literary poll
Of which writers whose works you have never read have you nonetheless formed an opinion?
This question was suggested by Walter Kirn's review of J.M. Coetzee's essays:
August 5, 2007
Coetzee’s Canon
By WALTER KIRN
Skip to next paragraph
INNER WORKINGS
Literary Essays 2000-2005.
By J. M. Coetzee.
304 pp. Viking. $25.95.
A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but dangerous things are very often exciting, and only the truly saintly would deny that there is a pleasure in forming opinions of writers whom one has never read a word of. Without experience to cloud one’s judgment or information to slow one’s thinking, the passage from ignorance of a writer’s work to a vague acquaintance with its main elements - courtesy, say, of an essay or a review executed by someone better versed - can be a stimulating imaginative exercise. On the basis of brief descriptions and short quotations the reader is free to conjure up a figure who may not much resemble the artist in question but is rich in associations anyway and who will do - will have to do - for now (which sometimes, sadly, is all the time one has).
I’m thinking here of W. G. Sebald, the late German writer whom I’ve never read but am told I should by people who impress me - most recently by J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist whose new collection of literary essays, “Inner Workings,” includes compressed studies of several authors who fall, at least for me, in Sebald’s category of highly ranked European worthies (Robert Musil and Bruno Schulz are others) whose pages are easy to postpone turning, but hard, in some circles, to avoid discussing. What little I know about Sebald’s novels comes from Coetzee’s commentaries on them, but this knowledge feels strong and suggestive nonetheless.
“There is a lead-up full of compulsive activity, often consisting of nocturnal walking, dominated by feelings of apprehension. The world feels full of messages in some secret code. Dreams come thick and fast. Then there is the experience itself: one is on a cliff or in an aircraft, looking down in space but also back in time; man and his activities seem tiny to the point of insignificance; all sense of purpose dissolves.”
This brisk little stroke of literary summary (itself an underappreciated form) gratifies that base side of our nature that wants to grasp before it has to reach and to caption before it has to scrutinize while also inviting us to examine firsthand what, for the moment, we must take Coetzee’s word about: Sebald’s distinctively fertile melancholia. It’s a valuable service, ably performed, with just the mix of concreteness and generality that letters of introduction ought to have. Thanks to Coetzee, Sebald stands at our door now, still a stranger but no longer a mystery, and our sense of how he’s likely to behave inclines us to usher him inside.
In the essays on modernist European writers that make up the first part of his book, Coetzee supplements his criticism with biography and occasional bits of illuminating gossip. Because most of the pieces first appeared in The New York Review of Books, he doesn’t have endless space for this material, but he also doesn’t seem to need it. He has a Cordon Bleu instinct for measuring portions and knows how to fill yet not overcrowd a plate. The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, the magisterially obscure left-wing literary something-or-other whose masterwork was an unfinished prose montage on the subject of Parisian shopping centers (“The Arcades Project”), is shown to have taken the Marxist path partly as the accidental result of a love affair with a Communist theater director. To Coetzee, this suggests that Benjamin was not a pure ideologue whose politics were fashioned by his intellect but a man who happened into a pose he found emotionally congenial and gradually bent to suit his eccentricities.
Coetzee compares “The Arcades Project” to “another great ruin of 20th-century literature, Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos.’ ” With the tongue-and-groove precision of someone who machines his thoughts to the finest hair’s-breadth tolerances, Coetzee shapes this comparison into a model for a type of literary lunacy that held a peculiar intellectual allure once, back in the heyday of the great isms. Both Benjamin and Pound, Coetzee observes, are obsessed with economics, both “have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate,” and “neither knows when to stop.”
That Coetzee can make such exotic eminences as Sebald and Benjamin less forbidding is a testament to his prowess as an interpreter but also to his charm as a companion. His erudition and analytic acumen - both considerable, to say the least, and best displayed in his remarks on the nuances of literary translation - are so well dissolved into his elegant bearing that walking beside him rarely feels intimidating. And when, about halfway through the book, he leads us to the smoother ground of writers who compose in English and whom we’ve already presumably met (Faulkner, Beckett, Bellow, Roth and others), the stroll speeds up some and grows more invigorating.
