with it. One could just as well argue that Finnegan's Wake was the start of something, as the end of it. As someone remarks above, literature changes - forms such as the epic rhyming poem or the epistolatory novel die out. Sure Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses are as far as you can go in a certain direction but there are other directions. At any rate Joyce changed things for writers by suggesting that pretty much anything was possible if you set your mind to it..The book itself may be something of a giant folly but the fact that it ( and Ulysses) are there has I think proved liberating rather than restrictive for writers who came after."
"Finnegan's Wake wasn't the end of the novel, but it might have signalled a dead end for one kind of novel, the self-consciously referential modernist one you describe. I've never been quite sure whether Finnegan's Wake is a novel or not.It seems like a collection of routines, quibs, puns, poetry, doggerel, a rag-bag of a bit of everything deliberately compressed to the limits of comprehension, but not structured or cohesive or even readable enough to be called a ' novel'. It has some amazing writing in it and some fantastic phrases and pages, but it's always struck me as a performance in the form of a book, or a giant collage, or a huge poem, or some kind of hybrid of all three in the form of words....
Writers who came later such as William Burroughs or Thomas Bernhard took this notion of writing as performance, comic routines, collage, etc, and went somewhere else with it. One could just as well argue that Finnegan's Wake was the start of something, as the end of it. As someone remarks above, literature changes - forms such as the epic rhyming poem or the epistolatory novel die out. Sure Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses are as far as you can go in a certain direction but there are other directions. At any rate Joyce changed things for writers by suggesting that pretty much anything was possible if you set your mind to it..The book itself may be something of a giant folly but the fact that it ( and Ulysses) are there has I think proved liberating rather than restrictive for writers who came after."
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I have devoted most of my reading time to reading 'canonical' literature and so the extent of my reading of female authors is 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Wuthering Heights', 'To The Lighthouse', 'The Awakening', 'Frankenstein' and some poets including of course Emily Dickinson. Oh, and Flannery O'Connor, one of my favourite writers, actually.
version
Well-known member
I read D&G on the novel last night,
The novel — A flock of geese flew which the snow had dazzled. [Perceval] saw them and heard them, for they were going away noisily because of a falcon which came drawing after them at a great rate until he found abandoned one separated from the flock, and he struck it so and bruised it that he knocked it down to earth.... When Perceval saw the trampled snow on which the goose had lain, and the blood which appeared around, he leaned upon his lance and looked at that image, for the blood and the snow together seemed to him like the fresh color which was on the face of his friend, and he thinks until he forgets himself; for the vermilion seated on white was on her face just the same as these three drops of blood on the white snow.... We have seen a knight who is dozing on his charger. Everything is there: the redundancy specific to the face and landscape, the snowy white wall of the landscape-face, the black hole of the falcon and the three drops distributed on the wall; and, simultaneously, the silvery line of the landscape-face spinning toward the black hole of the knight deep in catatonia. Cannot the knight, at certain times and under certain conditions, push the movement further still, crossing the black hole, breaking through the white wall, dismantling the face — even if the attempt may backfire? All of this is in no way characteristic of the genre of the novel only at the end of its history; it is there from the beginning, it is an essential part of the genre. It is false to see Don Quixote as the end of the chivalric novel, invoking the hero's hallucinations, harebrained ideas, and hypnotic or cataleptic states. It is false to see novels such as Beckett's as the end of the novel in general, invoking the black holes, the characters' line of deterritorialization, the schizophrenic promenades of Molloy or the Unnameable, their loss of their names, memory, or purpose. The novel does have an evolution, but that is surely not it. The novel has always been defined by the adventure of lost characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking for, or what they are doing, amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics. They differentiate the genre of the novel from the genres of epic or drama (when the dramatic or epic hero is stricken with folly or forgetting, etc., it is in an entirely different way). La princesse de Cleves is a novel precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the people of the time: the states of absence or "rest," the sleep that overtakes the characters. There is always a Christian education in the novel. Molloy is the beginning of the genre of the novel. When the novel began, with Chretien de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would accompany it over the entire course of its history was already there: The knight of the novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing, what people say to him, he doesn't know where he is going or to whom he is speaking, he is continually drawing a line of absolute deterritorialization, but also losing his way, stopping, and falling into black holes. "He awaits chivalry and adventure." Open Chretien de Troyes to any page and you will find a catatonic knight seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting, seeing the face of his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to make him respond. Lancelot, in the presence of the queen's white face, doesn't notice his horse plunge into the river; or he gets into a passing cart and it turns out to be the cart of disgrace. There is a face-landscape aggregate proper to the novel, in which black holes sometimes distribute themselves on a white wall, and the white line of the horizon sometimes spins toward a black hole, or both simultaneously.