kundera/joyce
Kundera writes in Les testaments trahis:
"D'emblée, tout ce qui restait encore en moi de méfiant à l'égard de l'art du roman disparut: en donnant a chaque partie le caractère d'une nouvelle, j'ai rendu inutile toute la la technique apparemment inévitable de la grande composition romanesque. J'ai rencontré dans mon entreprise la vieille stratégie de Chopin, la stratégie de la petite composition qui n'a pas besoin de passages a-thématiques. Je me suis débarrassé des araignées."
His point is that in writing a novel with seven shorter and mostly independent chapters, he avoided some of the risks and pitfalls of attempting a "big" novel. He calls this the "Chopin strategy" because Chopin avoided the pitfalls of longer compositions by sticking to shorter forms.
(Kundera says that the parts of his novel, read independently of the others, would lose a great deal of their meaning. That reminds me of the Ruskin quotation.)
Is this what Joyce is doing in Ulysses?
Also: a narrator, like a father, is a necessary evil. Does Joyce somewhat randomly hand over narration to 18 slightly bogus Homeric narrators just to be rid of the responsibility of coming up with a narrator?
"D'emblée, tout ce qui restait encore en moi de méfiant à l'égard de l'art du roman disparut: en donnant a chaque partie le caractère d'une nouvelle, j'ai rendu inutile toute la la technique apparemment inévitable de la grande composition romanesque. J'ai rencontré dans mon entreprise la vieille stratégie de Chopin, la stratégie de la petite composition qui n'a pas besoin de passages a-thématiques. Je me suis débarrassé des araignées."
His point is that in writing a novel with seven shorter and mostly independent chapters, he avoided some of the risks and pitfalls of attempting a "big" novel. He calls this the "Chopin strategy" because Chopin avoided the pitfalls of longer compositions by sticking to shorter forms.
(Kundera says that the parts of his novel, read independently of the others, would lose a great deal of their meaning. That reminds me of the Ruskin quotation.)
Is this what Joyce is doing in Ulysses?
Also: a narrator, like a father, is a necessary evil. Does Joyce somewhat randomly hand over narration to 18 slightly bogus Homeric narrators just to be rid of the responsibility of coming up with a narrator?
posted by Robert Frumkin at 2:51 PM
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