August 2, 2010
modern British authors are “limited, arrogant and self-satisfied”
I don’t have a good sense of contemporary British authors, but I’d be curious to hear the more literary flockers’ take on Josipovici’s perspective:
“We are in a very fallow period,” Josipovici said, calling the contemporary English novel “profoundly disappointing – a poor relation of its ground-breaking modernist forebears”.
He said: “Reading Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his generation – Martin Amis, McEwan – leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world.
“I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock.” Such faults were less generally evident in Irish, American, or continental European writing, he added.
comments
Leave a Reply
I definitely have opinions about this; I think the conglomeration of publishing houses in the late 80s and early 90s into subsets of multi-national media corporations put an end to a long-standing practice of nurturing talent over many years; not that the old houses *only* nurtured talent, they definitely wanted to make money, but they made sure, almost as a matter of pride, to bring a few writers along because they were good regardless of whether they, initially, sold. (Cormac McCarthy is a perfect example of this.) that doesn’t happen anymore. you can extrapolate from that what you will about what I think of almost all contemporary authors published by the big dogs, regardless of which country they are from.
I agree with your take on the situation, Deron. And I suspect this is the case far and wide. When it comes to British authors I can only speak of them as an American reader who tries to comprehend differences in culture (and the effects of such differences on various audiences), and who is never too confident of such an ability. There are actually a number of contemporary British novelists I admire–Jim Crace, David Lodge, Patrick McGrath, and Penelope Fitzgerald (d. 2000) among them. When I think of contemporary British writing as a whole I often find myself thinking that many of them are writing for an audience that chafes at restriction generated by social class differences but seeks only very subtle (often “approved”) ways of confronting such feelings. American writers tend to bring the guns out much earlier and much too often. I love the dry wit often found in British writing, and lament the fact that the future of the American novel seems to be one of scant underground exposure or–formulas of destruction that make for quick moves to film, with all lapped up by those who must see human failure again and again without knowing that its source lies in themselves.
Truly I’m blithering off the top of my fairly addled head tonight, but I wonder it this has not always been more or less true of English (or, to cast a wider net, British) novelists. The ever-splenetic Wyndham Lewis said, “Not only does the Englishman not ‘make a mountain out of a molehill’; he is able to make a molehill out of a mountain.”
I am a deep-dyed Anglophile, but I find some truth in that observation.
I love Fitzgerald and have Renner to thank for that.
Thank you, Deron, but I came to Fitzgerald (and Sebald) via recommendations from Davenport, so he deserves the credit. Fitzgerald certainly doesn’t merit J’s scolding, but she has been gone now for 10 years, and her last novel was in 1995, so that’s practically a generation that she’s been gone. Alan Garner is still at work, though he works very slowly and carefully and doesn’t churn things out like so many ‘literary’ writers do. And I must say I quite liked Barnes’s Arthur and George. But as most of you know, most of fiction reading is a century or more back, and while those authors could often over-analyze and over-describe, they have a mastery of the English language, and tone, and setting, and characterization, that one doesn’t much see today. At the moment I am actually reading Tarzan of the Apes–1914. Of course it’s American, not English, though Tarzan is English, and it was written for the pulps–but Burroughs’s command of English is much sharper than most of what is written as ‘literature’ nowadays. He’s full of stereotype and cliched thought, but he handles the language rather well. I find this also true of Dracula, which is beautifully written, though it’s a ‘genre’ book, and I would certainly rank it above Frankenstein, which is also no slouch with the language. In the Victorian period (sorry, Cindy) the ‘sensation’ novels could be just as well-written and just as thoughtfully produced as the literary fiction–the difference was not writing skill, but subject matter. The spread of universal education and ‘dime novels’ may have had as much to do with the dumbing down of writing as anything else.
[...] Cooper Renner: Fitzgerald certainly doesn’t merit J’s scolding, but she has been gone now for 10 years, and her last novel was in 1995, so that’s practically a generation that she’s been gone. Alan Garner is still at work, though he works very slowly and carefully and doesn’t churn things out like so many ‘literary’ writers do. And I must say I quite liked Barnes’s Arthur and George. But as most of you know, most of fiction reading is a century or more back, and while those authors could often over-analyze and over-describe, they have a mastery of the English language, and tone, and setting, and characterization, that one doesn’t much see today. At the moment I am actually reading Tarzan of the Apes–1914. Of course it’s American, not English, though Tarzan is English, and it was written for the pulps–but Burroughs’s command of English is much sharper than most of what is written as ‘literature’ nowadays. He’s full of stereotype and cliched thought, but he handles the language rather well. I find this also true of Dracula, which is beautifully written, though it’s a ‘genre’ book, and I would certainly rank it above Frankenstein, which is also no slouch with the language. In the Victorian period (sorry, Cindy) the ‘sensation’ novels could be just as well-written and just as thoughtfully produced as the literary fiction–the difference was not writing skill, but subject matter. The spread of universal education and ‘dime novels’ may have had as much to do with the dumbing down of writing as anything else. posted by Deron Bauman in books, from the comments, history, literature, nineteenth century (sorry cindy)™, observations | * | comment [...]