Holdings 1:5
A dash of theory, more Joyce, all of Ravn, and an introduction to Roussel
Here’s what’s going on at The Book Hold.
Portrait of the Artist
The ‘first pass’ reading guide for Joyce now has entries for the two earlier works:
- for Dubliners, and
- for Portrait of the Artist.
The goal of the series isn’t just to talk about how to ‘get through’ Joyce, but how to understand what he’s up to, and why it’s significant (or why I think it is anyway).
Olga Ravn complete (sort of)
Posts discuss all three of her translated novels (there is a fourth, her first, which hasn’t been translated):
Introduction to Roussel
Roussel’s Impressions of Africa has been troubling me, and it has taken a relatively long tour (longer than the one I describe here) to get to the point of ‘getting’ the ‘interest’ in him. I describe some of the relevant background now in a post:
Literature, resistance, and theory
Finally, I’ve been bothered by the sorts of questions amateurs are always (or should always be) bothered by. One in particular is about the possible political dimensions of literature, and of art more generally. (General question: What is that relation? Specific question: Now that we live in an authoritarian state, etc.?) A self-critical observation I’ve been nudging myself toward for a while is the thought that I haven’t been sufficiently discerning about some of the basic presuppositions I make on The Book Hold. One of those, which is probably definitely false, is that content alone can make a work politically meaningful.
In the spirit of wanting to question that, I’ve inaugurated a ‘Disassembly Line’ of theoretical works—no shelf, just an ongoing interrogation, with various threads of literary and art theory as our guides, of questions about form, experimentation, and so on, and with an emphasis on the relationship between art and politics. I offer a tentative self-criticism and introduce this line of reading and inquiry here:
There I also mention a few works that I’d like to begin with, including by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Andrea Fraser, and Hito Steyerl. There is a sort of ‘shadow’ lineage (one that exists in a shadow there because I don’t mention it, but it is inevitable) that is however the more obvious one: Benjamin, Adorno, Lukács, Sartre, Bürger, etc.—but I want to resist the temptation to take the more obvious route.
I basically consumed Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen the way certain birds swallow fish twice their size—this is genuinely, seriously exciting work that philosophers, literary critics, and readers like us should be thinking about here, and it isn’t canonically (and therefore, I am tempted to say, it should be) the most obvious place to begin in raising these questions (certainly it is not obvious, for example, in the case of the philosophy of literature, I can say confidently and more or less professionally). I also want to note, Book-Hold-specifically, that Wretched leaves a lot of questions just there to be asked about the form and nature of reading and writing. Anyway, this is just one of the texts in this thread of interest.
Coming up
Some things in the chute:
- There’s a moment at the beginning of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher that I want to talk about. It’s genius!
- Easy Reading is some kind of a misnomer. I love this book, but what is there to say about it? And what am I doing when I am reading it? There’s a lot to digest.
- A question that exists right alongside the questions about resistance is a question about certain suppositions I make, lazily, about modernity, and it’s one that has more or less halted my confidence in offering more general comment on Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Ravn’s translated corpus. There’s this story: Modernity involves a rupture of subject from world, and literature and the arts chronicle that rupture, and one way they do that is through excessive fascination with objects. And Adventures and all of Ravn could be suited up in that garb, it’s totally true. But I don’t know that I buy the broader narrative anymore (not even ironically). Nevertheless, these works are on my mind as touchstones for that more general inquiry.
- Valle-Inclán’s Tyrant Banderas for the Fictions of authority shelf and Cela’s Family of Pascual Duarte for the Salidas shelf are in the chute. In the case of the latter, I have been constantly holding onto an unreasonably intense interest in reading Ferlosio’s The River, which manages somehow to distract me from reading Pascual Duarte, which I’ve promised myself I would read before reading The River, so I am in a time warp of a tangle with my intentions here.
- For absolutely no reason at all I’m reading The Winter’s Tale.
Thanks for your support!