i added two comments to the two pieces:
1}The generalizations fly too furious for someone to whom the ABC OF READING once presented an ideal challenge. "Make it new" was in opposition to a state of affairs: the oppressive conventionality of the 19th century. Was it also intended as a state of permanent revolution? Perhaps so since conventionality is one of the major lodestones of the lethargy of history, e.g the basic forever naturalism of the American mind. Perhaps you need to live in Seattle for 20 years after 25 years in NY City to realize that modernism, except of course technologically, never penetrated the heartland or even its peripheries. Malevitch's newness yet incorporated the iconography of Russian religious art on what he imagined was a more substantial and more universal level. The recourse to the past, say to Greek drama, must be regained anew each generation, and in a new way. E.g. vide what a Shakespearean talent like Peter Handke does with it in creating experiences that alter an audiences state of mind. This is all for the few and there are too few of the few.
Pound's cleansing operation was scarcely unique if we take 1910 as the decisive line of division; his was the American voice within the chorus. What was produced in all the arts about that time and subsequently is absolutely extraordinary compared to the previous century and would have been far more splendid without the major 19th century hangover of imperialist competition, World War I. From which the world continues to suffer.
""Allow me to comment, too, on whether innovation is still feasible: There is no end of it going on, need for it seems to exert pressure, quite aside that to differentiate. As once Handke translator turned specialist on detecting that THE REPETITION made me into A GOD OF SLOWNESS and following up his innovations once he was a mature writer there came these discoveries, e.g.: ABSENCE I experienced as a film! Hadn't anticipated that at all! The same filmic quality characterizes CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS. ONE DARK NIGHT features getting the reader entangled in the protagonist's dream syntax! I have had other whelming UNIQUE EXPERIENCES with MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S BAY & the title text of A SLOW HOMECOMING, parts of the forthcoming MORAVIAN NIGHTS.
Ditto for his plays. Handke conducts his innovations, that comprise so much (including the nouveau roman) within the arena of classical prose – Flaubert, Goethe, Stifter. Others have razzmatazz. Proof in the pudding is, say, reading experiencing the “Berg & Tahl Fahrt” (A Drive across Hill & Dale) at the end of CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS, a greater ending than that of ULYSSES for this probably forever Joycean. And Handke is scarcely the only Austrian; other languages, Serbian, show an astonishing propulsion toward innovation – speaking “histo-mat” I would say because of a deep need to make prose able to exert, to penetrate the onslaught of whelming visual information; and on that deep syntactic level; not that reviewers editors have assigned have noticed. What Handke – and many others - have made prose capable of obviates the kind of dissatisfaction that some feel with the novelistic enterprise."
If you take the trouble to read the 20 + comments @ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/can-writers-still-make-it-new.html?comments#permid=13732120
ReplyDeleteyou will not that the great majority are pure drivel, typical of participatory NY Times Democracy which averts anything meatier.