100 Books to Read Before the End, 1
100 Books to Read Before the End, 1
An outsider canon, from Adorno to Grossmith
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly, with a lingering appreciation, the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
Aldous Huxley
There is not enough time in a collapsing world to live a good life in which reading plays some part, and read crap books1 which is so easy to do. It’s tragic really; people acquire the gift of literacy only to waste it on fifty years of detective novels, horror stories or cheap romance. Not that you have to always be reading masterpieces of world literature, which can be a bit draining (particularly if you have to work), but when you’ve got time and space to tackle something decent you might want to start here.
The theme is quality. Strange, I know, but the only thing these books have in common is that they are good, which is the only criterion anyone with any sense ever looks for in such a list. There is light relief but, for the most part, what follows are the towering literary achievements of our species.2 If you want Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hilary Mantle, Cormac McCarthy or any other meretricious bauble in our literary wasteland, you’ll have to find yourself one of the ‘100 books to read before you die’ lists that the establishment puts out.
There are no black authors here and very few women (one I think). Amazing that so many people need to be reminded of why, or one reason why3; because world literature, over the past three millennia, has been overwhelmingly dominated by European and Asian men. Even the woke-Pravda Guardian’s 100 greatest novels were nearly all by The Dreaded White Man. If you have to have an ethnically diverse list, again I suggest you go to one where quality is subordinate to keeping people happy. There are plenty of them.
None of this is to say that my subjective taste plays no part whatsoever. Of course it does. I have a weakness for certain kinds of fantasy, for a start, and I’m English, so I am biased towards my tradition. On the whole though, what follows are works which are a lot bigger than me. That’s what quality is, something which brings to the self that which is beyond the self, and beyond the self-reinforcing society which it is tragically, and comically, a part of.
And so we do have a unifying theme. These books are all, to a greater or lesser (sometimes much lesser) extent, outsider literature. Not in a trivially literal sense (e.g. that of an ethnic outsider), but in that they speak to what lies outside the given — the known, or the knowable. This is why merely enjoyable and satisfying authors, such as Edgar Allen Poe and J.R.R. Tolkein, are not here, good as they are, because these insiders, and many like them, did not have to struggle to grasp the fundamentally mysterious, to bring a radical truth back to a world which is so resistant to it.
1: Adorno, Theodore; Horkheimer, Max Dialectic of Enlightenment. Classic critique,4 from the Godfathers of the Frankfurt School, of Enlightenment thought,5 the alienating command-mentality of civilised rationalism that has terminated in a machine-like intellectual world that commodifies individuality and sells it back to us. Adorno’s style is often insurmountably obscure6 which, as with that of his primary influences, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, is evidence of confusion and triviality. Nevertheless, like his forebears, there is still more page-for-page insights in his work than can be found in 300 pages of most books. Two examples: ‘Under the given conditions, exclusion from work means mutilation, not only for the unemployed but also for people at the opposite social pole. Those at the top experience the existence with which they no longer need to concern themselves as a mere substrate, and are wholly ossified as the self which issues commands.’ and ‘It is a feature of the irrationally systematic nature of this society that it reproduces, passably, only the lives of its loyal members.’ Despite his wilful obscurantism, it’s worth making the effort with Adorno, by which I mean wading through the turgid swamp until you reach dry land, because when he wants to be understood Adorno cuts right through the shallow either-or fakery of the modern world, touching the enigmatic primal heart of existence. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, something of a follow-up, and not exactly pool-side reading either, is also overflowing with acute observations on the modern condition.
2: Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. Akutagawa’s stories mix sweet sorrow, grotesque weirdness and the kind of subtlety that makes you warm with hazy pleasure when you detect it — or even (no matter) have it explained to you. The high-point for me is the black-comic heartbreaker Green Onions, but Akutagawa is rightly famous for his chilling horror stories; Hell Screen, In A Bamboo Grove and the schizoid conclusion to his grim autobiography…
3: Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. Well-behaved and restrained situation comedy. Terribly English, but light, umannered (in fact it represented one of the first concerted attacks on ‘manners’ in the literature of this country) and very funny; the kind of comedy that comes from slowing down social interactions to a quarter speed and remarking on every bizarre nuance that passes between people who are only pretending to like each other. Don’t bother with Amis fils; Amis père didn’t.
