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Sep. 9th, 2012 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionCan't quite tell if another hero, Calvino, has advanced in his appreciation lately too. Calvino was previously someone Bloom mentioned toward the end of lists of short story writers he recommended, along with Nabokov and Cortazar and other people he's mostly lukewarm towards, and in another place basically prophesied that most of Calvino would fade along with Barthes and company. But he gets footnoted onto the most recent 20th-century-survivors rundown:
Immanuel Kant rightly advised us that all aesthetic taste was subjective, but experience makes me doubt the formidable Critique of Judgment. Why, after all, do we venture to juxtapose Joyce with Dante and Shakespeare? If you lived most of your life in the twentieth century, then the writers of your time were Proust and Joyce, Kafka and Beckett, or if you loved great verse more than fictive prose, the poets of your era were Yeats and Valery, Georg Trakl and Giuseppe Ungaretti, Osip Mandelstam and Eugenio Montale, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, Luis Cernuda and Hart Crane, Fernando Pessoa and Federico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot, and many more. Dramatists of universal value are fewer: perhaps Pirandello only, in the longest post-Ibsenite perspective. I myself place a particular value on those writers who composed greatly in prose and verse, Hardy and Lawrence, in particular. Joyce wrote an Ibsenite drama, Exiles, two volumes of lyrics, a superb volume of stories, Dubliners, and a conventional enough coming-of-age novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Yet Joyce challenges the greatest--Dante, Shakespeare, Milton--only in his prose epics, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Proust competes with all prior novelists since Cervantes with In Search of Lost Time, while Kafka even more than Joyce himself becomes the Dante of his era through excelling primarily in fragments and apothegms. Beckett, a novelist, dramatist, and poet, like Kafka matters as an icon of creativity, or, even better, a maker of icons. In their different ways, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino have something of the same function.
Cavalier absence of proofreading aside (it's "A Portrait," the first sentence contradicts itself, there's "particular" buildup in the Hardy bit, etc.), and even given their afterthought status, the inclusion of Borges and Calvino is new and pleasant. Bloom's ambivalence toward Borges is more, well, Bloomian than it is toward any of his other precursors, maybe Eliot as critic excepted, so his inclusion is a minor breakthrough. But Calvino's is neat and just and unexpected. I don't precisely understand how he or Borges are icons of creativity, though - Calvino often highlights the decisions and revisions involved in composing, I guess, and Borges writes about imaginary writers a lot, but when I think of a writer in the act I don't picture them, much as I love them. And last of all would I picture Beckett! Kafka I really might picture, though. You feel how high the stakes of undertaking it are, with him.
But surely all those guys matter outside of, maybe despite, the fact that they write about writing or analogous operations.
(Also Pirandello at his best seems pretty minor next to, say, early Williams. But what do I know. And clearly I should read more Paz.)
Bloom loves a lot of other 20C people, incidentally - he never does one of these list paragraphs without leaving some names overboard. In this case including a lot of female ones. And he's praised Portrait pretty steeply in the past.
Immanuel Kant rightly advised us that all aesthetic taste was subjective, but experience makes me doubt the formidable Critique of Judgment. Why, after all, do we venture to juxtapose Joyce with Dante and Shakespeare? If you lived most of your life in the twentieth century, then the writers of your time were Proust and Joyce, Kafka and Beckett, or if you loved great verse more than fictive prose, the poets of your era were Yeats and Valery, Georg Trakl and Giuseppe Ungaretti, Osip Mandelstam and Eugenio Montale, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, Luis Cernuda and Hart Crane, Fernando Pessoa and Federico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot, and many more. Dramatists of universal value are fewer: perhaps Pirandello only, in the longest post-Ibsenite perspective. I myself place a particular value on those writers who composed greatly in prose and verse, Hardy and Lawrence, in particular. Joyce wrote an Ibsenite drama, Exiles, two volumes of lyrics, a superb volume of stories, Dubliners, and a conventional enough coming-of-age novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Yet Joyce challenges the greatest--Dante, Shakespeare, Milton--only in his prose epics, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Proust competes with all prior novelists since Cervantes with In Search of Lost Time, while Kafka even more than Joyce himself becomes the Dante of his era through excelling primarily in fragments and apothegms. Beckett, a novelist, dramatist, and poet, like Kafka matters as an icon of creativity, or, even better, a maker of icons. In their different ways, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino have something of the same function.
Cavalier absence of proofreading aside (it's "A Portrait," the first sentence contradicts itself, there's "particular" buildup in the Hardy bit, etc.), and even given their afterthought status, the inclusion of Borges and Calvino is new and pleasant. Bloom's ambivalence toward Borges is more, well, Bloomian than it is toward any of his other precursors, maybe Eliot as critic excepted, so his inclusion is a minor breakthrough. But Calvino's is neat and just and unexpected. I don't precisely understand how he or Borges are icons of creativity, though - Calvino often highlights the decisions and revisions involved in composing, I guess, and Borges writes about imaginary writers a lot, but when I think of a writer in the act I don't picture them, much as I love them. And last of all would I picture Beckett! Kafka I really might picture, though. You feel how high the stakes of undertaking it are, with him.
But surely all those guys matter outside of, maybe despite, the fact that they write about writing or analogous operations.
(Also Pirandello at his best seems pretty minor next to, say, early Williams. But what do I know. And clearly I should read more Paz.)
Bloom loves a lot of other 20C people, incidentally - he never does one of these list paragraphs without leaving some names overboard. In this case including a lot of female ones. And he's praised Portrait pretty steeply in the past.
