(no subject)
Apr. 3rd, 2007 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionNoticing some parallel career aspects among McCarthy, Crowley, Roth and wondering if there's anything to them (dates from my memory and/or ass):
1. Early, very personal novel they work on for a decade or two, while publishing other books that mean less to them. Suttree c. 1959-1979; Engine Summer c. 1966-1979; My Life As a Man c. 1962-1974
2. Subsequent dense, mature masterpiece. Blood Meridian 1985; Little, Big 1981; Sabbath's Theater 1994
3. Late-career series of long, connected books almost but not quite as good, to some degree retreading and ramifying material of that central work. The Border Trilogy to 1998; Aegypt to 2007; The American Trilogy to 2000 or 2001
There's problems, of course: some of us prefer the first four Zuckerman books (late 70s-early 80s) to the Faulknerian '90s trilogy, and all these guys were publishing other books throughout. But I wonder if there's something to that format: breakthrough, masterpiece, paradigmatical cleanup. Maybe we can see two such cycles in Roth: Portnoy/My Life (reassigning it)/Zuckerman, then Shylock/Sabbath/Am. Trilogy. And the Everyman/The Road parallels may speak of a fourth, "coda" phase.
How true is this for other novelists' careers? And does the series phase inevitably involve dealing more closely with the history of one's times? A youth, maturity, rumination model--then maybe the fourth, facing down death.
I don't think many match it neatly. Many do start autobiographical, though, and it's often this phase of their work that they find most problematic themselves, delaying publication for years while revising, or writing on and on and publishing just to be done with it. The A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or V. phase. What else can we shove into this? Sons and Lovers--but wasn't that written rather hurriedly? Early Tolstoy squishes together into one autobiographical novel well enough, and The Cossacks fits the delayed/multistage publication model. War and Peace can be seen as a series I suppose (as can perhaps Underworld?--an American Trilogy all blended up). Anna Karenina is clearly on a fault line, maybe between stages 3 and 4, though it's more of a central statement about people, and W&P was both that and a meditation on history. None of this is clean.
Shakespeare doesn't fit it very well either. He didn't have much of a chance to be autobiographical, of course, and the history genre's heyday was the '90s.
Autobiography to vision to history to death.
Another characteristic of careers at their onset is parody, of course. Titus, The Torrents of Spring, Northanger Abbey.
Poetry? Paradise Lost is 2 and 3, The Prelude is 1 going on 2. The Faerie Queene entirely refuses conformity here and everywhere. 1 through 4 seem simultaneously present in Shelley at every point, sometimes all in the same work.
1. Early, very personal novel they work on for a decade or two, while publishing other books that mean less to them. Suttree c. 1959-1979; Engine Summer c. 1966-1979; My Life As a Man c. 1962-1974
2. Subsequent dense, mature masterpiece. Blood Meridian 1985; Little, Big 1981; Sabbath's Theater 1994
3. Late-career series of long, connected books almost but not quite as good, to some degree retreading and ramifying material of that central work. The Border Trilogy to 1998; Aegypt to 2007; The American Trilogy to 2000 or 2001
There's problems, of course: some of us prefer the first four Zuckerman books (late 70s-early 80s) to the Faulknerian '90s trilogy, and all these guys were publishing other books throughout. But I wonder if there's something to that format: breakthrough, masterpiece, paradigmatical cleanup. Maybe we can see two such cycles in Roth: Portnoy/My Life (reassigning it)/Zuckerman, then Shylock/Sabbath/Am. Trilogy. And the Everyman/The Road parallels may speak of a fourth, "coda" phase.
How true is this for other novelists' careers? And does the series phase inevitably involve dealing more closely with the history of one's times? A youth, maturity, rumination model--then maybe the fourth, facing down death.
I don't think many match it neatly. Many do start autobiographical, though, and it's often this phase of their work that they find most problematic themselves, delaying publication for years while revising, or writing on and on and publishing just to be done with it. The A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or V. phase. What else can we shove into this? Sons and Lovers--but wasn't that written rather hurriedly? Early Tolstoy squishes together into one autobiographical novel well enough, and The Cossacks fits the delayed/multistage publication model. War and Peace can be seen as a series I suppose (as can perhaps Underworld?--an American Trilogy all blended up). Anna Karenina is clearly on a fault line, maybe between stages 3 and 4, though it's more of a central statement about people, and W&P was both that and a meditation on history. None of this is clean.
Shakespeare doesn't fit it very well either. He didn't have much of a chance to be autobiographical, of course, and the history genre's heyday was the '90s.
Autobiography to vision to history to death.
Another characteristic of careers at their onset is parody, of course. Titus, The Torrents of Spring, Northanger Abbey.
Poetry? Paradise Lost is 2 and 3, The Prelude is 1 going on 2. The Faerie Queene entirely refuses conformity here and everywhere. 1 through 4 seem simultaneously present in Shelley at every point, sometimes all in the same work.