In his essay on Faulkner, Coetzee sets aside the novels (after aptly defining perhaps the most ambitious three, the Snopes trilogy, as the story of a “poor white class in a revolution as quiet, implacable and amoral as a termite invasion”) and concentrates on how Faulkner’s leading biographers handled him - maladroitly, Coetzee feels - as a character. In the process of attacking one biographer, Frederick R. Karl, for “reductive psychologizing” (Karl views Faulkner’s tidy penmanship as a sign of an “anal personality,” for example), Coetzee questions whether Faulkner the man even existed in the conventional sense or was “a being of negative capability, one who disappeared into, lost himself in, his profoundest creations.” Coetzee holds out Faulkner’s alcoholism as a biographical “acid test” but finds the explanations for it wanting, even fatuous. He concludes - with surprising modesty, for a novelist - that words must fail when the subject is addiction.
Coetzee’s discussion of Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” is pretty much a straight review, but a review of special consequence because it’s written by a peer with an appreciation of the challenges Roth must have faced in fashioning his tale (of a fictional fascist Charles Lindbergh presidency in the early 1940s). He judges the book a noble failure marred by Roth’s inadequate understanding of the troubling swerve in history that is his main conceit. On the way to this slightly too strict conclusion - that reaching out of time to alter a past event should have obliged Roth to track the falling dominos and also change the present situation that his narrator looks back from - Coetzee gives us a primer in the dystopian novel that’s thorough and practical enough to be of aid to working fiction writers. Any slights discernible in the review are between esteemed colleagues, one is given to think, and Coetzee is, in fact, paying Roth an honor by putting him on the syllabus.
“Inner Workings” is Coetzee’s master class, and he honors us, too, by letting us sit in on it, despite our spotty preparation and the hasty ways we may use it. Knowing something about W. G. Sebald feels a lot better than knowing nothing - particularly when the little knowledge one does have comes from a source as reliable as Coetzee and inspires one to make time to learn much more.
Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His new novel is “The Unbinding.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
This question was suggested by Walter Kirn's review of J.M. Coetzee's essays:
August 5, 2007
Coetzee’s Canon
By WALTER KIRN
Skip to next paragraph
INNER WORKINGS
Literary Essays 2000-2005.
By J. M. Coetzee.
304 pp. Viking. $25.95.
A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but dangerous things are very often exciting, and only the truly saintly would deny that there is a pleasure in forming opinions of writers whom one has never read a word of. Without experience to cloud one’s judgment or information to slow one’s thinking, the passage from ignorance of a writer’s work to a vague acquaintance with its main elements - courtesy, say, of an essay or a review executed by someone better versed - can be a stimulating imaginative exercise. On the basis of brief descriptions and short quotations the reader is free to conjure up a figure who may not much resemble the artist in question but is rich in associations anyway and who will do - will have to do - for now (which sometimes, sadly, is all the time one has).
I’m thinking here of W. G. Sebald, the late German writer whom I’ve never read but am told I should by people who impress me - most recently by J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist whose new collection of literary essays, “Inner Workings,” includes compressed studies of several authors who fall, at least for me, in Sebald’s category of highly ranked European worthies (Robert Musil and Bruno Schulz are others) whose pages are easy to postpone turning, but hard, in some circles, to avoid discussing. What little I know about Sebald’s novels comes from Coetzee’s commentaries on them, but this knowledge feels strong and suggestive nonetheless.
“There is a lead-up full of compulsive activity, often consisting of nocturnal walking, dominated by feelings of apprehension. The world feels full of messages in some secret code. Dreams come thick and fast. Then there is the experience itself: one is on a cliff or in an aircraft, looking down in space but also back in time; man and his activities seem tiny to the point of insignificance; all sense of purpose dissolves.”
