Jack Cox (1)
Autor de Dodge Rose (Australian Literature)
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Obras de Jack Cox
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
Miembros
Reseñas
Premios
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 1
- Miembros
- 36
- Popularidad
- #397,831
- Valoración
- 2.6
- Reseñas
- 2
- ISBNs
- 26
Caveat over.
One quarter of the way through this book, I started to suspect it was a hoax. Perhaps the best known Australian literary modernist (apologies to White), Ern Malley, was a made-up poet who submitted what he thought were bullshit 'modernist' poems to an important journal, which printed them. Critics have been finding great merit in those poems ever since. Dodge is published by an American publisher well known for publishing experimental work. Its author is not particularly well known; he seems to have only a couple of publications before this. Could it be, I thought to myself, Ern Malley II?
So I did some googling, and way happy to find the editor at Dalkey Archive saying precisely the same thing in a review essay plumping the book. Worst case scenario, we the literary world have not been taken in quite as easily as we were in the Ern Malley case.
I thought the book was a hoax because it's boring, predictable, derivative, and often unreadable, and has been hailed by all and sundry as a highly original work of genius, just like Joyce and Beckett. Note to reviewers: if a work is just like someone else's, whatever else it is, it isn't highly original.
What Dodge is, unless it's a hoax, is a work of genre fiction, where the genre happens to be high modernism. It follows all the rules (=breaks all the right rules): sketchy punctuation, authorial intrusions about the place of the book in the academic canon, cack-handed analogies and metaphors that make it 'poetic', incorporation of alternative discourses (here, the law of inheritance), and a Faulknerian second half. The content (a serious flaw in the modernist genre: having content) is hilariously similar to that in another Australian book I just read, Patrick White's Eye of the Storm, but White does approximately infinitely more with it.
On the upside, Dodge made something very clear to me: I don't care to read more of this stuff, unless it has clear literary-historical importance, or the rule-breaking has a purpose (Woolf), or the tiresome self-importance is made bearable by the sheer beauty of the prose (Joyce).
And it made me wonder why the angl0-modernist tradition is so focused on works like this one. Consider, 'we' have Eliot, Pound, and Joyce as the big three (I speak here of literary history, not intrinsic merit), where the French have Mallarme and Proust, and the Germans have say, Mann and Musil. Why are we the anglosphere so keen on books that demand of the reader an archaeological fascination with details: what is this quote from? what is this reference to? what Sydney street are we supposedly walking down?
I so much prefer the Musil or Proust version: if there's a reference to a work of art, that work is discussed with the reader; if there's a thorny intellectual question, that question is worried over with the reader. We walk with Musil and Proust, whereas Eliot/Pound/Joyce preach at us. A friend has suggested that this preaching at us has, oddly, allowed scholars to argue that Joyce (in particular) is a great democrat, since everyone understands as much of Joyce as anyone else. There's no need to think along with him, just to catch whatever few references you can. So everyone can have their interpretation.
But that's not 'democracy.' That's demagoguery. I propose that the real democrats are the authors who assume that their readers are their intellectual equals, and that their readers can work through their problems with the author. Cox is very much a Joyce/Pound/Eliot type, demanding that the reader do all the work, and refusing to work with them.
If this wasn't literature, we'd call that managerial capitalism.… (más)