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I had my own ideas of ‘good writing’. It was a category that did not include aphoristic or overtly ‘lyrical’ language, mythic imagery, accurately rendered ‘folk speech’ or the love tribulations of women. My literary defences were up in preparation for Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Above all, I had to let go of my objection to the love tribulations of women. The story of Janie’s progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It is, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives.
i've been struggling with the language part
not long ago I sat down to dinner with an American woman who told me how disappointed she had been to finally read Middlemarch and find that it was ‘Just this long, whiny, trawling search for a man!’ Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It’s about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another. It implies that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being.
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this might be the reason why my taste in movies (and actually, not just movies) differs that much from my friends'. i don't like being told what is good and what is bad. i would like to make these judgements myself. so all i really want from a movie is a good story with enough things happening to keep me judging. if, however, one's expecting the movie to tell them something then they will judge the movie by how good the 'point' was. those seem to me to be two totally different things to look for
Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston’s own grain.
In the high style, one’s loves never seem partial or personal, or even like ‘loves’, because white novelists are not white novelists but simply ‘novelists’, and white characters are not white characters but simply ‘human’, and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.
Much of his work is tedious, and some of it shocks people, so that we are inclined to say: ‘What a pity! What a pity to go on about the subconscious and the solar plexus and maleness and femaleness and African darkness and the cosmic battle when you can write with such insight about human beings and so beautifully about flowers. Have you had that thought? Don’t worry if you have; so has E. M. Forster. Still, it’s a mistake: You can’t say, ‘Let’s drop his theories and enjoy his art,’ because the two are one. Disbelieve his theories, if you like, but never brush them aside… He resembles a
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On a naval book that celebrates the simplicity of the sailor’s life: ‘I don’t know whether I am overpraising the book. Its values happen to coincide with my own, and one does then tend to overpraise.’
Nabokov’s profound hostility to Freud was no random whim – it was the theory of the unconscious itself that horrified him. He couldn’t stand to admit the existence of a secondary power directing and diverting his own. Few writers can. I think of that lovely idea of Kundera’s: ‘Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.’
Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
In his introductory letter Kafka claims: ‘I am an erratic letter writer… On the other hand, I never expect a letter to be answered by return… I am never disappointed when it doesn’t come.’ In fact, counters Begley, ‘The opposite was true: Kafka wrote letters compulsively and copiously, and turned into a hysterical despot if they were not answered forthwith, bombarding Felice with cables and remonstrances.’
Isn’t it natural to leave a place where one is so hated? The heroism of staying is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be exterminated, even from the bathroom.
Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one place without gaining another… This feels like Kafka in the genuine clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect (if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts.15 What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These
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I think of a creature called Odradek, who at first glance appears to be a ‘flat star-shaped spool for thread’ but who is not quite this, Odradek who won’t stop rolling down the stairs, trailing string behind him, who has a laugh that sounds as if it has no lungs behind it, a laugh like rustling leaves. You can find the inimitable Odradek in a one-page story of Kafka’s called ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. Curious Odradek is more memorable to me than characters I spent three years on, and five hundred pages.
It never occurred to me that I was leaving Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.
kind of the same story with English and Estonian for me
Yet he was less successful in politics than many who enjoyed smaller advantages. Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities which make his writings valuable frequently impeded him in the contests of active life. For he always saw passing events, not in the point of view in which they commonly appear to one who bears a part in them, but in the point of view in which, after the lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic historian. To me, this is a doleful conclusion. It is exactly men with such intellectual peculiarities that I have always hoped to see in politics. But maybe Macaulay is
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writers should always count their blessings. A line of O’Hara’s reminds us of this. It’s carved on his gravestone. It reads: ‘Grace to be born and live as variously as possible’.
and absolutely no understanding of feminine restriction. Dr Hepburn made few distinctions between his sons and daughters. All of them played touch football, learned to wrestle, swim and sail and were encouraged in the idea that intellect and action are two sides of the same coin, for either sex.
Second, there is a great fear of the ridiculous. People take care not to say anything that might make them look foolish. This fear manifests itself in a strange impulse to narrate events as they happen and thereby hold fast to a shared understanding of their meaning. Jokes are met not with laughter but with the statement ‘That’s hilarious. That is so funny.’
Harvey’s idea of a good time was the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, the grim tale of two mutually antagonistic ‘rag-and-bone’ men who pass their days in a Beckettian pile of rubbish, tearing psychological strips off each other. Each episode ends with the son (a philosopher manqué, who considers himself trapped in the filthy family business) submitting to a funk of existential despair. The sadder and more desolate the comedy, the better Harvey liked it.
Hancock’s heartbreaking inability to pass as a middle-class beatnik or otherwise pull himself out of the hole he was born in was a source of great mirth to Harvey, despite the fact that this was precisely his own situation. He loved Hancock’s hopefulness, and loved the way he was always disappointed. He passed this love on to his children, with the result that we inherited the comic tastes of a previous generation. (Born in 1925, Harvey was old enough to be our grandfather.) Occasionally, I’d lure friends to my room and make them listen to ‘The Blood Donor’ or ‘The Radio Ham’. This never went
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TV and popular film and most kinds of ‘low’ art – which just means art whose primary aim is to make money – is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas ‘serious’ art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one
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The ends of great fiction do not change, much. But the means do. A hundred years earlier, another great American writer, Henry James, wanted his readers ‘finely aware so as to become richly responsible’.10 His syntactically tortuous sentences, like Wallace’s, are intended to make you aware, to break the rhythm that excludes thinking.
What have we become when we ‘understand’ ourselves so well all our questions are rhetorical? What is confession worth if what we want from it is not absolution but admiration for having confessed?
Certainly in Brief Interviews our everyday human language always falls short, even in its apparent clarity, especially in its clarity. The curious thing about these men is how they use their verbosity as a kind of armour, an elaborate screen to be placed between the world and the self.
The moralist in Wallace – that part of him that wanted not only to describe the wound but to heal it
It’s not that language ‘is’ us, but we’re still ‘in’ it, inescapably, the same way we’re in like Kant’s space-time. Wittgenstein’s conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have. And if there’s one thing that consistently bugs me writing-wise, it’s that I don’t feel I really ‘do’ know my way around inside language – I never seem to get the kind of clarity and concision I want.
when I think of a moralist I don’t think of a preacher. On the contrary, he was a writer who placed himself ‘in the hazard’ of his own terms, undergoing them as real problems, both in life and on the page. For this reason, I suspect he will remain a writer who appeals, above all, to the young. It’s young people who best understand his sense of urgency, and who tend to take abstract existential questions like these seriously, as interrogations that relate directly to themselves. The struggle with ego, the struggle with the self, the struggle to allow other people to exist in their genuine
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Now more commonly used for recent immigrants to Western democracies.
about a question whether to persecute or tolerate. originally about Jews in early 20th
He makes the same point, at greater length, in an interview with Salon: ‘It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is
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about 'banal platitudes can have life and death importance'
