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Posted by Michael Sympson on 27/12/2001, 18:01:49
In imaginative writing an author exhibits a temperament and readers make choices according to their more or less educated tastes. When temperament and taste agree, reader and author embrace each other: "you are mine!" It's a bit like a love affair. It may even lead to a lifelong relationship. But like the relationship of old couples, things can turn sour. Some authors have a tendency to spin out their own private mythology and after considerable time and effort, in their old age and with waning powers, they produce curious monstrosities, which academic cliques and critical hacks (reputations and pay cheques are on the line) never tire to applaud and praise as the ultimate masterpiece.
However the unsuspecting reader, even the trusting fan, usually feels disappointed even cheated, if he made the mistake to trust the editorials on the back of the book cover. I give two examples: James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" and Nabokov's "Ada." (Shakespeare's "Cymbeline?" Melville's "Pierre?") About "Finnegan's Wake" it is easy to be brief: it doesn't communicate. End of story. And yes I did my homework, I studied the blasted thing and wasted hours and hours on the interpretation. Despite the main thrust of early attempts to find meaning in the mythological allusions, it has gradually transpired over the years, that the book is autobiographical, located largely in Triest.
Finnegan's Wake is a tirade of hate against Joyce's younger brother "One-One-One" (you get the reference? Right! Revelations!) whom he accuses of - well everything: cheating with Nora, being stingy, abusing his older brother physically, or just being himself. Stephen Joyce by the way wrote a rebuttal to the paranoiac gushing of his older brother, the title is "My Brother's Keeper," and it is a good read. But it is Stephen's diary which provides the key to Finnegan's Wake - James unashamedly had had read and exploited it. Once you break through the linguistic barbs, the method in Finnegan's Wake becomes clear and the decoded message is not something I care to know. Joyce was not the inventor of this method: this honor goes to Lewis Carroll, not so much for "Alice," but his "Sylvie & Bruno."
Nabokov's "Ada" is a slightly different affair, as far as the form is concerned. There are definitely passages in the book where Nabokov's language achieved an elegant edge - his English has thrown off the heavy clod-hoppers and at times just dances along - the complete opposite to "Finnegan's Wake," one should think. Yet look at the book as a whole: this is a juvenile phantasy, a little boy rioting in the old man. This is not a love story - this is a lay story. I admit, with advancing age getting laid can become more important than wasting time on courtship - but the way Nabokov obsesses over speciality brothels with virgins for selected clients, or how incestual lays become sport events of herculean proportions; in fact the whole idea of the protagonists' inexhaustible libido turn the book into the phantasies of a teenager in heat.
And that's the common ground where the two books come together. Imaginative writing, especially fiction, creates a parallel world, complete, self-sustained, plausible, very real, yet different from our own and in the final analysis just a wonderful fairy tale. The difference is in the detail. What sets apart a great writer from a merely good writer and the hack (who churns out SF and crime stories by the ream), is the quality of vision: it is an alien planet, but a very real, very accurately observed world. "Finnegan's Wake" and "Ada," both have lost touch with this kind of reality. Both are very self-conscious productions "written by the book," but Joyce's "Wake" is barely more than a pathological exposition of his pet-paranoias, a "confession in foreign tongues" (Stephen Joyce), and Nabokov gives us the adolescent obsessions of a rather lonely child or childish old man.
Both books retreat into a splendid isolation - the way they had been written. When Joyce scribbled 17 years at his last book, he had become a mental recluse in near complete blindness; Nora was not much of a comfort. Nabokov enjoyed the proceeds from his "Lolita" in his last refuge, a Swiss hotel, retreating from the bustle, plugging out, chasing butterflies, composing chess problems and playing scrabble with Vera. He never returned to America. Both, Joyce and Nabokov, lived in exile, closer to their dictionaries than to the living language. The puzzles in "Finnegan's Wake" are often just a question of having handy the right dictionary. "Ada's" puzzles are more subtle, they are hidden in the structure, remote references, repeating motifs, a game of recognition like Solomon's Song. It is less of a pain to read "Ada" than "Finnegan's Wake" - but the gain in the end is the same: not something I care to know. Once it is all figured out, we are left with a shrug and the question "so what?"
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Posted by Andres Natal on 28/12/2001, 7:07:47, in reply to "Ageing Authors"
Fascinating observations! Interesting to note the sublimation of the lecherous urges of youth through art: A lapse observed of the aging Picasso, as well.
