Mala’s Reviews > Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984 - 1994 > Status Update

my muse is the one with a smile on her face — for approaching the mystic and the tragic by way of the comic: it has to do with what (...) Umberto Eco calls "ironic double coding" (a hallmark of the postmodern condition, in Eco's opinion). In an age of hyper self-consciousness and lost innocence, straightforward mysticism (or tragicism or mythicism) is as likely to off-put the knowledgeable (contd. in comments)

How many books are enough? When one of my graduate students asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting our seminar, what she might do to become a better writer, Barthelme suggested that she might begin by reading all of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up to the last semester. The young woman objected that I had already urged her and her comrades to read all of literature, from the Egyptian (contd. in comments)

Borges's great contemporary and fellow Nobel Prize-non-winner Vladimir Nabokov once said mischievously that when he and Vera first discovered Borges's writings, they felt as if they were standing on a wondrous portico — and then they discovered that there was no house. For most of us (...) that "portico" is a marvelous freestanding specimen of Postmodernist literary architecture, rich in what (contd. in comments)

'Borges and I'
Yo, Barth!
Paul Cézanne is said to have said, vis-a-vis painting, that "the road to nature leads through the Louvre, and the road to the Louvre leads through nature." Similarly, for a writer of fiction the road to life may well lead through the library, and the road to the library — to the shelf with one's own books on it — will no doubt lead through life. Life teaches the (contd. in comments)

'Postmodernism Revisited'
Barth is taking a master class!

"the pedagogical virtues of the conventional modern short story will not be conflated with its aesthetic values, and its aesthetic values will not be assumed to hold for all times, places, temperaments, and talents. There is a narrative metabolism, equally honorable and with at least as long a pedigree, that valorizes expansiveness, even extravagance, complication, non-linearity, even telling (contd. in comments)

For Proust lovers:
"I personally recall, with undying gratitude to Marcel Proust, having survived an undergraduate life crisis by virtually isolating myself with Remembrance of Things Past. For two weeks I did little besides eat, sleep, and read Proust; my problems did not go away, but by page 1,124 my sustained and concentrated self-loss had weakened their grip on my spirit.
Getting out (contd. in comments)

On Maximalism:
'To create a world: That is it, precisely. One is reminded that the pleasures of the one-night stand, however fashionable, are not the only pleasures. There is also the extended, committed affair; there is even the devoted, faithful, happy marriage. One recalls, (...) Nabokov seconding James Joyce's wish for "the ideal reader with the ideal insomnia" (...) and Joyce himself insouciantly (in comments)

'The Limits of Imagination' essay was fantastic. The next one, 'A Few Words About Minimalism', ha! NR's fav bugbear :p

In 1973, Barth read two extraordinary books back to back: Gravity's Rainbow, & One Hundred Years of Solitude, and his vote went to Márquez.
"García Márquez showed me not what Postmodernism is, necessarily, but what it ought to be if it is to be anything worth taking seriously. Its author gave magic back to storytelling: not literary magic, but literal magic: the literally marvelous." (46)