Thomas Hardy

Fan me with your flames, Damian; I can take a joke, even if the rest of 'em can't!

I should probably add that on the other hand, I've never cared for the overly terse style of Ernest Hemingway -- I like a happy medium!

I might add that most of the British literature I've been exposed to I read in high school (and a little in college, and that's not always the best setting for ENJOYING the stuff! (I should mention that I absolutely hated American Lit as well -- Moby Dick and the Scarlet Letter and all that morose crap -- wasn't anyone having FUN on the frontier?)

Just to put the record straight, the last *Damian* post was the work of an impostor...I categorically deny all knowledge to use the standard phrase. This is the real nasty me. Good likeness though.....wee bit scary to know that I have a doppelganger. The world is just not ready for two of me.

Uriel......I refuse to flame...it's not my nature although I enjoy civilised disagreements and the airing of opinions and viewpoints. My comment about the prevailing European perception of Americans always evaluating everything in $ terms was not a deliberate "flame". Maybe it's yet another generalisation...like all Brits go out and get pi$$ed every night and speak like Hugh Grant. God! I'd emigrate if that was the case. I can't remember...does that bloke live over there now?

I know it's true that writers in the dim and distant were paid by the word. If that was the case now I'd be spending six holidays a year in Crete.....as my teacher always said precis was something I just could never get to grips with.

Crete - I sort of have a "thing" for the Greek Islands right now...just been flipping through 2006 holiday brochures. Well, wouldn't you if you lived in a place where it now gets dark soon after 4pm and the sun is some strange shiny thing that peeps out now and again....no wonder we're all snow whites.

Uriel: >>Anyway, to get back to LITERATURE (ahem): I think, despite my specific objections to Pride and Prejudice, most of my aversion to 19th centurey (and earlier) literature has less to do with the content per se than the impenetrable writing style. It's very verbose, and some people enjoy the richness and elegance of the language and some people wade through it grimly, thinking "Jeez, were they paid by the word?"

But that's not a British thing; I've been just as put off by American authors of the same time period. And I did like A Tale of Two Cities, even though Dickens was certainly a writer in the same style."<<

I once heard a radio version of Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", and I agree about the "impenetrable" part - it seemed as if one was meant to get lost in the style before one could get to the plot. Could this have been meant as a deliberate trick on the reader? On the other hand, I like Jonathan Swift's prose style, he for one seemed to have turned this 18th century style to his advantage, sometimes even seeming to make fun of both the style and the fashionable ideas of the age. "A Modest Proposal" is, I would say, downright lethal, and so is "Gulliver's Travels" at times. "Tom Jones" was OK for me as well.

Talking about Dickens - I had a teacher at university who said that my essay-writing style was a little like Dickens'. It was meant as a positive comment, but I did not enjoy it so much at the time, because I thought Dickens got overly indulgent and sentimental at times, although this was usually redeemed by his humour. I haven't read "A Tale of Two Cities" yet, but from what I have read so far, I think he was at his best in "David Copperfield" and (in a sense) at his worst in "Great Expectations", which latter one is perhaps the most controversial book of his - I liked the plot, but not so much the language, it really becomes jarringly indulgent at times.

Sorry, I meant "self-indulgent", or excessively sentimental.

I bought two Dickens books the other day. The original text from the 1870's rather than a modernised text.

They are David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities. I got them for 99p each when I think they should have cost £9.99p each.

lol... Damian's imposter did a good job there :)

Actually, Hardy's novel raises a complex array of social, moral, and philosophic issues which I don't really have time to discuss right now but which I will consider bringing up at a later date.

Thank you, Candy and Uriel.

Always nice to have a good discussion.

Damian: >>I reckon that much of English (or British) literature of the 19th century and further back to the 16th - to the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bunyan and others - and even further back to Langland and others.....do not appeal to American readers in particular because of considerable differences in culture generally.

They clearly appeal much more to Europeans who are more able to appreciate the writings and styles and share the same historical values over here among other things. Also they have a much closer proximity to this country physically, and therefore have reasonably easy access to the settings of the action of the novels, plays etc.

The Atlantic is a wee bit of a divide in this respect I reckon<<

Uriel: >>That definitely explains why I despised "Pride and Prejudice". A whole book about people whose greatest horror in life was being faced with the prospect of (gasp!) having to WORK for a living!

Do you guys over there really relate to that crap in this day and age? Do you have some residual sense of nostalgia about it, even though you would probably never have been able to participate in that lifestyle?<<

Tastes may differ, but I think "Pride and Prejudice" is a lucidly ironic book from cover to cover. So is most of 18th century literature, especially prose, even if it may seem to be somewhat "impenetrable" (in Uriel's words) to today's taste (as I said, it seemed to reach its height in Dean Swift's often biting prose, but that may be just my personal preference). This irony is still present in Dickens, but one cannot help but notice a tragic vision behind this irony (not so much in Thackeray, who seems to carry on with a more "candidly" ironic perspective). The only book by Thomes Hardy I have read so far, "Jude the Obscure" (probably not his best one, but at the moment I lack a basis for comparison) is more overwhelmingly pessimistic, at least with regard to the possibility of individuals coming to terms with their surroundings and social values at large - this seems to have become an increasing concern of Victorian writers. As a Continental European from the eastern fringe (well, sort of), I can relate to both the irony and the gloom voiced in these works. In general, it is especially Dickens who is appreciated over here, along with Irish-born dramatists like Wilde, Shaw or Synge.