I also applaud your even-handed estimation of the works of Joyce and Nabokov. Of the former, my innocence was subjected to a severe mortification when--after studying for years before approaching "Ulysses" (which included reading "The Iliad" and the "Odyssey" in several translations before even trying it in the original Greek!--I came utterly disappointed. The novel seemed banal . . . tedious, even. There's a quotation from Nietzsche that the truly deep people strain for clarity. It is only the shallow who try to make their work obscure. "The common folk," said the German philosopher, "can't see beyond the muddle. And anything beyond which they can't see, they consider deep." (Somerset Maugham held to the same opinion.) So, even though it's unfashionable to say so now--and I shall call down upon myself the wrath of right-thinking, community college-educated parrots--I arraign Joyce as such a one. A bluff, a phony: A mediocre talent whose bloated reputation owes more to the politics of Leftist intellectuals who fought against censorship and used him as a poster child. Now, as to Nabokov. I've read every word ever written by the man. He was my first great literary love (and the first author whose prose I read and said to myself, "Wow! Novels CAN be poetry!" That being said, I agree that "Ada" was a disappointment. Upon first reading it (I've read it twice since), I was struck by the feeling that the old man had had it. It seemed as if he were trying to recapture the "sucess de scandal" of Lolita by capitalizing on another sexual taboo: Incest. (It seemed to me transparent and pathetic.) And as to the main plot: Nabokov's playfulness with Terra and Anti-Terra seemed like so much bad science fiction. (His Lewis Carroll-esque puzzles were clever, as always. But they seemed to be decoys from a man desperate to distract attention from an otherwise empty novel.)
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 28/12/2001, 17:23:27, in reply to "Re: Ageing Authors"
I had my own take at "Ulysses" too (on Amazon) - but there are things which should be seen in their proper perspective. 1. Don't make preliminary studies on the presumed sources for "Ulysses." It is not all that difficult and actually a piece of very fine plot engineering. (Which requires attention - but the book does have its music.) 2. The parallels to Homer are rather crude, thin on substance, and never taken seriously by the author himself. (My own greek was always weak - which turned out to be something of a professional handicap.) I don't know about the shallowness of Joyce - but the shallowness of his academic critics is evident.
But I do object to the incoherence of style: the changes of mode and paraphrases - meant to be satirical, but actually rather unfunny - are unasked for and add absolutely nothing to the overall effect of the book. And I don't like Joyce's pettiness. It can be alright to put a petty character on stage as the narrator of the story, but this is not what is happening in the masturbation scene in "Nausicaa." Superbly written as it is, it gives us the whole deficiency of Joyce in a nutshell.
He imitates the presumptuous and pompous phrasing in certain fashion magazines from the turn of the century, which could have been interesting, but here, just tell me to what end? Is it to poke fun on the teenage cliches of the crippled girl? Well I fail to see the joke, this is merely an act of a certain and in Joyce's time very fashionable "anti-philistine" snobbery. (Ok, Joyce himself always acknowledged the influence of Ibsen and certain "naturalistic" authors like Gerhard Hauptmann, who he translated. So it just might be a "naturalistic" take in all innocence - but there is more evidence to the contrary from the rest of Joyce's work.)
Despite what the professional critics may claim, who drag a living out of such statements, "Ulysses" is NOT a difficult book, (quantum physics is difficult) and in patches real fun to read - before the author loses his artistic mind and drags the helpless reader through an other endless stretch of badly conceived style imitations.
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Posted by Lale on 29/12/2001, 13:47:16, in reply to "Re: Ageing Authors"
The topic of decline of creativity with age is very interesting. I wonder if I can find any studies on it on the internet, I will look.
There must be a peak point in every artist's life. A build-up through childhood, then a maturity where technique, skill, knowledge helps the creativity to leap ahead. Then either a stagnation or a blooming period. Maybe one last masterpiece. Then with the decline of eye sight and dexterity ... Too much alcohol, dead brain cells, senility, alzheimers ...
I don't know. I am not convinced (yet). I am just thinking out loud. Some people created their best work last (Beethoven - 9th symphony, Hemingway - "The Old Man and The Sea" ). Some people died way too young to show any signs of decline.
In every author's life there is the dilemma of the masterpiece, otherwise known as The Curse. Once an author writes a masterpiece, what else is there for him? He cannot top it. Everything he/she writes afterwards will be compared to the masterpiece. One can't help but think that after the masterpiece there is only one way and that is down. So, being always mediocre is a blessing???
