Visionary madness, Godless novels!?, Modernism’s cultural drift, Is culture stuck?, Complicated Odysseus, Can't read: won't read, Knausgaard and Scott and good bad writing, BBC bathos, Towards Zero
The irregular review of reviews vol. X
The next Western Canon book club is about Turgenev, October 17th. The next Shakespeare book club is on October 13th.
In case you missed it, here is my review of the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo.
Visionary madness
Ted Gioia’s piece about muses, madness, and visionary artists reminded me of my favourite passage in Frye on Shakespeare,
Perhaps Lear’s madness is what our sanity would be if it weren’t under such heavy sedation all the time, if our senses or nerves or whatever didn’t keep filtering out experiences or emotions that would threaten our stability. It’s a dangerous business to enter the world of titans and heroes and gods, but safer if we have as a guide a poet who speaks their language.
Godless fiction
The New Statesman’s review of Intermezzo is another fine instance of the philistine supremacy being in good working order. The people in charge aren’t taking literature seriously enough.
I don’t know whether Rooney believes in God – but Intermezzo certainly seems to.
In artistic terms, this is a problem. Why? As the critic Ian Watt argued in his influential 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel, the novel was incubated in the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy, which shifted the balance of moral responsibility from the Church towards the individual’s conscience. Novels only make sense in a world of ethical autonomy in which characters are free to make consequential choices and readers to judge them for it (“NOOO, Charlotte, don’t marry repulsive Mr Collins!”). A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one.
Consider the spiritual career of George Eliot…
Yes, yes Charlotte and Mr. Collins. What about Fanny Price marrying a clergyman? Considering George Eliot would be a good idea. Why don’t we start with Adam Bede? And then we could consider Jane Eyre (“for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing”!!), The Scarlet Letter, Stowe, Tolstoy, Trollope, Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead, for God’s sake, a novel about “the operation of divine grace”!), C.S. Lewis, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Gilead, Piranesi… the list is too long.
Is it too much to expect that critics know about determinism in the post-Darwinian novel (Thomas Hardy!), Methodism, the Reformation, the question of free will in Milton, and so on? (I made him just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.) The sentence “A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one” is not just myopic but absurd.
It’s just not serious to publish reviews like this; it perpetuates an unliterary attitude to criticism.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Common Reader to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.