A new collection of the writings of Henry James Jr. on fiction as an art, published by NYRB Classics, has drawn my attention. A reviewer of the collection quotes HJ saying, "The old superstition about fiction being 'wicked' has doubtless died out in England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed towards any story which does not more or less admit it is only a joke.” Some of James’s eminent contemporaries were casualties of the notion that fiction was a moral embarrassment — that its very falsity amounted to a sort of nefarious deception. In the novels of Anthony Trollope, for instance, James detected “a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe." Becca Rothfeld, reviewing this collection for WaPo, wonders whether we are to take this as a banner James was raising on behalf of his own work. Come into my tent, he would be saying and get fiction that is not apologe...
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They used to call it the "new criticism," but that isn't a name that wears well. I think of it as formalism. It is simply the formalism distinctive to the mid-20th century in literary studies. The New Criticism (1941) was a book by John Crowe Ransom that gave its name to a literary/theoretical movement. Besides Ransom the important figures in the movement included Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, and a two headed beast, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. Salient features of the movement are these: close reading and explication of the text. This would seem obviously something a good critic must do, but it was a rebuke to romantic scholars who showed off their contextualizing erudition and engaged in emotional effusions at the expense of this focus on the text. a deliberate detachment from the issue of what the author of a text MEANT to say. What matters is what he did say, the text before us, not intentions that other sorts of scholars might divine from...
On my mind today (and on Thanksgiving fairly often -- I've used this as this blog's Thanksgiving reflection twice before), is the novel Mildred Pierce, published in 1941, written by James Cain, a writer whose reputation, once considerable, has lately gone into eclipse. As it happens, Mildred Pierce was also made into a movie in 1945, and became a television miniseries (HBO) in 2011. The title character has two daughters: Veda (11 years old when the story begins in 1931) and her little sister Ray (7 years). The photo above is of Veda, as portrayed by actress Morgan Turner in that HBO miniseries. The following two-word sentence is not much of a spoiler, by the way, because it happens quite early in the plot, and sets up the rest: Ray dies. Indeed, that's why I'm thinking of the book right now. Thanksgiving as currently practiced in the US has a lot to do with the sentimentalization of the nuclear family, and Mildred Pierce has a lot, in turn, t...
Melville was "a great, deep artist, even if he was a rather sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful his book commands stillness in the soul, an awe. "In his 'human' self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out, He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things Men do." What the heck does all that mean? D.H. Lawrence, who was himself IMHO a "deep artist, even if he was a rather sententious man," did not use the phrase "a real American" as a compliment. Ever. For him, the real American prototype was Ben Franklin, whom he saw as a wealth-...
I'm giving myself an easy holiday out by repeating with minor variations, last year's Thanksgiving observation. On my mind today is Mildred Pierce, a 1941 novel by James Cain, set in the ten years leading up to the date of publication. No, I didn't just refer to the movie star best known for playing Sonny Corleone. That's James Caan. I'm thinking now of the novelist James Cain, born in 1892. Although his reputation is in eclipse now, he was quite well known for a time as a writer of "hardboiled" crime fiction, a peer of Chandler or Hammett. Cain wrote Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. , both memorably adapted into classic Hollywood films. Mildred Pierce was somewhat different, an effort at offering a naturalistic portrait of southern California suburbia. As it happens, Mildred Pierce was also made into a movie in 1945, and became a television miniseries in 2011. The title character h...
"He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speeds were not necessary." I like that sentence. From LIGHT IN AUGUST. The context indicates that the "he" refers to McEachern, though the sentence as it unfolds makes us suspect that the "he" does double duty, that it might as well be a "they," for both man and horse, except that "they" would do violence to the unity involved. I don't know that McEachern ever gets a first name in the novel. H doesn't need one. He is pure Calvinist indomitability, or implacability as Faulkner calls it here, trying to give his adoptive son a proper Presbyterian rearing...