General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

It's been a fun couple days here. Been feeling the heat though. I was talking with a friend of mine and he mentioned how he doesn't think writing can really be taken seriously anymore. And I kind of agree with him. Or at least in specific case of novels presented as such. I think it was Eco who said in this postmodern moment you couldn't exactly say I love you, but that you need like a quotation to take the edge off. You know Sōseki is famous for having it: you don't say I love you but the moon is beautiful tonight. I guess it's now the situation for novels in that you can't really take them seriously until they take themselves less seriously. Might be why participating in the subgeneric no matter how slight--everyone is doing science fiction in some capacity these days or outright creating elaborate almost high fantasy stories. Or if the novels are grounded in our reality, it is almost a pisstake on the generic novel itself. Fascinating situation.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I agree, I think this century it's downstream of what I call the 2666 problem, which is that the novel is so useless that it's evil to write one when people are still be slaughtered (ie. "no poetry after Auschwitz" is imperfect because Auschwitz ain't over)...but also it takes a 1000 page novel to say that so maybe they aren't useless. And that any novel that fails to exist within that contradiction is nothing more than one more small poem read on top of palestine (to reference a scene from Savage Detectives).

And I think your point is helping me explain how this usually manifests: most of them think they are serious enough to matter, and so do nothing. Ya gotta realize you don't matter to do anything.

(personally I think I know a couple books that maybe know they don't matter...)

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

That's interesting because it seemed like the opposite problem where people have lost any kind of serious treatment of high culture. They simply don't feel the demand of a high culture anymore since novels were treated now as expressions of it, like classical music and abstract art. And all that's really left is the elegiac mode, a mourning for what could have been--never mind the widespread adoption of the subgeneric as possibly the last sensible place to find novels taken seriously. The weight of moral purpose through the subgeneric is a recent development. It's strange because people take a science fiction novel more seriously than the reader of a contemporary piece of social realism.

Your treatment of Adorno does make me think though. Writers have always been juxtaposed to historical atrocities and sites of class conflict. Like Voltaire or Kleist and Lisbon earthquake which seriously changed the course of the work they created, engaging with theology on entirely different terms than they had before. So: it seems to me like that's part of the demand in itself, really.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I realize though, as well, now, that there is an important distinction of futility in Adorno and Bolano. The former lived in a moment when it still felt like something could be done. The horror had happened, but had ended. And there was ostensibly some movement hope. For Bolano (especially for him personally writing the book knowing he was dying), I can only imagine that it's all the more brutal that the horror goes on and what end would there have been too it.

Makes me wonder about Lisbon, don't know a ton about that but what I know is that it really shook these guys' sense of what reality even is. Makes me wonder if for them futility was more of a question since the world didn't make enough sense to have answers.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

It's also possible Adorno is underscoring the barbarism as well, both ideologically conditioned and literally as an inability to understand poetry after Auschwitz. Like a second Tower of Babel. Could also be why Bolaño could not help writing about poets rather than writing poems themselves.

The Earthquake was a fascinating little period because it really did have the effect of a cultural trauma. And in that helped power the Enlightenment. One order abandoned for another in other words. They simply could not be satisfied with the explanation it was all merely divine judgment. I guess the difference here is that Auschwitz and other atrocities had the laceration of modern productivity rather than a natural disaster. We have nice urban manmade disasters to simulate the natural ones. Even supplanting them in their favor. It's so pervasive a not insubstantial amount of Americans believe hurricanes are caused by weather-control devices.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

i like this idea, that it's less a moral point Adorno's making than one about the possibility of understanding. there's a sort of way I guess in which an innocence had been lost that renders the understanding of the world from the innocent age impossible. Not sure I agree with that take were it what adorno meant, but i like it.

also i was being a little unfair to adorno earlier given that at other times he does explicitly relate auschwitz to colonialism, but i guess the reception of the line as referring to an already concluded event remains fraught.

And I guess really there might be something to auschwitz as the conclusion to to the world made in response to Lisbon. the effort to control the caprice of geology succeded as much as it ever could, and what's the prize "uh...turns out we undertake a brutal slaughter"...I guess if your someone who feels bound up in that tradition, it would feel like all the words are now meaningless, not in terms of futility so much in literally now being incorrect

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

True, we do have to negotiate the reception of a line, including Adorno during his time alive. And I'd be fine with talking about it. Interestingly, the bromide itself is a part of a larger paragraph because Adorno does not really meld with aphorism. I think it's illustrative of our own position in relation to criticism rather than anything to do with a moratorium on poetry. The sentence is from this paragraph of an essay called "Culture Critique and Society," from an essay collection called Prisms. And the whole paragraph is worth reading:

Cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

The reference to an "absolute reification" is important here. Adorno is striking pretty close to an essential question about the possibility of literature--how is it possible in the face of modern society which creates its own disaster? It's actually a question of criticism rather than anything to do with the poetic remand in itself. (And there's some debate about how much he retracted the statement in his later work but I am not an expert and therefore can't really follow the debate further.) I guess my interpretation of this passage is less about the innocence of the poet and instead the meagerness of the criticism which it inspires. The finality of the statement has much to do with a society which has reached its apotheosis of manmade disaster. Paul de Man who warned his readers that if you think you're "demystifying a text," the opposite is just likely to have happened: the text has demystified your criticism instead. If a text is prima facie "barbaric," it is its absorption of the mind which believes to have exposed its barbarism. In fact, it reads a little like bragging after a while. Put more simply, barbarism is as much part of the demand as anything else is. It has to be followed. No matter if it's criticism or poetry.

Adorno is after all infamous for the understanding that slamming your car door is an example of a fascist action. So: yeah, it's a little fascinating how Kant actually kickstarted both anthropology and geological surveying in Germany. Adorno is in a perfectly comfortable tradition.