To no one's surprise, the Swedish Academy has reaffirmed its devotion to politically correct meretriciousness by awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Doris Lessing. I dealt with her here, and there's nothing else to say.
3 comments:
Anonymous
said...
It is very striking to read the words of someone who has been able to overcome, through unqualified inner strength, early indoctrination. Tolstoy was another person who could think for himself. In his What is Art?, he said the following about the works that were appearing in his time: "Recently, not only have vagueness, mysteriousness, obscurity, and inaccessibility to the masses been considered a merit and a condition of the poeticality of artistic works, but so, too, have imprecision, indefiniteness, and ineloquence." This was written in opposition to the avalanche of intentionally obscure, puzzling, cryptic, and complicated works that now comprise art, including painting, literature, and poetry.
I've never read Lessing, but I can't say as you provide any evidence for why you say that she's crap. The Beckett anecdote proves nothing; to reject an author on the basis of his/her bad behavior toward others is pure P.C. (Melville pushed his wife down the stairs, Woolf was mean to the servants, etc.). Roth and Bellow frequently fictionalize people of their own acquaintance, often in a quite rude way, but I don't see that you hold it against them.
Indeed, an old James Wood essay quotes Bellow's response to an acquaintance who was distressed to see a personal anecdote that he'd told SB end up in a novel. "The name of the game," Bellow informed him, "Is 'give all.'" So much for the fragility of identity!
Anyway, in the academy, Beckett is the absolute favorite writer of the Derrida set, so I suppose he's as P.C. as anyone these days.
(I disagree with you about everything, by the way, but I think this is a great blog.)
I love Memoirs of a Survivor and Briefing for a Descent into Hell. I have read both of them several times and expect to read them more. That's only a fraction of her work, but it's enough for me--those books were part of my life at the time that I read them, and I believe they still are.
3 comments:
It is very striking to read the words of someone who has been able to overcome, through unqualified inner strength, early indoctrination. Tolstoy was another person who could think for himself. In his What is Art?, he said the following about the works that were appearing in his time: "Recently, not only have vagueness, mysteriousness, obscurity, and inaccessibility to the masses been considered a merit and a condition of the poeticality of artistic works, but so, too, have imprecision, indefiniteness, and ineloquence." This was written in opposition to the avalanche of intentionally obscure, puzzling, cryptic, and complicated works that now comprise art, including painting, literature, and poetry.
I've never read Lessing, but I can't say as you provide any evidence for why you say that she's crap. The Beckett anecdote proves nothing; to reject an author on the basis of his/her bad behavior toward others is pure P.C. (Melville pushed his wife down the stairs, Woolf was mean to the servants, etc.). Roth and Bellow frequently fictionalize people of their own acquaintance, often in a quite rude way, but I don't see that you hold it against them.
Indeed, an old James Wood essay quotes Bellow's response to an acquaintance who was distressed to see a personal anecdote that he'd told SB end up in a novel. "The name of the game," Bellow informed him, "Is 'give all.'" So much for the fragility of identity!
Anyway, in the academy, Beckett is the absolute favorite writer of the Derrida set, so I suppose he's as P.C. as anyone these days.
(I disagree with you about everything, by the way, but I think this is a great blog.)
I love Memoirs of a Survivor and Briefing for a Descent into Hell. I have read both of them several times and expect to read them more. That's only a fraction of her work, but it's enough for me--those books were part of my life at the time that I read them, and I believe they still are.
Post a Comment