tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post989494172057748341..comments2023-06-21T18:53:11.897+10:00Comments on Pykk: call it a state of things, an economy of conditionsUmbagollahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-46558839788376674122013-01-29T12:28:10.611+11:002013-01-29T12:28:10.611+11:00I worded that the wrong way. It's the imaginat...I worded that the wrong way. It's the imagination that's strange, not so much the form. The form is fairly standard, a man goes through a magic portal and has adventures on the other side, the reader learns some sort of moral or absorbs some sort of commentary, <i>Piers Plowman</i>, <i>The Water-Babies</i>, things like that. Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-29668972544947470062013-01-29T09:01:40.475+11:002013-01-29T09:01:40.475+11:00I hadn't heard of the opera -- I go and look i...I hadn't heard of the opera -- <i>I go and look it up</i> -- oh there you go. Same Lilith, different scenario. Allegory is a huge help here when it comes to weirdness; the author <i>needs</i> the narrator to do weird things for the sake of the allegorical story, he needs him to stay in a cave for weeks pouring water over a corpse so that we can witness the difference between a shabby parody resurrection and a good one, or he needs tiny magical children to crawl up to his chin and push fruit in his mouth (and you realise that no author today would write something this suggestive between an adult and a child without expecting the reader to understand some sort of perversity behind it, but MacDonald's prose is innocent as lambkins).Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-25176521593819850842013-01-29T06:39:55.536+11:002013-01-29T06:39:55.536+11:00I always enjoy it when an author pushes hard again...I always enjoy it when an author pushes hard against form, trying to get somewhere he's never been. It's true that this often reduces other narrative elements (like narrators or plot) into obvious tools, but that's okay.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-88613462647104655252013-01-28T13:04:45.266+11:002013-01-28T13:04:45.266+11:00Thank you - Lilith sounds brilliantly weird and I&...Thank you - Lilith sounds brilliantly weird and I'd never have known of its existence without your blog. I'd only ever heard of the opera.zmkchttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08972549292961948240noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-51348295810313730312013-01-27T18:30:58.205+11:002013-01-27T18:30:58.205+11:00Give him a shot. Lilith's got the good qualiti...Give him a shot. <i>Lilith</i>'s got the good qualities of allegories as well as the bad ones; the narrator is humourless and more or less characterless (he's a vehicle to carry the reader around in, not so much a person in his own right; the author shunts him around the scenery like a prize bicycle), but this drive to come up with a scenario that will approximate an important spiritual realisation takes the book into some charismatically strange places.Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-31567212686292235052013-01-27T17:34:09.774+11:002013-01-27T17:34:09.774+11:00I wonder. The absence of fight in MacDonald's ...I wonder. The <i>absence</i> of fight in MacDonald's narrator interests me. This inability to describe whatever he's seeing doesn't oppress him. He mentions it and keeps going without digging or fretting or getting angry because he can't explain himself. Language, I think, doesn't bother him. What bothers him is the fear that the reader might mistake his allegory for an ordinary adventure novel. So he writes this paragraph, which, in a different kind of writer, would have been the gateway to worries about language, but in him it's an instruction to the rest of the world. "Think <i>behind</i> the leech."Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-89367496498574278362013-01-26T07:03:52.452+11:002013-01-26T07:03:52.452+11:00This reminds me of an observation I made about Dos...This reminds me of an observation I made about Dostoyevsky's narrator in <i>Brothers Karamazov</i> a couple of months ago: he hedges his bets with the reader early on, claiming gaps in his knowledge and begging the reader's forgiveness, allowing him to introduce into the narrative all manner of events he could not have observed. This is different from what MacDonald's narrator is doing, I know, but even if Dostoyevsky wasn't thinking about the limitations of language, he was thinking about the endless problems of verisimilitude.<br /><br />I've never heard of either George MacDonald or his novel, but now I must read <i>Lilith</i>.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-8272601313131599392013-01-25T09:35:31.896+11:002013-01-25T09:35:31.896+11:00Good, as they say, good catch. This reader certai...Good, as they say, good catch. This reader certainly forgot. That is a rich sentence.<br /><br />I'm reading Hofmannsthal, a writer who actively fights with language and its limited ability to represent - well, represent what, I am still not sure about that. But he is open about his frustration.<br /><br />I wonder what he would have done in the face of MacDonald's placidity or resignation (or laughter) in the face of the inadequacy of language?Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com