4: Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Stoicism has a huge, empty, civilised crack running right through it, exploited by modern middle-class Stoics. Nevertheless there is much splendid wisdom in the words of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. I’ve chosen the latter because, even though his is the most weary, melancholy and even dreary philosophy of them all (contrast the light-at-heart Epictetus), his grim determination to hold to the good thing, even as the suffocating walls of the iron cage close in, is most useful to us, in our dark times.
5: Balzac, Honoré de. Pére Goriot. Or any of the better ‘La Comédie humaine’ novels (such as the equally compelling Eugénie Grandet). Balzac makes an astonishing contrast to the trivial dilettantes exalted in the literary world of today, providing more insight into the human condition in ten pages than most Booker / Pulitzer winners manage in a career. Not as broad as Tolstoy, say, or as profound as Hardy, Balzac’s later works tend to drown in minutia and he’s far too interested in commerce, but for anyone with a stake in the human condition, Balzac deserves to be read as closely as Proust and Dostoevsky read him.
6: Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. ‘It is just where Heidegger thinks of himself as wandering in a mist ‘beyond philosophy’ that Barfield pitches base camp and plots his route to what he considers to be a clearly visible summit.’ 7 Gets a bit hard going here and there, but is a minor classic of modern philosophy, if a little woolly round the edges. Makes the case that religion and science are forms of idolatry, in that both—despite of course what their followers like to believe—worship creations of the mind. Barfield’s theories on metaphor (worked out in his earlier classic, Poetic Diction), and its central importance in transcending the twin illusions of subjectivism, or idealism, and objectivism, or positivism, will one day be regarded as one of the supreme intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. Not surprising his wonderful truths have been neglected in favour of Heidegger’s shady nihilism, but a dreadful shame.
7: Berger, John. About Looking. ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’ A book about art, and about what is right in front of your eyes when you look at it, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, about how the contextual aura of a work of art, which is literally priceless, has been supplanted by mere authenticity, something which you can put a price on. A subversive book because, like all subversive ideas, it is simple and direct; at one point in the teevee series Berger gets children to talk about renaissance masterpieces, and they make far more interesting comments than Brian Sewell or, God help us, Jonathan Jones.
8: Berger, Peter L. The Social Construction of Reality (with Thomas Luckmann). ‘The institutional order embraces the totality of social life, which resembles the continuous performance of a complex, highly stylized liturgy.’ Berger is tough-going. Not Marx or Adorno-level tough, but he does require a bit of effort. Worth it though. Unpicks the deep-structure of ‘insider’ society in ways that connect up far flung perceptions into gut-powerful glowing nodes of deep meaning. The Sacred Canopy is also outstanding.
9: Berne, Eric. The Games People Play. ‘Wooden Leg. In this game the player uses his “wooden leg’”as an excuse for not doing something that he — and probably everyone else — knows he should. “Oh, I’d love to go hot-air ballooning with you, but I have this wooden leg, you see’. In extremis leads to ‘the plea of insanity’— “Of course I killed her! What do you expect of someone as fucked up as I am!”’ Plenty of other crackers here. Berne was one of a few marvellous psyche-writers of the 60s and 70s who explored the deep structure of the everyday. Also highly recommended; Erving Goffman’s Behavior in Public Places and Interaction Ritual and the 70s self-help classic, When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel J. Smith.8
10: Bickel, Lennard. Mawson’s Will. The most extraordinary tale of polar survival, beating even Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s correctly titled Worst Journey in the World. Douglas Mawson — ‘Awesome Mawson’ as my mum calls him — set out in 1911 to explore 1500 miles of unexplored Antarctica. It goes wrong, then it goes wronger, then there is a massive disaster, then everything gets really bad, then you begin to understand, in the deepest sense, what ‘difficult’ means.
