Jeff Riggenbach on Imaginative Literature


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INTRODUCTION TO IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE

By Jeff Riggenbach

[Announcement preceding Part 1 of the series as it originally appeared in August 1975 in Libertarian Review: This month we are proud to begin Jeff Riggenbach’s long-awaited series on imaginative literature. The six-part series will appear every other month. On the alternate months, and beginning next month, Neil McCaffrey, Publisher and President of Arlington House and jazz buff extraordinary, will take us on a tour of the world of recorded jazz. We are very pleased and excited about these two new features, and we hope you will be, too.]

Part I: Preface

Once, a few years ago when I was ghost-writing college term papers for a living, I was asked to discuss, compare, and contrast the epistemological theories of five philosophers (Descartes, Hume, Kant, C. I. Lewis, and Merleau-Ponty) in seven typewritten pages (about 1700words). The present assignment—to write a reasonably comprehensive, reasonably useful introduction to imaginative literature in around 36 typed pages (8400 words)—is not nearly so absurd, but it is equally difficult of achievement. If I try to be reasonably comprehensive about only the Western literary tradition, I will have about three words at my disposal for each year of literary history. (“It was good,” “It was bad,” “It was so-so.” That kind of thing.) If I try to be reasonably useful—Ah! But here we have the issue whose disposition will determine what words like “reasonable” and “comprehensive” will mean in this context: Just what use is there in a series of six 1400 word articles on imaginative literature (whatever that is)?

The use of such a series is neither more nor less than the use of any literary criticism—rendering the criticized literature more accessible to its readers and, thereby, making a more intense aesthetic experience available to them. But already I am knee-deep in terms for which no definitions have been offered and for which (alas for the discipline of literary study!) no commonly accepted definitions exist. The definitions I am about to propose and the theory of literature I am about to sketch around them are not commonly or even uncommonly accepted; I know no one who accepts them, save myself. And I am no more able to argue for them effectively in a few hundred words than I was able to discuss, compare, and contrast the epistemologies of five philosophers in seven typewritten pages. All I can do at present is assert my ideas, cite sources of supportive argument for certain of them and indicate the kinds of comprehensiveness and usefulness which they justify as reasonable goals for this series of articles.

A work of imaginative literature is a presentational symbol of human feeling or experience, a verbal presentation of an imaginary world in which imaginary beings engage in imaginary acts and processes, the whole being useful to human beings by enabling them to make certain kinds of abstractions—abstractions about the nature of the world and about the ways in which the conceptual faculty may be used to describe and understand it. (See Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form.) Now it must be emphasized that no work of imaginative literature is about the real world, and no work of imaginative literature espouses or implies any theory about the way the real world is. A work of imaginative literature presents an imaginary world which is a certain way; we find it useful to contemplate this imaginary world because, in so doing, we are enabled to make an abstraction of the sort Ayn Rand calls a “metaphysical value judgment,” and being enabled to do that with respect to an imaginary world acquaints us with the mode of conceptual thought we need to do it with respect to the real one. (See Ayn Rand, “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” in The Romantic Manifesto, and “Art and Cognition. Part I,” in The Objectivist, April 1971.)

Actually, I should say that being enabled to make such abstractions with respect to an imaginary world acquaints us with the mode of conceptual thought we need to do it with respect to the real one if the writer does his job as an artist properly and if we do our jobs as readers properly. The artist’s job, essentially, is to present an imaginary world the total of whose specified detail enables us to make only one abstraction—that is, to present an imaginary world all of whose details may be accounted for by only one abstract idea and all of whose details are relevant to the formation of that idea. The reader’s job, essentially, is to engage in the process of concept formation without making errors and to properly interpret the sentences which present the details of the world of the work. No one, of course, is born knowing how to form concepts or interpret sentences; both skills are learned. And the sentences of which imaginative literary works are composed are not always of the same sort as those used in the composition of (for example) philosophical or historical works: they employ rhetorical devices such as metaphor which literally mean differently (according to different semantic and logical principles) and must be understood differently. The job of the literary critic is to discover the interpretive methods appropriate to imaginative works and communicate them to those readers who experience difficulty in discovering such methods themselves.