This brisk little stroke of literary summary (itself an underappreciated form) gratifies that base side of our nature that wants to grasp before it has to reach and to caption before it has to scrutinize while also inviting us to examine firsthand what, for the moment, we must take Coetzee’s word about: Sebald’s distinctively fertile melancholia. It’s a valuable service, ably performed, with just the mix of concreteness and generality that letters of introduction ought to have. Thanks to Coetzee, Sebald stands at our door now, still a stranger but no longer a mystery, and our sense of how he’s likely to behave inclines us to usher him inside.
In the essays on modernist European writers that make up the first part of his book, Coetzee supplements his criticism with biography and occasional bits of illuminating gossip. Because most of the pieces first appeared in The New York Review of Books, he doesn’t have endless space for this material, but he also doesn’t seem to need it. He has a Cordon Bleu instinct for measuring portions and knows how to fill yet not overcrowd a plate. The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, the magisterially obscure left-wing literary something-or-other whose masterwork was an unfinished prose montage on the subject of Parisian shopping centers (“The Arcades Project”), is shown to have taken the Marxist path partly as the accidental result of a love affair with a Communist theater director. To Coetzee, this suggests that Benjamin was not a pure ideologue whose politics were fashioned by his intellect but a man who happened into a pose he found emotionally congenial and gradually bent to suit his eccentricities.
Coetzee compares “The Arcades Project” to “another great ruin of 20th-century literature, Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos.’ ” With the tongue-and-groove precision of someone who machines his thoughts to the finest hair’s-breadth tolerances, Coetzee shapes this comparison into a model for a type of literary lunacy that held a peculiar intellectual allure once, back in the heyday of the great isms. Both Benjamin and Pound, Coetzee observes, are obsessed with economics, both “have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate,” and “neither knows when to stop.”
That Coetzee can make such exotic eminences as Sebald and Benjamin less forbidding is a testament to his prowess as an interpreter but also to his charm as a companion. His erudition and analytic acumen - both considerable, to say the least, and best displayed in his remarks on the nuances of literary translation - are so well dissolved into his elegant bearing that walking beside him rarely feels intimidating. And when, about halfway through the book, he leads us to the smoother ground of writers who compose in English and whom we’ve already presumably met (Faulkner, Beckett, Bellow, Roth and others), the stroll speeds up some and grows more invigorating.
In his essay on Faulkner, Coetzee sets aside the novels (after aptly defining perhaps the most ambitious three, the Snopes trilogy, as the story of a “poor white class in a revolution as quiet, implacable and amoral as a termite invasion”) and concentrates on how Faulkner’s leading biographers handled him - maladroitly, Coetzee feels - as a character. In the process of attacking one biographer, Frederick R. Karl, for “reductive psychologizing” (Karl views Faulkner’s tidy penmanship as a sign of an “anal personality,” for example), Coetzee questions whether Faulkner the man even existed in the conventional sense or was “a being of negative capability, one who disappeared into, lost himself in, his profoundest creations.” Coetzee holds out Faulkner’s alcoholism as a biographical “acid test” but finds the explanations for it wanting, even fatuous. He concludes - with surprising modesty, for a novelist - that words must fail when the subject is addiction.
Coetzee’s discussion of Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” is pretty much a straight review, but a review of special consequence because it’s written by a peer with an appreciation of the challenges Roth must have faced in fashioning his tale (of a fictional fascist Charles Lindbergh presidency in the early 1940s). He judges the book a noble failure marred by Roth’s inadequate understanding of the troubling swerve in history that is his main conceit. On the way to this slightly too strict conclusion - that reaching out of time to alter a past event should have obliged Roth to track the falling dominos and also change the present situation that his narrator looks back from - Coetzee gives us a primer in the dystopian novel that’s thorough and practical enough to be of aid to working fiction writers. Any slights discernible in the review are between esteemed colleagues, one is given to think, and Coetzee is, in fact, paying Roth an honor by putting him on the syllabus.
“Inner Workings” is Coetzee’s master class, and he honors us, too, by letting us sit in on it, despite our spotty preparation and the hasty ways we may use it. Knowing something about W. G. Sebald feels a lot better than knowing nothing - particularly when the little knowledge one does have comes from a source as reliable as Coetzee and inspires one to make time to learn much more.
Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His new novel is “The Unbinding.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company