Forum / One Sign of How Things Have Changed or Improved over the Past Century

• 
  strannikov

  Sep 14, 01:49pm

  "Literature deals with the most difficult and important problems of existence, and therefore, litterateurs consider themselves the most important of people. A bank clerk, who is always handing money out, might just as well consider himself a millionaire.

  The high estimate placed upon unexplained, unsolved questions ought really to discredit writers in our eyes. And yet these literary men are so clever, so cunning at stating their own case and revealing the high importance of their mission, that in the long run they convince everybody, themselves most of all.

  This last event is surely owning to their own limited intelligence. The Roman augurs had subtler, more versatile minds. In order to deceive others, they had no need to deceive themselves. In their own set they were not afraid to talk about their secrets, even to make fun of them, being fully confident that they could easily vindicate themselves before outsiders, in case of necessity, and pull a solemn face befitting the occasion. But our writers of today, before they can lay their improbable assertions before the public, must inevitably try to be convinced in their own minds. Otherwise they cannot begin."

  --Lev Shestov, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, I/28, 1905 (Koteliansky tr.)

• 
  strannikov

  Sep 14, 02:07pm

  (strannikov is always a perfect proofreader after the fact, especially after he's finished his morning coffee:

  third paragraph, first sentence: "This last event is surely owing to their own limited intelligence."

  The error was not Koteliansky's, that is. [Bad proofreader, bad BAD BAD BAD proofreader!])

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 14, 04:38pm

  Is Shestov indulging in that very thing in arguing that litterateurs ought never to argue any question? I am not saying Shestov's statements have no seductive merit. Is Shestov's finding writers' ideas unacceptable related to Soviet suppression of literature that did not pass a test of Party acceptability?

• 
  strannikov

  Sep 14, 05:18pm

  Ann: far be it from me to offer myself as any reliable interpreter of Shestov (my Russian is far too poor to merit the attempt, for one thing).

  To address your latter question: I think not. This work was published in the fateful year 1905, and shortly after the fateful year 1917, Shestov left Soviet Russia permanently, and so I doubt he was anticipating Soviet literary decrees.

  I don't know what specific literary figure(s) or work(s) prompted his reflection, either, but rather than asserting that litterateurs do well to avoid arguing or asking questions, he seems to be questioning the regard litterateurs have for the literary enterprise itself: a question instead of the valuation writers place upon their purpose, their expertise, their capability. (Shestov was active as a literary critic at the time.)

  I recommend the work (the Ohio Univ. Pr. ed. is long out-of-print but can still be found under the title All Things Are Possible [together with Penultimate Words and Other Essays]), esp. for his takes on Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Nietzsche, et al. His general observations on literature I find insightful and provocative, too.

• 
  strannikov

  Sep 14, 06:05pm

  Plus: he's a fine prose stylist, which comes across well courtesy of his various translators. (He also has a marvelous talent for repeating himself, which of course only some readers find charming.)

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 14, 07:24pm

  Thanks much, Strannikov. I'll keep out an eye for Shestov. I am in the midst of reading Nabokov's short stories. Very soon, I plan finally to read Nabokov's Speak, Memory. The NYTimes just busted another writer -- maybe you know whom I mean (his name slipped, sorry) -- last week who "self-plagiarized," i.e., repeated himself substantially in a present editorial that he based on his previously published work, a practice not permitted by their editorial policies!

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Sep 18, 07:47am

  @Ann I think you're looking for Slavoj Žižek who's a well-known Marxist enfant terrible. He doesn't have much to say in the first place so that the self-plagiarizing doesn't come as a surprise to me. No more anyway than his unwillingness to see the point of the "publishing policy" that forbids it (cp. Newsweek http://bit.ly/1wrJI1U). As if this was a formality. Žižek has also plagiarized so he's in every respect comparable to Jonah Lehrer (on whose case I have written http://bit.ly/PgBAJx).

  @strannikov "repeating yourself" is different. It's a great device, I think, and I need to do more of it, much more. If well done, it induces trance-like states. Proust does it in French, Kafka in German, Dostoevsky does it in Russian and in English nobody does it better, and more artfully, I think, than T.S. Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Sep 18, 08:21am

  See here for a view on Žižek's transgressions & another (more outspoken) comment by me: http://bit.ly/1DlpWK8

• 
  Chris Okum

  Sep 18, 03:39pm

  What a bizarre thing to say about someone who has written dozens of books on various topics. If he has nothing to say then the rest of us are mute.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Sep 19, 11:37am

  Interesting reading, Marcus, thanks for posting and commenting. I recently referred to an idea (development) in one essay that I had previously described in another. I guess it was reflex on my part to do so. Also, it is a small sign of fatigue I feel in needing to summarize a past episode in writing because the writing is not available in book form: there is no way to ask the reader to be able to account for it as something he or she has read. That the NYT lets slip its own standards, that any publication slips in its standards, that standards are so reduced in general, while meanwhile better writers go without strong representation ... all these I find meaningfully disconcerting.

• 
  eamon byrne

  Sep 20, 09:38am

  Burroughs in his interview book with Daniel Odier (The Job) observed that the problem with writer's, apart from often misplacing their apostrophes, is that they think that what they have to say is interesting, whereas usually it is not. This leads me to say that writers are as opinionated as most people, and in fact tend to the pompous. There, I've just been pompous. As for plagiarism, I'm all for it. A lot of my youth was misspent underlining bits in novels I was reading, in the vain hope of one day weaving them cleverly into a magnum opus by way of .. wait for it .. literary allusions. Of course it was an illusion on my part. Or was that delusion. Whatever.

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