And what do these general principles imply for this series of articles? That, in recommending works of imaginative literature (and I use “imaginative” here in something like the Coleridgean sense to designate the esemplastic faculty which, rather than rearranging the concretes of the real world into new combinations, creates imaginary concretes and entire imaginary worlds, building up from the same base in sensuous experience from which percepts and concepts of the real world are formed), I must indicate the works’ themes, the abstractions which they enable their readers to make. And that I omit from consideration works which are only partially literary (in the sense of using words as only one of two or more ways of presenting their imaginary worlds) and works which I am unqualified to criticize comprehensively. The chief works in the first category are plays (see Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form for a discussion of why plays are not literature); the chief works in the second category are works composed in languages other than English (the only language in which I am competent). A literary work is made of words in much the same way a painting is made of canvas and pigment, a bust of plaster, a concerto of tones. Judging a work written in a language one does not read is like judging a painting composed of colors one cannot see. Translation is a difficult business at best; outside of certain unusual circumstances, it is impossible where imaginative literature is concerned. (See William H. Gass’s “The Medium of Fiction,” in Fiction and the Figures of Life, and chapters five and six of Rudolf Flesch’s otherwise almost valueless book The Art of Clear Thinking.)

Nevertheless, as almost every lover of literature knows, some of the finest imaginative writing ever done in the English language has been done by playwrights, and some of the most perfectly integrated imaginary worlds in literature have been created by writers who described them in other languages. (It is possible, within limits, when reading a work in translation, to judge the coherence of its world; it is not possible to judge the style in which that world is described.) Accordingly, I want to conclude this preface with a discussion of some plays and some works in translation which I have found particularly exciting. Since any ordinary survey of the “Literature Made Simple” variety can provide the reader with a list of significant English-language playwrights and foreign-language imaginative writers, I shall restrict my own discussion to a handful of the most outstanding of their works.

Oblomov, by the late 19th century Russian Ivan Goncharov, is a brilliant character study of the under-achiever, locating his failure to achieve in his failure to think for himself, and presenting one of the most (contextually) admirable heroines I know in fiction. Jealousy, a short novel by the avant-garde French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, is the most devastating and devastatingly clever presentation of that emotion I have ever read. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus ingeniously interweaves the Faust legend with the development of contemporary music and the social and intellectual forces responsible for the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. (The almost incredible complexity of this novel is best appreciated when it is read in combination with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, the latter preferably in Phillip Wayne’s fine translation.) Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (in the translation by Richard and Clara Winston) is the most effective and moving presentation I know of what it really means to be dedicated to the life of the mind. And the beautifully polished miniatures of the Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges are available for sampling in the collection called Labyrinths; there is almost literally no describing these stories and essays, each of which presents the sensuous reality of a philosophical idea with an economy and precision of expression any writer could use as a model.

William Shakespeare is, and deservedly, the most universally revered of literary playwrights. Read Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, or The Tempest. (This one—my personal favorite—is particularly enjoyable if read in conjunction with Robert Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos” and James Branch Cabell’s “Prologue of Duke Prospero at Milan.”) And for a fascinating experience of revenge, greed, and their consequences, read and savor The Visit by Swiss playwright-novelist Friedrich Duerrenmatt. (In October: A look at fiction in English and why not much of it written before this century is of much artistic value. Also, a definition of the one key term left undefined this month. Next month: The first part of Neil McCaffrey’s jazz series.]

[This essay was first published in Libertarian Review, August 1975, Vol. IV, No. 8, and was posted to Objectivist Living on Wednesday, November 15, 2006 with the author's permission.]

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  • 1 year later...

