Chekhov's Mistress

Steven Moore Interview

by Bud Parr

Gaddis fans know Steven Moore’s work so might be interested in this interview by John Lingan at Splice Today (which I had never heard of before):

ST: Since it’s not yet published, could you summarize the thesis of your work in progress?

SM: It’s that the experimental, artsy novel that [reviewer Dale] Peck and others feel began with Ulysses actually began thousands of years ago, and that today’s experimentalists are continuing in that venerable tradition. The conventional, realistic novel that dominates the best-seller lists today is a very late development in the long history of the novel, not the novel’s default setting. So I begin at the beginning—ancient Egypt, “The Tale of Sinuhe” (c. 1950 BCE)—and show that all early fiction writers were innovative, making up the rules as they went along. At early stages in every culture’s history, literary theorists like Aristotle in Greece (and his counterparts in India and China) established rules and expectations for poetry and drama, but ignored prose fiction. Consequently, novelists were free to do whatever the hell they wanted, so I survey the results from around the world up to the year 1600 (right before Don Quixote, 1605). That’s where my Volume 1 ends, which is circulating among publishers right now. Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

posted June 19, 2008

comments

today’s experimentalists are continuing in that venerable tradition. The conventional, realistic novel that dominates the best-seller lists today is a very late development in the long history of the novel, not the novel’s default setting.

I’m only a member of the chorus on this one… but it’s lovely to hear nonetheless.

    – Jacob Russell (06/19  at  09:16 PM)


Twenty years from now, I think, it’ll be obvious why the terribly retro (or reactionary) Dale Peck, James Wood and B.R. Myers became Litcritter “stars” when they did. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto came out in 2002; Wood’s Tora Tora Tora to the “Hysterical Realists” came out in October of 2001 (Ground Zero was still very warm) and Peck made his mad dash for currency in July of 2002: the discombobulated era of GW Bush’s 80% approval ratings. Coincidence? Marginalized as literary matters are, they still flex and warp, or take on weird odors, along with everything else, as politics and tech-trends suffuse a polity’s daydreams and nightmares.

America was in a deeply conservative (quasi-Mullah) mood and these three gentlemen found themselves to be the right scolds in the right place at the perfect time. To the extent that things are *still* rather conservative, Wood, by far the most talented of the three, lingers on… but it’s obvious that the Zeitgeist has recoiled, and those who follow book reviews (many of whom don’t read a tenth as many books as reviews) no longer seem to believe that National Security depends on having DeLillo, Pynchon, Wallace and Rushdie, et al, held up in front of an audience of pretend-readers-of-Henry-James and pilloried for being too damned fancy for anyone’s good.

It was a heady couple of post-9/11 years that must have seemed like the prelude to a cultural revolution; but, perhaps, on the eve of (mitigated) Regime Change, to paraphrase a line from Mr Wood’s so terribly-of-its time manifesto:

“Surely, for a while, (literary critics) will be leery of setting themselves up as (cultural demagogues), while (literary Art) bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.”

    – Steven Augustine (06/20  at  03:25 PM)


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Tags: Steven Moore, William Gaddis


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