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Nov. 21st, 2010 01:53 amNow seeing that The Trial -> Little, Big like "Circular Ruins" or (less certainly) Calvino's "Priscilla" -> Little, Big.
Maybe to some extent via Crying of Lot 49, but there's some direct impact of the Court on the Parliament. And some other reflection via Borges, presumably. I've taken "Garden of Forking Paths" to be child of "Before the Law" but not the rest of The Trial (nor "Before the Law"'s Zenoesque expansion, The Castle) - though an anti-System reading/retaking of The Trial is consonant enough with Borges' attack on nationalism. Crowley picks up on what can neither be embraced nor condemned about the Law.
Kafka's book's the clear parent of A Serious Man too. Which shows how weird The Trial really is, that it can be that as well. Though the Coens can laugh at their man from the sidelines (just seemingly?), however sympathetically, where Kafka and Josef K. are famously inextricable. The Coens' great touch is to have everything be completely ambiguously real, which Kafka avoids because he's Kafka. He had to write things clearly unreal in which we completely believe. A bit like Dante that way? What other dream-writers are there.
But anyway: the multiplicity of the Entity is something Crowley gets from Kafka, though the final equation is his own. Pynchon took it to a zero-sum, "Triumph of Life"-y place Crowley avoids, and also didn't quite keep Trystero plural, just many-handed, each hand a person.
And isn't Crowley's book finally about what would have happened if the man in "Before the Law" had fought his way through the door, all the doors, meant only for him? Or if a family were to, one generation per door. (While Oedipa goes through just one.)
Huh. Thus making "Before the Law" set in an Impossible House. Which of course it is, that's right there in the text. And in The Trial generally, where the Court seems architecturally insane, an effect very well captured by Welles.
Grand Unification Theory of Literature completed. Beep.
I always liked the expression "Don't Go There" - unlike "Get a Life" and "It Is What It Is" and other sudden idia - though I could never use it with a straight face. But it so concisely turns conceptual space into one of those old globes where here and there dragons be. Makes topics topoi, as they once were, makes human intercourse the quest peppered with warnings it should be. Gets you partway through the door of the place that ain't, ain't yet or ain't no more.
***
Thinking now about "Triumph of Life" in "Childe Roland" - in Rousseau's battle with life, she remained conqueror. They don't quite ever battle on-screen, just as they don't in "Roland," though you might say Rousseau's battle was his disillusioning process. But Shelley's battle hasn't happened yet (though if it's that same revelation-vastation the poem itself stands in for it), though Rousseau tells him to go do it right now if he dares. In Browning's time (I think) the poem ended with "and what is life I cried" - which Browning might have put together with Shelley's "and like the preacher found it not" conclusion about what Truth is from his Painted Veil sonnet. Life is either the thing you won't figure out, hence can't conquer, or this later poem corrects the earlier by saying here's the truth and it is blatant, victorious and intolerable.
In Browning the battle never begins, and perhaps we're to take it as a date with the unanswerable which never quite happens to us unless death is that. If he took Shelley's question-line as an intended breakoff point, or anyway peoetically just one, he might have taken that as a) Shelley's battle moment with said unanswerable (unless drowning was that) and b) borrowed not just that but the title-referencing (precursing Pynchon's more direct borrowing of his own title-inexplicable-until-it-becomes-final-phrase idea, as Roland's unknown,-but-not-lookin'-good-though-he's-weirdly-upbeat-about-it fate does Oedipa's). And of course in both there is a waste land, in both the fallen comrade(s)/predecessor(s) - perhaps the ignoble fallen in Browning equate to e.g. Voltaire, who doesn't go down as well as desire-defeated Rousseau. And Browning's strange new "Roland" stanza's somewhat terza-ish, as we find in its visionary correction "Thamuris Marching".
So there's a "Triumph" tradition as well as an "Alastor" one, perhaps. It's Shelley who was at the fountainhead of those quester-attrition effects I was interested in. My Shelley. Yours too if you want him.
(Though there's bits of that in "Resolution and Independence" - parent poem of James Wright's "Hook" - and then arguably "The Castaway" and on back...)
Tennyson wrote a sonnet addressing "what is life I cried" also, to which he pretty much just said "word, bro." His "Grail" poem from Idylls of the King might be less in the "Alastor" tradition, where early/middle Bloom located it, than the "Triumph" one.