INTRODUCTION TO IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE

By Jeff Riggenbach

Part II: Fiction—The Short Story

I have said that literary criticism worthy of the name must enable the reader to have as intense an aesthetic experience as possible. But what is an aesthetic experience, and what does it have to do with presentational symbols of human feeling that enable us to make the abstractions we call metaphysical value-judgments? Precisely this: the aesthetic experience, the experience of feeling an imaginary world organismally—not the experience of conceptualizing such a world, however elaborately—not the experience of perceiving it with the mind’s senses—but the experience of perceiving that world’s “sensory field as perceived by a conceptual consciousness” (Ayn Rand in “Art and Cognition”)—the experience of living in that world, insofar as we can achieve such an experience through the intermediaries of language and imagination—this aesthetic experience is the means by which readers of literature understand what they are reading. The aesthetic experience is to understanding a work of art what a knowledge of dictionary definitions and grammatical rules is to understanding a sentence—with one qualification, namely, that both are part of understanding a literary work. A literary work is made of words, sentences, paragraphs, which must be understood according to specifiable rules of definition and grammar before the reader can know in what a given imaginary world consists; but a literary work is also made of that imaginary world—its people, places, events and things—and it must be understood according to specifiable rules of concept formation before the meaning of the work as a whole may be grasped. And one of the most fundamental of those rules of concept formation, I would say, is the rule that all valid conceptual thought must originate in immediate, personal (organismal) awareness—the kind of awareness involved in the aesthetic experience. In a sense, to say that a work of art is a presentational symbol is to say that it is comprehensible only to those who achieve an aesthetic experience of it.

Clearly, the work of imaginative literature which offers the possibility of the richest, most varied kind of aesthetic experience is the work of fiction. For a work of fiction is an imaginative literary work in which the actions (physical or psychological) of imaginary human beings are the most significant, the most nearly essential of its characteristics qua presentational symbol—a work, that is, in which the action symbolizes the essence of the metaphysical value-judgment(s) justified by the work as a whole, while the characters, settings, and inanimate properties add the qualifiers. What this means is that a story may present as complex and elaborate a world as its author desires, so long as its every detail is integrated (and there are thousands of kinds of fictional integration) to the significance of the plot, while a poem is limited to presentation of essentially static worlds and an essay is limited to presentation of worlds organized around a single kind of action—cognition. (For a fuller presentation of these distinctions among literary forms, I refer the reader to parts III and IV of this series.) Though one of the most common types of fiction—narrative verse—is of genuinely ancient origin, the two most common types—the short story and the novel (distinguished from each other, for me at least, on purely arbitrary grounds of length)—are inventions of the past 200 years. Prose fiction existed in English before the turn of the nineteenth century, to be sure, but not in any great abundance or to anyone’s great artistic benefit. And even after the turn of the last century, when fiction had become a more or less popular kind of literature to write, the novelist or short-story writer tended not to produce works of great literary excellence. And the reason is entirely a function of his public and personal image: the story-teller was not regarded and did not regard himself as an artist, subject to the same kinds of expectation and criticism to which the poet was subject; the novelist or story writer was an entertainer, more like a clown than a Shakespearean actor, more like a Ross Hunter film than an Ingmar Bergmann. It was not until the late nineteenth century (in the era of Meredith, Moore, James, and Art-For-Art’s-Sake) that any significant number of fictionists came to regard themselves as artists of at least as refined a sort as poets—and before those fictionists were able to build a public for such fiction, another few decades had gone by. Today there are still influential critics and professors of literature at important institutions who believe the story is intrinsically a “looser” form than the poem and is not capable of the same degree of aesthetic refinement—that is, of the same degree of symbolic organization and compression. And, predictably, writers who did not consider themselves serious artists seldom produced works which could be taken seriously as works of art, whatever their excellence in this or that subsidiary area of fiction writing (plot construction, style, characterization).

The first really artistic short story in English literature (henceforth, when I use the phrase “English literature,” I will mean literature written in English—nations have nothing to do with art) is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s verse narrative The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. A useful edition of this work (though its introductory and appended material works to establish a few minor critical perfidies) is Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Ancient Mariner. Coleridge was much greater as a literary critic and theorist than as a literary artist, but his allegory of good, evil, and nature combines brilliant stylistic achievement with painstakingly economical presentation of a thoroughly designed, thoroughly integrated imaginary world.

