Comments on: Sunny Jim

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Sat, 29 Nov 2003 18:15:11 +0000

I used to have more patience for the kind of drivel Peck offers here as argument, what with the heart of the novel still being alive and the oy! and the farfelgnugen, but these days I mostly just throw up my metaphorical hands and walk away to fresh fields and pastures new. OTOH, I did get the pleasure of learning about the best song in the world.

By: Mikhel

Mikhel — Fri, 28 Nov 2003 04:41:15 +0000

Literary types hate Joyce because they read him and think, I could have written this rotten drivel! Upon closer inspection, they realize this probably isn't true. Did Joyce ruin the novel? Of course not, and indeed, I would argue that the novel is doing far better these days than its languishing sibling, the Poem. Peck just realizes he hasn't hit anything lately, and so took a swing at the biggest thing he could see.

By: msg

msg — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 21:13:21 +0000

Oh, the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster, farther and more impalpable. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

By: drapetomaniac

drapetomaniac — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 18:29:12 +0000

Perhaps a subscriber can tell me who, besides Dale Peck, counts as a great modern novelist. His answer is Virginia Woolf, I believe. From what I read in Prof. Levy’s post, it seems to me Peck is making a quite common argument that modernism and post-modernism (Joyce, Gaddis, Nabokov, etc) ruined everything by focusing so much on prose style at the expense of other values….. hence the difficulty in mentioning Woolf, perhaps. I must add that Portrait of the Artist is one of the worst books I was ever set in school, and I am ergo prima facie sympathetic to blaming anything on Joyce.

By: raj

raj — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 13:57:25 +0000

Oh, jeez, give me a break. Those who are responsible for the sorry state of the novel are Barbara Cartland, Tom Clancy, and those who figured out how to publish books cheeply (misspelling intentional).

By: Jeffrey Kramer

Jeffrey Kramer — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 12:52:52 +0000

Following up on Thomas Dent’s comments: Shaw similarly argued that Shakespeare ruined English drama (until Shaw’s own advent, of course) by “inspiring” so many fustian blank verse imitations.

By: Vance Maverick

Vance Maverick — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 12:13:09 +0000

I’d like to take a moment to note that Ulysses is extremely good. For example, it gives great pleasure across many readings. (This is of course not the only criterion! Burgess’s comment on its humaneness is praise under another.) Whether it’s relevant to novel-writing today, or central to us, are different questions. When people like Peck complain about the baleful influence of Joyce, they mainly seem to forget how wonderful the book is. Or maybe they really don’t find it wonderful. Either way, I have trouble taking their conclusions seriously.

By: Thomas Dent

Thomas Dent — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 11:59:27 +0000

Was that toxic antimony (a metallic element occupying the lower reaches of the Periodic Table) or antinomy (opposition to the rule of law)? Peck sounds like the 19th-century German music critic Edouard Hanslick on Richard Wagner: although acknowledging Wagner’s genius and talent he continually accuses him of misusing it and (worst of all) being an inspiration to hordes of other composers’ pseudo-Wagnerian extravaganzas. At the back of Hanslick’s mind, he’d rather such incendiary geniuses didn’t exist if they’re going to lead the impressionable youth off the narrow way of Schumannian classic-romantic purity. He might have been right in a way, since it took decades for most of the musical world to get over either imitating or reacting against Wagner, with regrettable results. Having said which, Verdi, Bruckner, Dvorak, Franck, Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Mahler etc. got over it remarkably quickly. Without any Wagnerian stimulus, the alternative for the Austro-German tradition was an eternal twilight of neoclassical dullness. Returning to the novel (although Joyce and music aren’t far removed), Joyce’s sin was merely to be both ridiculously ambitious and surprisingly successful. I don’t think any geniuses were prevented from writing great novels because of Ulysses. The non-geniuses, as usual, imitated or reacted. Did Joyce’s influence led to a greater proportion of bad novels? Or were the bad novels just bad in a different way? I go for the latter.

By: Hugo

Hugo — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 11:20:29 +0000

I simply don’t believe that the modernism represented by the later Joyce has too much relevance to novel-writing today. Joyce is respected by some, but is not much of an influence to many any more. Dale Peck’s journalism seems to be displaced anger to me and a journey into the mind of Dale Peck rather than any sort of analysis of the novel form. His generalisations are pretty laughable: “very writer wants to save the world”, every work presents us with “a utopian vision” etc. – here, he seems to falling into the modernist trap himself. My first novel was published recently, and I am certainly not trying to “save the world”; my aims are rather humbler and more realistic than that.

By: Jeffrey Kramer

Jeffrey Kramer — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 11:17:23 +0000

“what if we’ve just been wrong for the past few generations about the lasting value of Joyce (and others)? Why are we so sure that Joyce is the titan we were taught that he is?” Ayjay, what is the point of worrying about such questions? If enough people over enough years feel strongly enough about there being writers more worth talking about in English Lit classrooms than Joyce, then those writers will displace Joyce in English Lit classrooms. If not, then not.

By: gilly

gilly — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 09:56:51 +0000

Ron Jeremy left his job as a special education teacher (for which he holds a master’s degree), launching a career in pornography which encompasses over 1600 films and directing over 100 others.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 05:47:42 +0000

Or, to put it more bluntly, is literature more than a crossword puzzle or not? I personally have little patience with the genre of literature as crossword puzzle, just like I have little patience with crossword puzzles. I appreciate that part of the point of literature is not simply what is said, but how it is said. What I dispute is the idea that the highest ideal of how something is said should be to wrap it up so densely that it is incomprehensible to anyone who does not have five years free to devote to studying it.

By: No-one special

No-one special — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 05:23:51 +0000

It may or may not be relevant at this stage to point out that Dale Peck is not a very good novelist. If you ask me. Which, of course, you didn’t.

By: fyreflye

fyreflye — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 04:29:25 +0000

If there were no required or even recommended reading lists for any Western language literature courses what would we actually read? If there were no literary critics or book clubs what would we read? If there were no “journals of opinion” what opinions would we have? Would it make any real difference?

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 03:37:39 +0000

I’ve heard (in a bar in a seedy neighborhood, late at night) that ‘cypherpunk’ might work both as a name and password for The New Republic, and many more sites, such as a certain LA newspaper.