tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post8839924805037642690..comments2024-03-27T16:48:21.039-05:00Comments on Wuthering <br>Expectations: more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit - some of the abysses of The Wings of the DoveAmateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-13104138860009239252017-05-10T18:44:10.874-05:002017-05-10T18:44:10.874-05:00Yes, that is perfect. Maybe some answers there. Yes, that is perfect. Maybe some answers there. Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-52409926665441066592017-05-10T17:04:57.530-05:002017-05-10T17:04:57.530-05:00I just read this TLS review of Megan Quigley's...I just read <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/fuzziness-abounds/" rel="nofollow">this TLS review</a> of Megan Quigley's <i>Modernist Fiction and Vagueness</i>, which sounds like it might be worth investigating:<br /><br />“Impressions <i>are</i> experience”, Henry James reckons in “The Art of Fiction” (1884), with a matter-of-factness that makes the indistinct sound equal to the self-evident. But what does it mean to equate visceral experience so confidently with the phenomenological fuzziness of perception? Perhaps the insistent tenor of James’s claim about ephemeral sensations befits the literary aesthetic it both requires and endorses.<br /><br />Paradoxes of this kind remained creatively fruitful for modernist fiction, suggesting literary affinities with philosophy’s shifting propositions about language. It is this connection which provides the premiss of Megan Quigley’s deeply engaging book, <i>Modernist Fiction and Vagueness</i>, in which she reads Charles S. Peirce alongside Henry and William James, places Bertrand Russell beside Virginia Woolf, and uses Wittgenstein and C. K. Ogden as lenses through which to view the work of James Joyce. What develops is more than a study in intellectual influence or conceptual coincidence.Languagehathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13285708503881129380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-9447369396570478102017-05-07T12:18:39.329-05:002017-05-07T12:18:39.329-05:00Certainly James, for Brookner, can do no wrong!Certainly James, for Brookner, can do no wrong!Tom Sabinehttp://brooknerian.blogspot.co.uk/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-46159347481764289682017-05-07T11:59:01.627-05:002017-05-07T11:59:01.627-05:00It is, at times, maddening. In Wings, the represe...It is, at times, maddening. In <i>Wings</i>, the representative episode is Milly's illness. If James just wanted to avoid the issue because it is vulgar, or because he did not feel he had the expertise to write about it convincingly, he could have hidden it easily. But instead he devotes a great deal of space and plot, moving characters around, to make sure that the <i>characters</i> do not know what the illness is - including the one who has the illness!<br /><br />And if there is a hint that this makes the characters crazy in some way, I missed it. In the novel's terms, they are doing the right thing.<br /><br />Brookner is insightful about James, but I guess she has absorbed his writing like few others have.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-48925446286622512692017-05-07T10:43:12.872-05:002017-05-07T10:43:12.872-05:00Anita Brookner in her Paris Review interview descr...Anita Brookner in her Paris Review interview described James's hesitations as the secular equivalent of religious obligations.Tom Sabinehttp://brooknerian.blogspot.co.uk/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-11743794126056211912017-05-07T09:04:38.976-05:002017-05-07T09:04:38.976-05:00I may be an insensate clod, but I find it hard to ...I may be an insensate clod, but I find it hard to see how vagueness could be a moral principle. Perhaps that is why I have trouble with James.Languagehathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13285708503881129380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-64051613348036727492017-05-06T11:07:53.106-05:002017-05-06T11:07:53.106-05:00Prose trying to do what poetry does - in James'...Prose trying to do what poetry does - in James's own way, with different ideas about what poetry does, but much like Flaubert and a number of subsequent writers.<br /><br />The "text" metaphors caught my attention. Maybe I'll write about that. The quotation you give is a perfect sample of this novel.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-51447991954993582922017-05-06T04:14:35.983-05:002017-05-06T04:14:35.983-05:00I've enjoyed these posts on Wings of the Dove....I've enjoyed these posts on Wings of the Dove. I read it some time ago, so it's faded in my memory. I picked up my Penguin Classics edition and found a random passage I'd highlighted, that chimes a little with what you've been saying. Densher has just met Kate in London, and the plot is beginning to hatch against Milly. He sees Kate off in a cab and 'he stood a while by the corner and looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment for the absentee recaptured -- THE moment, that of the reflux of the first emotion...His full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text that, from his momentary street corner,showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being 'fine'. The grey, however, was more or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and there would be colour enough to come out.'<br />This is prose as densely packed as poetry. The metaphors of theatre that appear elsewhere are replaced here by those of 'text', colour, even punctuation. I must re-read it and rediscover it. Simon at Tredynas Dayshttp://tredynasdays.co.uknoreply@blogger.com