Later nineteenth-century practitioners of the short story were important, many of them, but for only tangentially artistic reasons (Edgar Allan Poe is a representative example: his stories are innovative in a number of ways and enjoyed great influence over any number of much better writers, but they stand up rather badly when they are subjected to purely literary evaluation—evaluation, that is, outside their historical context). It was only at the end of the century, during the eighties and nineties, that substantial work was done to continue the tradition launched by writers like Coleridge and the American Nathaniel Hawthorne (of whose best short fiction “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Great Stone Face” are fairly representative). Henry James, whose work will be discussed more extensively next month, is the author of a number of fine short works, notably “The Beast in the Jungle.” And such popular writers as Bret Harte (in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and others), Mark Twain (in “The Mysterious Stranger” and others), and “O. Henry” (in tales like “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Last Leaf”) brought a less ambitious sort of literary distinction to their work during this period.

After the turn of the twentieth century, the short story began a climb to artistic glory which it has not yet exhausted. And, uniquely among the literary arts, the short story has enjoyed its greatest achievements since then in the United States, not in England. While certain British writers such as W. Somerset Maugham and D. H. Lawrence have become internationally famous for their short fiction, they have always seemed to me substantially more adept at their novels. But at least two British writers of short fiction—E. M. Forster (see “The Other Side of the Hedge” and “The Machine Stops”) and James Joyce (see “The Dead”)—achieved genuine distinction in that form, and one British writer of the first years of this century must be ranked as one of the greatest figures in the history of the short story. I am speaking here of H. H. Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym Saki. There is almost no describing Saki’s short stories; what can one say after indicating that each is written with theretofore almost unprecedented economy of prose expression and that each is an artistic whole of only a few pages in which, in a single perfectly stylized scene, a character reveals his self, his character? The only thing like these stories is the work (in translation and to that extent inaccessible) of the French writer Guy De Maupassant. I especially recommend Saki’s “The Open Window,” “Sredni Vashtar,” “Esme,” and “The Schwartz-Metterklume Method.”

The early 1900s in America were not up to Saki’s standards, but they were developing in a similar direction. Even Theodore Dreiser, American literature’s leading exponent of clumsiness in style, produced a memorable short work or two—the best is probably “The Lost Phoebe”—and with the appearance of Ernest Hemingway, the first giant of the short story had spoken from this side of the Atlantic. Hemingway’s best stories are so good they must be read (and re-read and re-read) to be believed. And it is almost impossible to pick “bests”; so instead I’ll name favorites: “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well Lighted Place,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Other important short works of this period are Faulkner’s “The Bear,” “Delta Autumn,” and “A Rose for Emily’: Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” (a touching, poetic, shocking presentation of a child’s withdrawal into classic schizophrenia—as seen by the child); and Steinbeck’s “The Ears of Johnny Bear.” Also notable, though lighter, are Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen Versus the Ants” and Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.”

During the 1950s and ‘60s a good half dozen serious writers of short fiction came to prominence in this country by bringing the art of the short story to its highest point of consistent excellence to date: William H. Gass (who, despite or possibly because of his being one of the five or six most accomplished stylists in all of American literary history, has not been terribly prolific—almost his entire short fiction is available in one collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and the title story is a masterpiece); Alfred Bester (whose best work is in the collection, Starburst, particularly the stories “Fondly Fahrenheit” and “The Starcomber”); J. D. Salinger (whose book, Nine Stories, is a must for any short fiction enthusiast, and whose “The Laughing Man” and “For Esme—With Love and Squalor” are among the best ever written by anyone—“The Laughing Man,” by the way, bears an allusory resemblance to a famous Victor Hugo novel); Ray Bradbury (whose best stories are scattered among several anthologies, but whose collection, Twice 22, is representative and contains two of his very best—“The Great Wide World Over There” and “In a Season of Calm Weather”); Donald Barthelme (whose collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts is as representative as any other of these indescribably, surrealistically funny stories); and Theodore Sturgon (whose finest work—one of the finest done by anyone working in English in this century—is More Than Human, a short-story cycle—a continuous narrative that is also several distinct and artistically complete short stories—that, in fewer than 200 pages, breathes more life into the idea of the gestalt than the Gestalt psychologists have done in the past quarter-century). (Next month: Neil McCaffrey brings us “Jazz with a Human Face.” Jeff Riggenbach returns in December with “Fiction—The Novel.”)

