But why, one is driven to ask, why has the tale of terror so special an appeal to Americans? Surely its success must be derived in part from the failure of love in our fiction; the death of love left a vacuum at the affective heart of the American novel into which there rushed the love of… Continue reading How could one tell where the American dream ended and the Faustian nightmare began
The primary meaning of the gothic romance, then, lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central theme of fiction. The titillation of sex denied, it offers its readers a vicarious participation in a flirtation with death—approach and retreat, approach and retreat, the fatal orgasm eternally mounting and eternally checked. More than that,… Continue reading The primary meaning of the gothic romance, then, lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central theme of fiction
There is a real sense in which our prose fiction is immediately distinguishable from that of Europe, though this is a fact that is difficult for Americans (oddly defensive and flustered in its presence) to confess. In this sense, our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile. The… Continue reading Monsters of virtue or bitchery (Leslie Fiedler)
April is always a weird month for me, the last few weeks of the spring semester when I try to corral my students (and myself) toward our Grand Project of Just Damn Finishing (while also Learning and Growing as Humans), when the magic of spring break has burned off to memories, scents, traces, when the… Continue reading (Some) books acquired, April 2024
He’s in love with his sister and she’s dead. —The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy The theme of brother-sister incest haunts the early American novel on its lower levels of literacy as well as on the higher—a nightmare from which our writers do not choose to awake too soon, since it is one their readers are… Continue reading The incest thing | More scattered thoughts on Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Passenger
I’ve written about the so-called “Postmodernist Dinner” on this blog before. The 1983 dinner was organized and hosted by Donald Barthelme, and attended by John Barth, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes, among others (Thomas Pynchon politely declined). This morning, searching for something other than what I ended up finding, I came across a… Continue reading Another Postmodernists Dinner
The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, Angela Carter Deeply horny and deeply deprave. Hoffman sprints along with an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire energy. It’s a picaresque adventure with narrator Desiderio taking on titular mad scientist Hoffman and his war against reality. Wild shit happens and each chapter feels like it could stand on its own as a… Continue reading Annotations on a probably incomplete list of books I read or reread in full in 2019
I am reading too many books right now. The big book I am reading is Marlon James’s surreal fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf. I am a little over half way through this long, long book, which is by turns rich, dazzling, baffling, and befuddling. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fantasy-quest novel set in a mythical medieval… Continue reading Blog about some recent reading
I ended up reading the last two chapters of William Gaddis’s novel Carpenter’s Gothic a few times, trying to figure out exactly what happened. I then read Steven Moore’s excellent essay on the novel, “Carpenter’s Gothic or, The Ambiguities.” (If you have library access to the Infobase database Bloom’s Literature, you can find the essay there; if not,… Continue reading Blog about some recent reading
On 1 Oct. 2018 on this foolish blog I foolishly wrote about my foolish “good intent to blog about something—books, film, art—every day or nearly every day.” I added, ” I’m not sure how it will go,” although I was a little bit sure about how it would go, which was, not great. Like, I knew that I… Continue reading Blog about Blog about 4
The enemy of society on the run toward “freedom” is also the pariah in flight from his guilt, the guilt of that very flight; and new phantoms arise to haunt him at every step. American literature likes to pretend, of course, that its bugaboos are all finally jokes: the headless horseman a hoax, every manifestation… Continue reading A last desperate attempt to convince us of the innocence of violence, the good clean fun of horror
In the final lines of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, our narrator-hero declares: “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” We have here the signal trope of… Continue reading A review of Robert Coover’s excellent new novel Huck Out West
Favorite Reading Experiences I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow in full in 2015. Then I immediately read it again (which is sort of like really reading it), occasionally dipping into Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. Rewarding, hilarious, challenging, perplexing, Gravity’s Rainbow is too brilliant to look at directly, and is perhaps best approached slantwise, as one Ms. Dickinson… Continue reading The obligatory 2015 year-end list
Terms like space-warp, telekinesis, teleportation give to that latest avatar of the gothic, science fiction (even its name adapted to modern times), the most respectable of cachets. The blasphemous hope of Faustian man: the re-ordering of nature, the canceling out of the effects of original sin, the creation of life become the daily business of… Continue reading Terms like space-warp, telekinesis, teleportation give to that latest avatar of the gothic, science fiction
…the gothic is an avant-garde genre, perhaps the first avant-garde art in the modern sense of the term. A pursuit, half serious enterprise, half fashionable vice, of the intellectuals of the end of the 18th century, it remained highbrow enough to tempt the Shelleys and Byron, for instance, to try their hands at it. The… Continue reading The gothic is an avant-garde genre
Don Juan and Faust alike are former villains of the orthodox mind made heroes in an age of unorthodoxy, Promethean or Satanic figures; and both come to stand for the lonely individual (the writer himself!) challenging the mores of bourgeois society, making patent to all men the ill-kept secret that the codes by which they… Continue reading Making patent to all men the ill-kept secret that the codes by which they live are archaic survivals without point or power
As practical men, the new middle classes found literature frivolous; as pious ones, they found it idolatrous; as class-conscious citizens, they felt it too committed to court and salon. Yet they could not live without it; a lust for images of their own lives, projections of their own dreams and nightmares moved them obscurely. They… Continue reading The novel is the first large-scale example of “mass art”
Biblioklept 