inner workings
Posted by Gordon on January 8, 2011
Reading thoughtful literary essays by critics/novelists who know their world literature is one of my greatest pleasures. Tim Parks’s Hell and Back is one of many examples, and Robert Dessaix drifts in to this territory in books organised around some other principle eg Turgenev on Love.
J M Coetzee writes often for the New York Review of Books; his efforts 2000-2005 there and elsewhere are compiled in Inner Workings (2007 Harvill; 2008 Vintage from which the following citations).
For those with a strong interest/obsession about Joyce in their late teens/early adulthood the name Svevo pops up from time to time. (Just checking Richard Ellman’s biography where it pops up a lot: Livia Svevo’s first name and hair making it into Finnegan’s Wake by page 5). Coetzee’s account of Svevo reminds the reader that Svevo’s confidence in his writing was restored by a youngish Irish teacher of English (Joyce) inexplicably relocated to Trieste before WWI; and later in 1923 when Zeno was not all that well received Joyce, by now in Paris, had a hand in ensuring translations were made, and a certain success followed.
In Svevo’s eyes, Schopenhauer was the first philosopher to treat those afflicted with the handicap of reflective thought as a separate species, coexisting warily with healthy, unreflective types, who in Darwinian jargon might be called the fit. With Darwin–read through a Schopenhaurian lens–Svevo carried on a life-long tussle. [p4] From Socrates to Freud Western ethical philosophy has subscribed to the Delphic: Know yourself. But what good does it do to know yourself if, taking your lead from Schopenhauer, you believe that character is founded on a substratum of will, and doubt that the will wants to change. [p10]
And from an essay on an early novel by Musil:
The master metaphor that Musil uses to capture these incommensurabilities (what Torless himself calls ‘incomparabilities’) comes from mathematics. Living among the whole numbers and fractions of whole numbers–which together make up the so called rational numbers–and somehow made to interlock with them by the operations of mathematical reasoning, are the infinitely more numerous irrational numbers, numbers that evade representation in terms of whole numbers. Adults, led by Torless’s teachers, seem to have no trouble in making the rational and the irrational cohabit, but to Torless the latter are vertiginously beyond his grasp.[37]
Part of page 5 of Ellman on Joyce