[This essay was first published in Libertarian Review, October 1975, Vol. IV, No. 10 and was posted on Objectivist Living with the author's permission on January 5, 2008.]

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Chris, the last I heard was that Jeff moved to Oklahoma to help take care of his parents, and that he was fine.

As for his activities, I don't know specifically. I do know that he worked on and got a Masters degree several years ago, but I don't know whether he pursued and got a teaching position or instead has continued to do a variety of low-profile writing and editing assignments.

Jeff does post regularly to Atlantis II, sometimes substantively, usually just in riposte manner.

REB

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Ernest Hemingway, the first giant of the short story

Rubbish. And worse: he praises Lawrence, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Salinger; ignores Fitzgerald, Melville, Kipling.

Argues in essence that literature amounts to evil, death and disaster.

W.

Edited by Wolf DeVoon
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Chris, the last I heard was that Jeff moved to Oklahoma to help take care of his parents, and that he was fine.

Texas; his mother. His father died many years ago.

As for his activities, I don't know specifically. I do know that he worked on and got a Masters degree several years ago, but I don't know whether he pursued and got a teaching position or instead has continued to do a variety of low-profile writing and editing assignments.

He's pursued but he hasn't yet succeeded at getting a teaching position.

Ellen

___

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Ernest Hemingway, the first giant of the short story

Rubbish. And worse: he praises Lawrence, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Salinger; ignores Fitzgerald, Melville, Kipling.

Argues in essence that literature amounts to evil, death and disaster.

W.

Tsk, tsk, tsk; silly description of what he "argues in essence." The writers he praises deserve praise. He didn't recognize Melville's ability back then, but I think the only thing he'd read of Melville's [edit: sic] was "Heart of Darkness," the whole last part of which he hadn't connected with. This oversight was remedied in some exchanges between him and me a few years ago.

OOPS; Edit: Embarrassing "senior moment"; how could I have confused Melville and Conrad? I don't know if JR ever read anything of Melville's; I don't think we ever talked about Melville.

Ellen

___

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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The writers he praises deserve praise.

Not from me. Lawrence's short stories are plain evil, not of drop of benevolence. Ditto Hemingway's 'The Killers.' Salinger salacious and deviant.

Herman Melville was a true pioneer of the American short story with 'Bartleby The Scrivener.' I'm not asking anyone to agree with me. But Scott Fitzgerald is the all time short story champ, period. He gave Hemingway a leg up to get him started. Praised him and loaned him money. Hemingway betrayed him and then belittled Fitzgerald publically. In the end, Hemingway knew that he couldn't equal Fitzgerald's achievements, didn't deserve worldwide acclaim, and blew his brains out. None of them would have existed without RLS and Kipling, absent from your friend's account of English roots.

How on earth did Riggenbach get tagged as an Objectivist, anyway? Oh, never mind. Sciabarra and Perigo make me choke, too. I'm the one who's out of step here, not you guys.

W.

Edited by Wolf DeVoon
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How on earth did Riggenbach get tagged as an Objectivist, anyway? Oh, never mind. Sciabarra and Perigo make me choke, too. I'm the one who's out of step here, not you guys.

W.

Who said Riggenbach was "tagged as an Objectivist"? He doesn't tag himself that way; he's Rand-influenced but not "Objectivist." Is your reason for choking at Sciabarra because he's gay? (That appears, from the TAS Dollars thread, to be your reason for choking at Perigo.)

Ellen

___

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How on earth did Riggenbach get tagged as an Objectivist, anyway? Oh, never mind. Sciabarra and Perigo make me choke, too. I'm the one who's out of step here, not you guys.

W.

Who said Riggenbach was "tagged as an Objectivist"? He doesn't tag himself that way; he's Rand-influenced but not "Objectivist." Is your reason for choking at Sciabarra because he's gay? (That appears, from the TAS Dollars thread, to be your reason for choking at Perigo.)

