By Willem Elsschot (1933)
Cheese is just wonderful. A hapless clerk tries to make it big by becoming the exclusive Edam agent for the whole of Belgium (and the Grand Duchy). Problem is he hates cheese, and business too. Kafka is the obvious comparison, and I’m not sure the fact it’s so funny makes it less of a cheese-nightmare.
By Stella Gibbons (1932)
Cold Comfort Farm is a weird book. Immediately dated but seemingly timelessly funny, and with turns of phrase that are probably immortal now (“something nasty in the woodshed”), a sophisticated society girl takes out to save her romantically doom-laden rustic family in darkest Sussex.
My initial impressions (whoa, this is modernist, unreliable narrator) were somewhat deflated when it turns out that the protagonist basically telling them to buck up and start wearing fashionable clothes is in fact the unironic solution.
But reliably amusing and well-written.
By Edmund White (1973)
I’ve just finished White’s first book, Forgetting Elena – this is the book that Nabokov called “remarkable”.
It is something else. An apparent amnesiac, who doesn’t even know his own name, plays out several days on an idyllic island, attempting to piece together his identity in a sort of utopian society ruled by infinite shades of etiquette.
Combines dreamy psychedelia with really precise poetic language
By Edmund White (2020)
I’ve been meaning to read some Edmund White for a while – given that White got a very rare enthusiastic recommendation from my favourite writer. Amusingly, for a long time I confused him with E.B. White, creator of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little – they are emphatically not the same guy!
I definitely enjoyed this, the immersion into unfamiliar worlds is very well done – I partly like all the technicalities on practically how saints are made.
This was originally written a comment on an episode of the wonderful Partially Examined Life (“A podcast by those who were once considering doing philosophy for a living, and then thought better of it”) – specifically Ep. 189 on Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al).
Thanks guys for the great conversation: you do your usual wonderful job of presenting compelling readings for positions I am not particularly sympathetic to. In the same way as Robert Williams’ comment on part one – and as alluded to by Wes during towards the end – my general impulse is to bemoan the baleful influence some of these have had on the practice of criticism. I think you made good points on the potential breadth of “intention” and how it could be broader than the conscious. What I found curious though is that the survey (while seeming to be sufficiently broad to take in all of “art”) seems to leave out some very specifically intentional works.
This particularly chimed with me as I read Brian Boyd’s wonderful criticism on Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (a previous Phi Fic read!) – “The Magic of Artistic Discovery”. Now Wes and Mark described several scenarios where the artist either (i) deliberately uncouples intention from the creative process, (ii) uses free association as a source of raw material which they actively shape into the product or (iii) act as readers of their own work, and create meaning therein. I don’t doubt that this is a major origin in many types of works. But I would argue that in writing prose and poetry, it is not a necessary component.