11: Black, Bob. The Abolition of Work. Why work? Bob Black’s essays tend to wander into — I think — self-indulgent point scoring against ‘his enemies,’ but much that he writes is quite inspiring. This essay, rightly the one he is most famous for, is essential reading. I’ve heard that Bob Black fell into line over Covid and has been shaking his fist at the Russkies, so he might have fallen further than I thought, but he’s an elusive cat, so hard to substantiate.
12: Blake, William. Selected Poems. When Thomas Butts, a friend of the Blakes, came to visit them at their house in Lambeth he was amazed to find them both completely naked in the garden. ‘Come in!’ Blake cried. ‘It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!’ Blake’s life and work forms a whole, like the infinity that revealed itself to him in everything he laid his eyes on. I’ve chosen this famous book of poems as a gentle place to start, but everywhere leads directly to everywhere.
13: Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Gets a bit boring halfway through, and all the characters are real idiots. Aye! ‘bu’ that ‘fahl, flaysome divil of a gipsy, Heathcliff!’ I like Jane Austen — she’s wonderfully observant, within her limited, frigid little world — but for depth, subtlety and structure Wuthering Heights knocks clean white Mansfield Park into a cocked hat. Charlotte Bronté’s work is good too, but a lot neater than Emily’s. D.H. Lawrence rightly condemned the rather sordid wish-fulfilment finale of Jane Eyre as ‘pornographic’.
14: Bryant, Edwin F. (ed.) Bhagavata Purana.10. By far the sexiest religious masterpiece. At one point Krishna duplicates himself into nine-hundred thousand copies of himself in order to make love to as many adoring devotees, for five hundred God-years, until the universe itself ignites. A friend of mine used to be a Hare Krisna, a fairly benign cult from what I can tell, although sexually repressive. He had to wear a little plastic apron in the shower so as not to catch a glimpse of his penis and was told that only when sufficiently spiritually advanced could he tackle the fruity tenth.
15: Bukowski, Charles. Ham on Rye. ‘At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.’ Bukowski’s finest, but I have a soft-spot for bildungsromane. It’s difficult to make art of unfiltered personal confession, hardly anyone has succeeded because in the end it’s so cheap, but Bukowski (who certainly did filter his accounts) comes close. He could be distastefully macho, but Post Office and Factotum are gleaming with dark spit-and-fuck truths: ‘How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?’
16: Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God (vol 1–3). Joseph Campbell’s extraordinary review of the entire history of myth. Part 4, modern literature, is not half as interesting though (it’s all about Mann’s dull and pointless Magic Mountain). Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, the model for Star Wars (and countless tiresome Hollywood films since) focuses on male-oriented tales of self-mastery. His Historical Atlas of World Mythology is also a thing of wonder — my coffee table books of choice — although he died before completing them, which I can forgive, but it always strikes me as somewhat inconsiderate of him.
17: Camus, Albert. The Fall. ‘A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and looked at his phone. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.’ (adapted) Ever realised you’re not the man you thought you were? This is the story for you. The Outsider is excellent too of course, with one of the funniest opening lines in the history of literature, ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.’
Camus was the first author I absorbed completely. Not having read much of any real depth before applying for an English Literature course at university I more or less chose Camus at random and went through all his books so that I could say my ‘favourite author’ was one of greater substance than James Herbert or Stephen King. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy for, just as when someone pretends to love someone for long enough he actually falls in love, so Camus became, until I discovered the injustice he and the vile Sartre had done to the sublime thought of Søren Kierkegaard,9 my favourite author.
18: Carter, Asa Earl. The Education of Little Tree. ‘He got pretty worked up about it. He said the meddlesome son of a bitch that invented the dictionary ought to be taken out and shot…’ Apparently full of lies and Carter, so they say, was full of shit. But these things really don’t matter with a story like this, which rings so true — in its innumerable details about the magic of nature and the characterful power of people who really live in it — that there has to be truth in it.
19: Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Voyage to the end of the Night. ‘You don’t lose much when the rented house burns down.’ If you can ignore the questionable sexual ethics of Journey to the End of the Night, and a view of mankind which is unremittingly bleak, you’re in for a treat. The truth, and my God, the language. ‘Poverty is a giant, it uses your face to clean away the world’s garbage.’ On and on it goes, page after page, of unbelievably acute poetic insight, defying the rise of humourless modernism and initiating a rich vein of literature, on the margins of the acceptable canon, which started here, with Céline’s excoriating refusal of the world as he found it.