Maybe to some extent via Crying of Lot 49, but there's some direct impact of the Court on the Parliament. And some other reflection via Borges, presumably. I've taken "Garden of Forking Paths" to be child of "Before the Law" but not the rest of The Trial (nor "Before the Law"'s Zenoesque expansion, The Castle) - though an anti-System reading/retaking of The Trial is consonant enough with Borges' attack on nationalism. Crowley picks up on what can neither be embraced nor condemned about the Law.
Kafka's book's the clear parent of A Serious Man too. Which shows how weird The Trial really is, that it can be that as well. Though the Coens can laugh at their man from the sidelines (just seemingly?), however sympathetically, where Kafka and Josef K. are famously inextricable. The Coens' great touch is to have everything be completely ambiguously real, which Kafka avoids because he's Kafka. He had to write things clearly unreal in which we completely believe. A bit like Dante that way? What other dream-writers are there.
But anyway: the multiplicity of the Entity is something Crowley gets from Kafka, though the final equation is his own. Pynchon took it to a zero-sum, "Triumph of Life"-y place Crowley avoids, and also didn't quite keep Trystero plural, just many-handed, each hand a person.
And isn't Crowley's book finally about what would have happened if the man in "Before the Law" had fought his way through the door, all the doors, meant only for him? Or if a family were to, one generation per door. (While Oedipa goes through just one.)
Huh. Thus making "Before the Law" set in an Impossible House. Which of course it is, that's right there in the text. And in The Trial generally, where the Court seems architecturally insane, an effect very well captured by Welles.
Grand Unification Theory of Literature completed. Beep.
I always liked the expression "Don't Go There" - unlike "Get a Life" and "It Is What It Is" and other sudden idia - though I could never use it with a straight face. But it so concisely turns conceptual space into one of those old globes where here and there dragons be. Makes topics topoi, as they once were, makes human intercourse the quest peppered with warnings it should be. Gets you partway through the door of the place that ain't, ain't yet or ain't no more.
***
Thinking now about "Triumph of Life" in "Childe Roland" - in Rousseau's battle with life, she remained conqueror. They don't quite ever battle on-screen, just as they don't in "Roland," though you might say Rousseau's battle was his disillusioning process. But Shelley's battle hasn't happened yet (though if it's that same revelation-vastation the poem itself stands in for it), though Rousseau tells him to go do it right now if he dares. In Browning's time (I think) the poem ended with "and what is life I cried" - which Browning might have put together with Shelley's "and like the preacher found it not" conclusion about what Truth is from his Painted Veil sonnet. Life is either the thing you won't figure out, hence can't conquer, or this later poem corrects the earlier by saying here's the truth and it is blatant, victorious and intolerable.
In Browning the battle never begins, and perhaps we're to take it as a date with the unanswerable which never quite happens to us unless death is that. If he took Shelley's question-line as an intended breakoff point, or anyway peoetically just one, he might have taken that as a) Shelley's battle moment with said unanswerable (unless drowning was that) and b) borrowed not just that but the title-referencing (precursing Pynchon's more direct borrowing of his own title-inexplicable-until-it-becomes-final-phrase idea, as Roland's unknown,-but-not-lookin'-good-though-he's-weirdly-upbeat-about-it fate does Oedipa's). And of course in both there is a waste land, in both the fallen comrade(s)/predecessor(s) - perhaps the ignoble fallen in Browning equate to e.g. Voltaire, who doesn't go down as well as desire-defeated Rousseau. And Browning's strange new "Roland" stanza's somewhat terza-ish, as we find in its visionary correction "Thamuris Marching".
So there's a "Triumph" tradition as well as an "Alastor" one, perhaps. It's Shelley who was at the fountainhead of those quester-attrition effects I was interested in. My Shelley. Yours too if you want him.
(Though there's bits of that in "Resolution and Independence" - parent poem of James Wright's "Hook" - and then arguably "The Castaway" and on back...)
Tennyson wrote a sonnet addressing "what is life I cried" also, to which he pretty much just said "word, bro." His "Grail" poem from Idylls of the King might be less in the "Alastor" tradition, where early/middle Bloom located it, than the "Triumph" one.
