#192

“We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was only open aplin and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide to that openness: it is terror to us” (id, 268).

#191

“What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them – it says exactly nothing. The moment of of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator” (id, 167).

#190

“The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fürher – it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity... Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness – not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life” (id, 133).

#189

“It was widely believed in those days that behind the War – all the death, savagery, and destruction – lay the Fürher-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources” (Pynchon, 2006: 82).

PYNCHON, Thomas (2006). Gravity's Rainbow. London: Penguin.

#188

“It is as if, for Rabelais, the inventor of a narrative is not obliged to bring coherence, logic or resolution to the text. That (as Diderot would later make clear) is the task of the reader, the mark of his freedom” (id, 277).

#187

“Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading – once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive – is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. (...) In our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room” (id, 223-224).

#186

“Objective evidence for subjective preferences does not make the value judgement itself objective, but merely objectifies the preferences. This process brings to light those predilections that govern us. These can be then seen as an expression of personal norms (...) and in being exposed they open up an intersubjective means of access to our value judgements” (Iser, 1980: 25).

ISER, Wolfgang (1980). The Act Of Reading. A Theory Of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, Londres: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

#185

“The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and is the world itself” (id, 89).

#184

“God, the legend tells us, invented the multiplicity of languages in order to prevent us from working together, so we would not overreach our powers” (Manguel, 2008: 19).

MANGUEL, Alberto (2008). The Library At Night. London, New Haven: Yale University Press.

#183

“As Madame Bovary, however, became a worldwide success, when at first it was understood and appreciated as a turning-point in the history of the novel by only a small circle of connoisseurs, the audience of novel-readers that was formed by it came to sanction the new canon of expectations; this canon made Feydeau's weaknesses – his flowery style, his modish effects, his lyrical-confessional cliches – unbearable, and allowed Fanny to fade into yesterday's bestseller” (Jauss, 2007: 28).

JAUSS, Hans Robert (2007). Toward An Aesthetic Of Reception. Translation by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

A Chronicle Of Early Failure I

“Becoming a writer is not a “career decision” like becoming a doctor or a policeman: you don't chose it so much as you get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. Unless you turn out to be a favorite of the gods (and woe to the man who banks on that), your work will never bring in enough to support you, and if you mean to have a roof over your head and not starve to death you must resign yourself to doing other work to pay the bills” (Auster, 1998: 4).

AUSTER, Paul (1998). Hand To Mouth. A Chronicle Of Early Failure. London: Faber And Faber.

#181

“Cool media are high in participation, on completion, by the audience. And I have always taken that to heart, that sometimes it can be a dangerous practice.
I'm not reader-friendly. I do ask something of the reader, and many reviewers say I ask too much; even some of them who like my work say, but it's work, it's difficult; and as I say, it's not reader-friendly.
Though I think it is, and I think that a reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that ends up being between the reader and the page, without this whole world of giving readings” (id, 229-230).

“Now everybody–”

“I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself” (id, 222).

#179

“We are thousands and they are millions, write the fiction they want or don't write at all, ruling out Pound's cry for the new, the challenging or what's labeled difficult, so when Gravity's Rainbow is being devoured by college youth everywhere and wins the National Book Award, its unanimous recommendation by the Pulitzer jury is overturned by the trustees for a double-talk spoof of academic vagaries by a bogus “Professor”” (id, 42).

On religion

“In other words, we are all in the same line of business: that of concocting, arranging, and peddling fictions to get us safely through the night” (id, 189).

The rush for second place

“The day's mail brings flyers offering courses in Mid-life Crisis, Stress Management, Success Through Assertiveness, Reflexology, Shiatsu, Hypnocybernetics, and The Creative You. Books disappear overnight or are instant “best-sellers”: mortifying confessionals and est, group therapy, primal screams and “making it,” pious plagiaries on moral fiction and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM Technique for reducing blood pressure and increasing self-esteem. Even impotence is briefly chic; the movie screen offers the dreary sentimental humanisms of Woody Allen achieved at the expense of cast and audience alike and, for the beer crowd, Rocky” (id, 142).

#176

“These poets and other artists must not show indecency and intemperance so the first thing to be done is to censor writers of fiction or they'll corrupt the citizens growing up among images of moral deformity, because youth can't tell the difference between allegory and what's literal” (id, 47).