Tuesday, July 14, 2015
on where we wanted to go
Why should I compare David Ireland to Virginia Woolf, I ask myself, when there's nothing in common between them, and the difference is so obvious, so absolutely gaping and open, like a chasm or pit; why should they be brought to the same area – because I had his two books in my head and then I read hers; that's why – it was the chronological proximity of my reading. Taking a non-fiction hardback off the shelf at UNLV a few days ago I discovered that the North American author (whoever they were, I'm not sure) had read a number of Australian books and come away feeling puzzled because the authors seemed not to arrange an ambition for themselves and move after it in pursuit; instead they circled around an idea that they did not directly reveal or, perhaps, she suspected, understand. Then the book would end.
The two David Irelands were like that, I thought: this circling around a large unstated balloon (through a mosaic of small scenes) and the ending would be a conclusive destruction.
But he tells you that direction itself is a treacherous idea, and the suspicion he feels towards any purposed motion is one part of his satire; purpose will be thwarted, it's the way of the world. "The Boatman and I were concentrated absolutely on where we wanted to go. We had no mind left over to escape each other. Back and forth we went from side to side, left right left right in perfect time, getting no farther forward; each, for the sake of a tiny inconvenience, wishing the other had never existed." Those are the last lines of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner.
Completeness and intellectual working-through are problems in Woolf's work, according to John Cowper Powys in his 1931 monograph on Dorothy Richardson. It is a strength in Richardson that she doesn't do that, he says. "She takes her place in the great role of thinkers who, like Heraclitus and Goethe and Nietzsche are intent on Life Itself, in its mysterious flowing stream, rather than any human hypothesis of its whence and whither."
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the circularity in ireland; i've seen this before, but am not enthusiastic. i think it's boring because most people already know that that is what life is like anyway, so why try to write it up to mean something? i liked powys' comment on richardson. i've never read any of her work. looked up a couple reviews, though; it sounded unbearably chatty, even though she's supposed to be one the first stream of consciousness writers. by the same token, i am not greatly fond of faulkner either. hard to figure out what he's talking about. as an interesting contrast i was taken by e.r. edison almost as much as i was about woolf. i hear you saying "there must something wrong with his head!" you're not alone. i've tried powys several times but have trouble with his attitude.
ReplyDeleteIreland is satirical before he's circular -- he thickens the situation he touches on -- he sees the disaster piling on disaster, and the entrancing high poetry of that horrible disaster, and the ludicrous situation of Aussie blokes in factories; and the extension of that ludicrous clownliness to the position of Australia as a whole, and then to all of humankind -- and there are no other books like that, just as there are no other poems quite like Swift and "Celia shits!" We all know that pretty women shit so why try to write it up to mean something? Because it does mean something, and that something is more than simply the earthly fact of a woman in 1732 needing her chamber pot. Something is Swift extruding himself into language and calcifying there uniquely, just as Ireland calcifies uniquely. There is no other Ireland.
DeletePutting it another way: do you watch much Godard? We decided to pay for Hulu a short while ago and I've been tracking down the Godards. Over and over again he is misanthropic and angry. People are cruel and cold, characters shoot or beat one another, they exploit one another, they wish their parents were dead, they loot corpses; they engage in cannibalism. And you could say that everybody knows this; everybody knows that people are cruel. You see it on the news, you see bullies in the street; you lose your temper and feel it in yourself: you know. But none of it means that Godard should not have made those films.
Deletei get the point. instead of a circle it's a helix, going....somewhere.... i guess oedipus could be described the same way. perhaps i'm not enthralled by human behavior; like madame destahl(sp.) said, men are what they are but i prefer dogs. (she was a pushy broad who knew napolean who, in turn, was smart enough to exile her from paris. she moved to switzerland. godard i've never heard of. we don't have commercial tv; just get movies occasionally when we can find a good old one. otherwise we read, practice music, garden, walk, or zone out on the northwest woods.
DeleteHe was part of the French New Wave cinema of the '60s. Still alive and making films. I think he's one of the few directors who could be described as a genuine poet, in that he's able to consider the language of his medium from several directions at once and compress it into astonishing personal metaphors. He understands that sound and image don't have to mirror one another. (In Two or Three Things I Know About Her, for example, he uses the noise of a gunshot to punctuate his edits without imagining that he needs to show us any of the characters in the film firing a gun. And we know we don't need it -- we understand.)
DeleteZoning out in the woods sounds nice.
i guess i'm encouraged to comment as i don't see very many other persons doing it on this blog. umbagollah seems to be extremely well read and knowledgeable, which makes the exchange pleasureable for me. i'm into volume three of the romance of the forest by ann radcliffe. she's not reputed to be one of the biggies, but there's something about her writing that grabs me; verbose, windy at times, but maybe it's her sense of timing. sort of like listening to a symphony by goldmark: it's kind of boring but interesting. sort of
ReplyDelete"Kind of boring but interesting" is Radcliffe to a T. She has that strange way of bringing in goofy shock-horror effects -- "lifting the lid, he saw the remains of a human skeleton" -- and then treating them as opportunities to argue for the pre-eminence of unimaginative good sense. "That thrilling curiosity, which objects of terror often excite in the human mind, impelled him to take a second view of this dismal spectacle."
Deletefinished "romance". the ending was a bit like "mysteries of u.". the main thing i noticed(well, not the main thing, but a protrusive characteristic) was the amount of water in the book. every page was soaked with tears that had burst forth from a sudden state of emotional upheaval. especially the last volume. made me wish for a set of water wings.
DeleteIt was a very weepy time, the late eighteenth century. There's an interesting discussion in one of T.H. White's books about the way everyone - from Lord Chancellors to hangmen - burst into tears at any provocation.
DeleteThe real mystery of Udolpho, is the fact that the characters made it to the end of the story without dehydrating into piles of shrivelled dust.
DeleteRoger Allen, was that The Age of Scandal?