Ellen

___

Yes. I'm appalled that it has somehow become part of the neo-Objectivist canon to accept homosexuality as a lifestyle choice. This is said from multiple years of experience, both professionally and personally, interacting with homosexuals. Beyond which, it has no basis in Rand's fiction, contrary to claims made by Chris Sciabarra and others. How I got into this mess of speaking up, I don't know. Nor does it matter in the wider universe of discourse. Just an unfortunate circumstance of my having too much time on my hands right now waiting for a visa number that's a month overdue.

Ellen, I am indeed sorry. We are strangers. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason to hold differing literary views.

Sincerely,

Wolf DeVoon

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  • 4 months later...

Just for the record, I'd like to let it be known that these ancient articles on imaginative literature seem pretty substandard to me nearly thirty-five years later. I gave Roger permission to reprint them when he requested it, because, like them or not, I *did* write them, and the historical record should be allowed to stand without interference from those who helped to make it. But I must confess that I see little in these pieces to admire, and I have often wondered why various people over the years have told me they liked the articles and would like to see them in print again.

The fact is, I was too young to write something like this, and my ignorance shows through.

If I had it to do all over again, I'd probably drop Lawrence from the article on the short story, and I'd probably add Melville - specifically, "Bartleby, the Scrivener." I wouldn't add Fitzgerald, however. He didn't impress me then, and he doesn't impress me now.

As to "evil," my purpose in these pieces was not to talk about the morality of literature. It was to recommend some aesthetically worthy literature. If a writer views life as "evil, death, and disaster," my only question as a critic of literature is how effectively, how artistically, he expressed that worldview. If he did a good job, it's a good work of literature. If you don't like it because of its moral implications, fine. But keep the issues separate. They are, in fact, separate issues.

JR

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Kipling had a truly amazing verbal facility, but little else. Stevenson's short stories, unless you regard the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a "short story," leave much to be desired. He's a very interesting writer and much more important than most people realize, but he wrote too much too fast, and only a handful of his works achieve real excellence. Lack of "benevolence" is not an aesthetic flaw - in Hemingway or anybody else. What it means to call Salinger "salacious and deviant" is beyond me, and what salaciousness and deviance have to do with artistic excellence is anybody's guess.

If anyone ever "tagged" me as an Objectivist, I remain blissfully unaware of the fact. I certainly don't tag myself that way. As far as I can see, the word "Objectivist" has been used for years now to describe people who clearly don't understand Ayn Rand's ideas and are unable to figure out how to apply them to anything in life.

JR

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If anyone ever "tagged" me as an Objectivist, I remain blissfully unaware of the fact. I certainly don't tag myself that way. As far as I can see, the word "Objectivist" has been used for years now to describe people who clearly don't understand Ayn Rand's ideas and are unable to figure out how to apply them to anything in life.

Did Ayn Rand? :mellow:

--Brant

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Jeff,

A warm welcome aboard. It is great to see you.

Things were getting calm around here...

:)

Michael

Jeff; Allow me to second Michael's welcome. Chris Grieb

Edited by Chris Grieb
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Just for the record, I'd like to let it be known that these ancient articles on imaginative literature seem pretty substandard to me nearly thirty-five years later. I gave Roger permission to reprint them when he requested it, because, like them or not, I *did* write them, and the historical record should be allowed to stand without interference from those who helped to make it. But I must confess that I see little in these pieces to admire, and I have often wondered why various people over the years have told me they liked the articles and would like to see them in print again.

The fact is, I was too young to write something like this, and my ignorance shows through.

If I had it to do all over again, I'd probably drop Lawrence from the article on the short story, and I'd probably add Melville - specifically, "Bartleby, the Scrivener." I wouldn't add Fitzgerald, however. He didn't impress me then, and he doesn't impress me now.

As to "evil," my purpose in these pieces was not to talk about the morality of literature. It was to recommend some aesthetically worthy literature. If a writer views life as "evil, death, and disaster," my only question as a critic of literature is how effectively, how artistically, he expressed that worldview. If he did a good job, it's a good work of literature. If you don't like it because of its moral implications, fine. But keep the issues separate. They are, in fact, separate issues.

JR

Good to see you posting here.

Bill P (Alfonso)

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