From Céline, via Henry Miller, Jaroslav Hašek, Joseph Heller and Charles Bukowski the principle pleasure and purpose of this kind of account has, albeit without the grand ambition (and therefore the grand beauty) of true novels, lived on, as a means of giving voice to moral truth in the teeth of a world which has no use for it.10 ‘The best thing to do when you’re in this world, don’t you agree, is to get out of it.’ You said it Ferdinand; although I’m not sure Céline did get out. Not really. He pulled himself far enough out of the muck to see it as it is, but no further, which is why his decline was so very shabby.
20: Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote (trans. Grossman).
Quixote belongs on this list, but it can drag and exhaust — after nearly a thousand pages of madcap irrealism it feels very much like it’s time to clean the oven — and the ending, in which the eponymous hero abruptly realises the whole thing has been a mistake, is none too satisfying. It’s a road movie, basically, with all the inherent narrative weakness the genre entails. Nevertheless, Like so many classics, Quixote is surprisingly readable and funny, especially the first part, although it does add quite a weight to the old suspended disbelief (seventeenth century Spain seems to have been crawling with noble folk pretending to be shepherds and shepherdesses) and for all the tales of derring do, and the interesting questions the novel throws up on the nature of imagination, it’s really the immortal characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and the love they have for each other, and for the simple goodness of life, which makes the reading so agreeable.
21: Chuang Tzu / Zhuangzi. The Book of Chuang Tzu. ‘You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog—he’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar—he’s shackled by his doctrines.’ The first and certainly one of the greatest anarchist texts ever written. Quite unbelievably radical. I prefer the Watson translation, (The Complete Works of Zhuangzi) which has an excellent introduction and textual notes.
22: Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. ‘Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.’ Dense, dense and super-intense; if somewhat hysterical (is Kurtz really a genius? doesn’t seem like it) and cynical (we’re basically all evil according to Conrad).
My path to great literature started with, predictably enough, 1984, which my mum recommended to me when I was fourteen (scared the bejesus out of me), and Heart of Darkness, which a boring but exceptionally clear and methodical teacher took us through line by line, uncovering, at least for me, a new world of meaning. Thank you Mr. Jones.
23: Crumb, Robert. Sketchbooks. Mind-blowing — far better than his comics I believe. Like opening the mind of a trickster god and pouring it over a stash of seventies porn mags. A lot of grim prurience, but entertainingly self-deprecating with it and some excellent, caustic observations of the ordinary folk of the world:
24: Dick, Philip K. Valis. ‘Perhaps the universe is in the invisible process of turning into the lord?’ Talking of Crumb, he did a very good account of the strange episode that led Philip K. Dick to write this, the world’s only science fiction autobiography. Dick penetrated the unreality of modern life down to the projector of the shuddering representation the mind makes of it. His hard-gnosticism sends him a bit awry, I believe, but I also think he was the last author to have said something. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is another reality-bender, and perhaps a little more accessible, as are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — a subtle and bizarre enquiry into empathy (‘The only way to determine whether someone was an android was empathy. What separated humans from androids was that androids had no sense of empathy. The difficulty was that very few humans did either.’) and The Divine Invasion, which is Valis part two. Dick is the most modern writer of fiction on this list.11
25: Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Dickens’ most autobiographical novel and [consequently, I’d say] one of his most enjoyable. Possibly the most ludicrous ending in world literature, although plots aren’t so very important in Dickens, and Copperfield is, like most of Dickens’s heroes, a real sap, with little modulation of character; but that doesn’t really matter either. Critics can be very sniffy about Dickens, but if he’s good enough for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Kafka, Huysmans and Orwell, he’s good enough for me. The problem with Dickens, often noted, is that he has little time for the natural, unifying ground of human character, leaving a sordid carnival of surface personalities, silly names and melodrama; but these are an essential backdrop to modern literature, situated as it is in urban spaces that deprive everyone of context, and, in their reflection of a grotesque new social experience, Dickens characters make a profound commentary on modern life, often missed by his detractors. His books are also tremendously entertaining, with a light-hearted buoyancy12 and eye for telling detail that humanise even the most dreadful scenes. He does tend to go overboard with all this, which can make his stories feel thin and mercurial — not to mention, gawd, so sentimental — but I’d rather read Bleak House than Madame Bovary any day, and consider the great man something of a major influence.
