Yeah okay so the books
Aug. 4th, 2008 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaSince I made the last post I also plowed through The Wisdom of Father Brown. Basically this was two half-day binges: I'd arrive at the end of a story with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction and start on the next immediately, as if it were going to do better. Can't pinpoint this except by saying that all the narratives actually seem to be moral fables, only in detective story format instead of talking animals format, and Chesterton's worldview doesn't dovetail with my own on a very basic level - that of emotional reaction. It doesn't irritate or alienate, but it depresses. ^^; I'm not sure why. I have the same problem with Graham Greene but this is more so. I want to say it's because Chesterton truly believes in salvation whereas Greene only resonates with the concept of damnation, but that's typical INTP-style great-leap-forward and doesn't make any sense. Does it? In any case Chesterton is very powerful when he writes about Evil, some of those passages will probably remain with me for life. One can see what Evelyn Waugh was thinking. XD
There's also a, how would you call it, an issue of racial and cultural attitudes. Basically my enjoyment of these stories would've been vastly less complicated if I'd read them as a child, as I did with the Tintin comics. It's that sort of thing, only magnified because the writer is such an incisive observer. And yet he doesn't deal in individuals, but in types. Of course this is partially due to the format, which is genre i.e. pop, and I expect and even crave the style in pop, but Chesterton is too smart for it not to be apparent that it's how he thinks, only on a level more complex than that of War Hero, Gentleman Thief, Beautiful Heiress, etc. on which the stories nominally operate (but don't stick to by a long shot). Borges - who must've been influenced by Father Brown - typifies in the same way, and so does Ayn Rand, but Borges doesn't even pretend to be writing about people, which is one of the reasons he's a great writer and Rand is not. I do think somewhere there lies a fundamental demarcation between conservatives and liberals, in the most abstract senses of the terms. Sometimes that outright backfires onmodern my sensibilities. At other times... I mean dude stereotypes French intelligentsia at one fell swoop but I've yet to meet anyone in that category who wasn't exactly as described in these stories. XD; And if I'd read them as a child the quality of the prose would've flown over my head. The deployment of such a well-balanced tool in the-butler-did-it-cos-he-was-the-evil-duke-in-disguise narratives makes for an odd sense of luxury, like jumping in the Porsche to make a tobacconist run. Chesterton especially excels at setting descriptions and a sizeable number of the stories seem to have been inspired by some unusual architectural or street layout.
Out of 24, there is 1 x parody of Swinburne and 1 x story in which an American reporter meets a British reporter in a pub; the former is chasing a story about an alternate theory of evolution and the latter is chasing a celebrity sex scandal. LOL. Still have three collections worth to go.
As for Graham Greene I don't want to talk about it much anymore as I've talked about it everywhere, including when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
worldserpent was reading it (here - spoiler alert). I will say that it hadn't occurred to me until this book that Greene's Catholicism is what gives the puzzling dark aftertaste to even his lighthearted novels, otherwise you'd think he'd read like Terry Pratchett or something. All these books seem to come by twos: like the Father Brown stories, Brighton Rock is an appropriation of genre conventions and structure in order to talk about ideas on a higher order, religion and secularism and so forth. Despite its parable nature I don't know if Greene meant the outcome of his novel to have universal application, or if it's no more than that - one possible outcome of one possible battle between eternal forces. If there's a takeaway I found valuable it's the definition of secularists as people who think in terms of Right vs. Wrong, whereas believers think in terms of Good vs. Evil - and Good vs. Evil pushes more buttons, allows for more seductive and/or extreme dramas, wherease Right vs. Wrong is the choice of the annoyingly healthy in mind and body who thus assume they know best for everyone. Tempting as it is one should probably avoid calling that a fundamental demarcation between conservatives and liberals, no matter how abstractly defined. XD;
I was in the Gallimard bookstore the other day and saw this genius idea - reissues of books with the DVD of the film adaptation packaged in. They should do that for Brighton Rock! Or a Hong Kong cinema remake, though that would eliminate all the Albionic signifiers.
There's also a, how would you call it, an issue of racial and cultural attitudes. Basically my enjoyment of these stories would've been vastly less complicated if I'd read them as a child, as I did with the Tintin comics. It's that sort of thing, only magnified because the writer is such an incisive observer. And yet he doesn't deal in individuals, but in types. Of course this is partially due to the format, which is genre i.e. pop, and I expect and even crave the style in pop, but Chesterton is too smart for it not to be apparent that it's how he thinks, only on a level more complex than that of War Hero, Gentleman Thief, Beautiful Heiress, etc. on which the stories nominally operate (but don't stick to by a long shot). Borges - who must've been influenced by Father Brown - typifies in the same way, and so does Ayn Rand, but Borges doesn't even pretend to be writing about people, which is one of the reasons he's a great writer and Rand is not. I do think somewhere there lies a fundamental demarcation between conservatives and liberals, in the most abstract senses of the terms. Sometimes that outright backfires on
Out of 24, there is 1 x parody of Swinburne and 1 x story in which an American reporter meets a British reporter in a pub; the former is chasing a story about an alternate theory of evolution and the latter is chasing a celebrity sex scandal. LOL. Still have three collections worth to go.
As for Graham Greene I don't want to talk about it much anymore as I've talked about it everywhere, including when
worldserpent was reading it (here - spoiler alert). I will say that it hadn't occurred to me until this book that Greene's Catholicism is what gives the puzzling dark aftertaste to even his lighthearted novels, otherwise you'd think he'd read like Terry Pratchett or something. All these books seem to come by twos: like the Father Brown stories, Brighton Rock is an appropriation of genre conventions and structure in order to talk about ideas on a higher order, religion and secularism and so forth. Despite its parable nature I don't know if Greene meant the outcome of his novel to have universal application, or if it's no more than that - one possible outcome of one possible battle between eternal forces. If there's a takeaway I found valuable it's the definition of secularists as people who think in terms of Right vs. Wrong, whereas believers think in terms of Good vs. Evil - and Good vs. Evil pushes more buttons, allows for more seductive and/or extreme dramas, wherease Right vs. Wrong is the choice of the annoyingly healthy in mind and body who thus assume they know best for everyone. Tempting as it is one should probably avoid calling that a fundamental demarcation between conservatives and liberals, no matter how abstractly defined. XD;I was in the Gallimard bookstore the other day and saw this genius idea - reissues of books with the DVD of the film adaptation packaged in. They should do that for Brighton Rock! Or a Hong Kong cinema remake, though that would eliminate all the Albionic signifiers.