As I see it, the "Atlantic divide" mentioned by Damian can be partly due to the fact that Americans in general have seemed to take themselves more seriously both with regard to their history and values, at least during the 19th century. They usually seem to get less ironical about themselves (both in literature and in everyday life) - there always being exceptions, of course, like Mark Twain or others. The two American writers who had the most immediate appeal on me were Hawthorne and Melville (perhaps because I could easily relate to their somewhat skeptical and tragic perspective), while it took me much longer to appreciate Whitman, Faulkner, Hemingway or Salinger (at least on a deeper level, beyond the immediate impact their works made on me). It often takes time for me to figure out why characters in American fiction or drama pieces act the way they do (especially in situations involving some sort of conflict), and what the motives or implications behind their actions are - in short, I always have to do some "deciphering" or background reading to come to a full understanding. I generally don't have such problems with British fiction or drama.

Erratum: Thomas Hardy, of course

<<It often takes time for me to figure out why characters in American fiction or drama pieces act the way they do (especially in situations involving some sort of conflict), and what the motives or implications behind their actions are - in short, I always have to do some "deciphering" or background reading to come to a full understanding. I generally don't have such problems with British fiction or drama. >>

Can you give an example, Easterner?

To Uriel,

Maybe it was an exaggeration that "I ALWAYS have to do some deciphering or background reading", but sometimes I really have to. I will give two examples from 20th century fiction where I had to have this sort of "cultural background awareness" to understand why the characters behaved in a particular way.

For one, when I first read Salinger's "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes", I couldn't figure out why the gray-haired man was so irritated all through the conversation and why he hung up so abruptly at the end. It was just after a bit of "deciphering" and some background reading that I realised that the "girl" he was with was actually the wife of his friend who called him on the phone. He just had to keep up the appearance of being attentive to his friend's problem and at the same time he attempted to break the conversation at any convenient point. When his friend called him again and announced that his wife had come home - an obvious self-delusion - he couldn't give away the fact that he knew she couldn't be at home, that's why he brought in his "headache" and hung up.

I always had a feeling it was an American thing to try to keep up an appearance so long. In an European version of the story, the cheater would probably have played on being sympathetic, would have got more emotional, more eager to talk his friend off from thinking that he had a reason to be suspicious about his wife at all, and would not have tried to pass the blame for the wife's behaviour on his friend.

Also, at the end of Updike's A&P, I found both the boss' adamant insistence that the girls leave and the protagonist's confrontation with the boss a pretty much American thing as well. The key sentence was "But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it" - persistence for the sake of appearing consistent, which both protagonists share. Again, an European version would contain much more arguing, and perhaps one of the protagonists would have changed his mind. This kind of single-mindedness and reluctance to yield has often struck me in both American fiction and films.

>>I always had a feeling it was an American thing to try to keep up an appearance so long.<<

I would correct this to "an appearance of moral flawlessness".

>...with respect.....only an American would evaluate [literature] in monetary terms!!! I've no intention whatsoever of perpetuating the Transatlantic flaming here, but there is a discernable American tendency to think in terms of $$$ for practically everything! Touch of Mammon...... [Guest, Damian i9 Edinburgh]

You must not be familiar with Trollope's autobiography. I think of him first when I think of money and 19th-century literature. (I say this not in criticism of Trollope, some of whose works I've enjoyed.) He explicitly justified writing for money. At the end of his autobiography he even included a list of the earnings from his various books. :-) Here's a characteristic passage:

"I am well aware that there are many who think that an author in his
authorship should not regard money....As far as we know, Shakespeare worked always for money, giving the best of his intellect to support his trade as an actor. In our own century what literary names stand higher than those of Byron, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle? And I think I may say that none of those great men neglected the pecuniary result of their labours....it is a mistake to suppose that a man is a better man because he despises money." [Autobiography]

On the other hand, when I think of the opposite attitude, the first author who comes to mind is the American Henry David Thoreau. In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau tells of an Indian who lived near Concord and who decided that he'd earn a living by making baskets. He made some baskets and peddled them door to door. Great was his disappointment, though, when he discovered that nobody wanted to buy them. He denounced the people of Concord and accused them of trying to starve him.

We could interpret this story as a indication of the misery of the poor, or the mistreatment of the native peoples of America. Thoreau, though, had something else in mind. He recounted the Indian's experiences as a parable for the predicament of the writer or artist. He wrote, "I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."

Thoreau's solution was the simple life. Not needing or desiring many material things, he didn't have to dedicate much of his energy to earning money to purchase them. He could write as he pleased. Others choose to weave at least some baskets which will suit the tastes of the masses (or of a substantial elite).