26: Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Magarshack, David). And talking of endings, Dostoevsky was all about them. There is a breathless, fanatical feeling to his writing that make you want to get the point, tell us the POINT Fyodor! But, like a kind of sweaty existential-intellectual one-night-stand, after it’s over you don’t always feel you want to get into a relationship. There are some passages in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils and here, in The Brothers Karamazov (particularly the legendary Grand Inquisitor and Russian Monk sections), along with a great many unmatched insights into the perversity and purity of the human spirit, which are, for psychic truth, unmatched in world literature. For the sensory beauty of the sensory life, go Tolstoy, for the darker, inner chambers of the mountain — and for the freedom of the spirit that can only be found at the bottom of the pile — let Fyodor be your guide. You’ll have to wade through frustrating longueurs, a great deal of piffle about ‘we Russians’ and his world is terribly claustrophobic (even the outdoor scenes seem to happen indoors) but it’s well worth it, as all the great authors who have looked upon his work with admiring wonder shows — amongst others Gide, Girard Lawrence, Zweig to name but four. Apart from his insights into suffering, guilt, faith and pride, Dostoyevski also presents one of the most profound and penetrating critiques of materialism and utilitarianism in literature.
A related recommendation; Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky, which is the best literary biography I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few. One of the greatest pleasures of my ‘intellectual life’ has been reading The Brothers Karamazov in tandem with Frank’s commentary. The glory! Through Frank I came to understand that the ‘solution’ to Ivan’s unanswerable complaint about the existence of evil in the world is not the unsatisfying gospel of Father Zosima. As with, in a way, Chekhov, Dostoevsky is far too intelligent to deliver a nice little summative meaning of life. The meaning is in the whole.
27: Elias, Norbert. The Civilising Process. Fascinating history of manners, showing how social climbing and new class-stratification tended to repress physicality and spontaneity, leading to what we now understand as civility. Related, and also mind-opening, Phillipe Ariès, author of two masterpieces of medieval scholarship, The Hour of Our Death and Centuries of Childhood.
28: Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland. Along with The Hollow Men; pretty much the unworld as it is. Prufrock is phenomenal too, as is Four Quartets.
29: Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Also Propaganda. Ellul’s work, along with that of Illich and Mumford, is central to understanding the modern world. Here is my account of the same system that Ellul wrote about so eloquently and perceptively, incorporating some of his key insights. Also highly recommended; Propaganda, The Formation of Man’s Attitudes.
30: Eschenbach, Wolfram von. Parzival. Astonishing story, of penetrating subtlety, but pretty inaccessible these days as most medieval romances are. For a TLDR you might want to read Campbell’s account (see above) or read a nice modern translation of the equally zesty Gawain and the Green Knight.13
31: Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones; A Foundling. Tom Jones helped sire the English novel, which, for several centuries, was one of our chief contributions to world culture. Here the joy lies in Fielding’s mordant humour, his generous, forgiving view of human nature and his well-designed plots. It’s also a pleasure to inhabit a world in which the farting, shitting, bawdy body is accepted, in which society is, to some degree, ‘integrated’ (the social classes exist, for all their enmities, together) and in which psychological qualities have reality (Honour and Wit and Doubt and so on contend in people’s breasts like wrestlers), all far more human — not to mention medieval — than the remote, shallow, professional world of the Regency and Victorian literature which followed. Tom Jones does suffer from an innately conservative realism, with the suffocating superficiality that realism entails — the characters don’t end up much changed by 900 pages of adventure and neither does the reader — but, for all that, Fielding’s company — which he is prodigal with, frequently taking the reader by the hand in long authorial asides — is as congenial as that of his warm-hearted hero.
