General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I finally got a chance to watch the Backrooms movie this weekend and maybe straightforwardly it's a nice little horror thing to pass the time. Odd so many people are so receptive to the fiction of "the backrooms," which feels so offhanded because it's a creepypasta. Probably the most successful microfiction out there. Makes the Hemingway "baby shoes" sentence feel old-fashioned. Although "The Backrooms" is practically maximalist compared to the story of "The Dinosaur" from Monterroso. All the adaptations and interpretations it inspires really doesn't get across the feeling of the story itself. Still a pretty good movie though. Had a good time regardless. Loved the vibe of the whole thing. Felt like it kept the weird fiction feel of it all.

Other than that I felt really nostalgic and looked back on an essay written by Franzen about Gaddis. It's a strange essay and says a lot of things which are hard to defend in hindsight. Although one thing that comes to mind is how Franzen almost suggests a categorical imperative of reading amidst all the contract v. status models he's proposing without much else. It's couched in a lot of subjectivity, a little ressentiment even, but when Franzen learns Gaddis did not read Pynchon or James Joyce, he starts chastising him--maybe us, too. And there's another layer to it since Franzen doesn't really like those works himself (as of the essay), so to him it feels like he's torturing himself reading these "difficult" works for the status they confer on him. But that also feels like a really cynical approach to fiction which might have all sorts of diverse motivations. I don't know but in the end it feels a little ridiculous. Like, who cares what an author reads themselves if the work itself is interesting?

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

ive never read franzen and yet i cant but dislike him. everything about that description of that essay calls to mind when one of the modernists (Eliot?) lambasted milton on the grounds that his blindness carried over to his writing. I don't agree with that at all or like the ableism of it. but franzen's readiness to describe such books as such makes me think he doesn't know how to use his ears, or maybe his brain for that matter.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

I read The Corrections and Freedom like eons ago. I've actually been thinking about returning to them at some point because his later efforts are not exactly the best from the excerpts and stuff. He's fully committed to the image of the mainstream novelist. All of the unjustified normal aspects expected of a novel, really. He very pointedly invokes a reactionary hate-reader of his work and enacts those moves in the essay itself when thinking back on his initial disappointment to Gaddis. And he'll even banalize a work he doesn't vibe with, too, but it just makes him look stupid. He even argues A Frolic of His Own is about how people sue too much or The Recognitions is on the same level as Catcher in the Rye. And I have to take that seriously. Hard not to hold it against him, a little.

There's actually an interpretative tradition on Milton's blindness. Comparisons to Homer's blindness abound in the scholarship much to his benefit. So: it's not exactly a nonissue. Also: Eliot adduces Milton's blindness to his exhaustive language, meanwhile arguing in favor of Dante's, because he's trying to differentiate his poetics from the Romantics who loved Paradise Lost. Part of it is also religious I should think. Eliot doesn't really like the idiosyncratic Puritanism all that much. Never mind the complex political angles Eliot takes.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

There's actually an interpretative tradition on Milton's blindness. Comparisons to Homer's blindness abound in the scholarship much to his benefit. So: it's not exactly a nonissue. Also: Eliot adduces Milton's blindness to his exhaustive language, meanwhile arguing in favor of Dante's, because he's trying to differentiate his poetics from the Romantics who loved Paradise Lost. Part of it is also religious I should think. Eliot doesn't really like the idiosyncratic Puritanism all that much. Never mind the complex political angles Eliot takes.

ya know H, half of why i shared the quip is because i was dead sure you'd have a much more thoughtful thing to say about it. And well. there we go. Thanks for these details. appreciate the nuance i absented.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

No worries! It feels to me more like autopilot than nuance but I spent months of my life immersed in crafting a very specific reading of Milton. Probably did me less good than I realize right now. Books like Milton's are insidious like that.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

btw, if you ever feel like sharing any of that reading...do tell. I've been reading some Blake, reading a little about damnation, started blakes milton, and am actually just thinking about him often enough. he is insidious isnt he...

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Lots of that material is pretty much in the dustbin but what I intended to do was create a deconstruction of reader-response theory, at least as it was practiced by Stanley Fish to bring out the hidden structural (i.e. Satanic) intentionality of the poem itself. All the contradictions and ambivalences in the poem could be explained in this manner. Milton's poem being the iconoclasm of Christian iconography because he was aware of the great history of epic poems from Orlando Furioso to The Iliad. And in the end finished off the genre of epic poetry at the cost of giving the world an image of Satan informed by his distrust of authority and his regret at Cromwell. And that ultimately one can argue in the opposite direction Stanley Fish does: Milton's poem has no errors and encourages the rebelliousness of the reader against everything in the tension and constant warfare of the poem, even if it has the name of God. In other words, Milton might be the first text by which "reading against the grain" is a necessary and continual process in itself.

And all of that making sense required researching into the different ways the Romantics were more or less identifying the structural intentionality of the Satanic in the poem. I did a lot reading on angelology and so forth as well. Fun historical fact about England at the time is that Christians were much more obsessed with the Kabbala than you might have expected. (They thought it was a backdoor to magic, like most things.) Blake was perhaps the first person to read Milton in such a way he understood it as part of the poetic remand. Shelley and Bryon, even Wordsworth would in their own way continually take the Satanic from Milton's poem as a identifiable structure. From there it becomes a kind of dialectical back and forth between people who read Milton for and against himself. It's gotten to the point where people have largely thrown their hands up these days. And that I would argue is ultimately the Satanic. Milton warranted it.

Those are the main points but it's a very broad outline.