Some people write only one book and stop, like in the movie Finding Forrester. Why? Are they one-hit-wonders by choice? Afraid that they can never match the success of that first book? Or have they tried and failed to write a second book? One example comes to mind: To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't read this book so I don't know how good/bad it is but most people consider it a masterpiece and there has never been a second book.
J.D. Salinger. He wrote only, what, 2-3 books? I love his short stories and I always thought he could have written many more of them, but he didn't. Weighed down by the success of Catcher in the Rye?
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 1/1/2002, 19:45:00, in reply to "Re: Ageing Authors"
I obviously don't think much of the popular myth of the one last perfect work in old age. Not only don't I think much about Hemmingway's fish story, but just ask an orchestra conductor about the work that has to be put into rehearsals of Beethoven's 9th symphony. The wind section in the original score is completely out of balance with the string section, the famous chorus coda has been addressed as "coffeehouse music" (Leonard Bernstein - who, as everybody knows, had been a great admirer of Beethoven) and the scales in the choir are sheer torture for the singers. So more or less routinely the orchestras edit the score in their rehearsals, to make it manageable. Not exactly what I would call a masterpiece.
No Lale, ageing authors are not like ageing wine - they ain't getting any better. And the reason, apart from obvious physical decay, is a mental process as well, which in a sense is something more sinister than physical decay. The perspective on things becomes more detached, though not necessarily more objective and at the same time more tainted by the author's pet-obsessions. There is a decrease of human empathy and an increase in sardonic laughter which is not necessarily identical with humor. Sexuality becomes more and more a show from the fun-house. Voyeurism takes the place of affection, and, depending how bright an author is, (having a great artistic talent is not an automatic passport to great intelligence) you observe either an all pervasive nihilism or some rather desperate forms of sometimes pretty ridiculous superstition or religious mysticism.
These are of course generalizations in need of being qualified in each and every individual case, but I found it a surprisingly reliable guideline. The symptoms I had just described are sometimes called "wisdom." If you look into the biblical sections of such geriatric "wisdom," you may notice a brutal overall inhumanity - which is pretty typical. The human race is not such a complicated species after all. Neither are artists. What an artist feels is a decay of his best asset, his once wonderfully discerning and empathic artistic temperament, and if he still possesses the powers of creation he sets out to pull in into his inner self all the available resources of an extended life experience to create for one more time a last testimony from his inner world, which for the rest of the human race is rapidly becoming a message from a more and more alien planet. This can be very interesting if the artist has retained enough of his former creative powers. Tolstoy was capable of creative bursts of great beauty until late in his seventies ("Hajji Murad.")
However if an author lacks Tolstoy's broad foundation and enormous talent and generally has moved in a rather narrow circle of parochial experiences, like James Joyce, or suffered from a lifelong detachment from things imposed by particular circumstances, like forms of multiple exile as in Nabokov's case, then the product of advanced age can take a very strange shape indeed. It seems nobody is exempt here, even Shakespeare was a mortal after all. "Tempest" and "A Winter's Tale" are typical productions by an ageing artist, but still wonderfully artistic, though the author's preference for the "cloud capped towers" of some fantastic never-never land of his own making, already shows. In "Cymbeline" Shakespeare eventually had lost much of his poise and powers. He has become obscure and entangled in the sub-clauses of his syntactic structures. Long, schizoid and labyrinthine sentences with hosts of clauses and sub-clauses are an other symptom of mental isolationism in ageing writers. Nabokov was aware of this telltale sign for old age, and made a deliberate effort to avoid it in "Ada," thus making the book's shortcomings more apparent. The syntax of old age can be a form of verbal disguise.
As always there are exceptions from the rule. Sometimes the style of advanced age produces truly a marvel of literature. I had already mentioned "Tempest" and "Winter's Tale;" Cervantes "Don Quixote" was the product of a 63 year old man; but the absolute marvel of the species is Lawrence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy." Actually we don't know what a book of a young or middle-aged Sterne would have been like - he published only when he had reached an advanced age. 46 in his days could mean that the end was near, especially when you are consumptive, and Sterne was fully aware of his situation. So, knowing that his days were counted, Sterne too set out to pull in into his inner self all the available resources of an outwardly uneventful life, which so far had passed in the pleasures of extended reading, and he created the crown jewel of English literature. Sterne is really only second to Shakespeare, but even his book shows all the symptoms and signs of artistic ageing; however somehow Sterne's artistic powers managed to disguise his inhumane detachment (it is there if you look for it) and make it look like the whimsical empathy of a sentimentalist. But Sterne was a child of the early 18th century and of rationalism, and anything but sentimental - despite the title in his travel journal.
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