32: Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. At the heart of Foucault too is a horrible, horrible emptiness, but this remains one of the classic works on the schizoid introjection of surveillance and the extraordinarily subtle techniques of controlling people in modern society. Should be read side-by-side with Baudrillard, another ‘postmodernist’, who, for all his emptiness, is also worth exploring and who provides a useful corrective to the idea, in both Foucault and Debord, that power and propaganda are things there which we here can do something about, or even perceive, when we have become the very illusion which oppresses us.
33: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Essential Goethe. An author, like all great writers, who must be grasped as a totality, might best be approached with a voluminous and authoritative selection, such as this. Why approach Goethe, the father of all that is best in modern philosophy? Listen to Nietzsche14;
A magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by a coming-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts in himself: sentimentality, nature-idolatry, the antihistorical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the last being merely a form of the unreal)… he did not divorce himself from life but immersed himself in it; he never lost heart, and took as much as possible upon himself, above himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will (preached in the most repulsively scholastic way by Kant, Goethe’s antipode), he disciplined himself into a whole, he created himself... Goethe conceived of a strong, highly educated man, adept in all things bodily, with a tight rein on himself and a reverence for himself, who can dare to grant himself the whole range and richness of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom; the man of tolerance, not out of weakness, but out of strength, because he knows how to turn to his advantage what would destroy the average type; the man to whom there is no longer anything forbidden except weakness, whether it be called vice or virtue... Such a liberated spirit stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, with faith in the fact that only what is individual is reprehensible, that everything is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he no longer denies... But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths…
34: Grossmith, George. Diary of a Nobody. Funny late Victorian comedy about an uptight social climber — the status-obsessed forerunner of David Brent, Alan Partridge, Basil Fawlty and Rupert Rigsby. Not hysterically funny, but worth reading. It’s by the heroin-addict actor character in Mike Leigh’s splendid Topsy Turvy, if you’ve seen that. George’s brother did the illustrations…
Read part 2 here , part 3 here (both for paying subscribers).
Or, to put it another way, ‘A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones — for life is short.’ Arthur Schopenhauer.
Those I have discovered at any rate. I’m not claiming this list is somehow definitive, which would be preposterous.
There is a deeper reason, but it would be invidious to mention it here without going into detail. I cover gender here, and in all my books.
Actually ‘dialectic’, or description of the evolving relationship of opposing forces.
Although the authors, being Marxist materialists, did not actually reject the Enlightenment itself.
I am told that many of his translators haven’t helped here, but his German can also be, again so I am told, also frustratingly oblique.
Jeffrey Hipolito, Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction.
Yes, a great book, but very American in it’s continual insistence that morality is an arbitrary and individualistic state of affairs, and that, to take responsibility for our lives, we should be going round making clear, literal declarations of our intentions, ‘No, I won’t help you because I don’t want to.’ Strictly speaking, true, but ‘Sorry, I just can’t’ can, even if it’s often a cover for irresponsibility, mean the same thing.
And until I realised that his plots and characters are really rather thin; essentially a means by which he, Camus, can soliloquise.
I flatter myself that my Drowning is Fine continues this marginal tradition. Judge for yourself.
Readers looking for a modern novel equal to the above, albeit without the spiritual depth and satirical nuance, might try M.T. Anderson’s Feed, about a world in which the internet is beamed straight into people’s minds. It manages, as so very few ‘high-concept’ novels do, to make the dystopian premise dependent on well-observed and eloquent characters, giving us the immortal line; ‘The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.’
Terry Eagleton writes;
Distinguished visitors to Dickens’s home would smile indulgently to see the great man crouched on the carpet playing with his children, only to realize after a while that he was taking the game with disturbing seriousness and appeared notably reluctant to break off.
Few authors have understood children and childishness as well as Dickens (Dostoevsky was another. Lawrence too could write a child). Here is a delightful example, from Great Expectations. The narrator is obviously an articulate writer, but the tender innocence of the remembered perception something else entirely;
Mr. Pumblechook’s premises… were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of a corn-chandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be a very happy man indeed, to have so many little drawers in his shop; and I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers, and saw the tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom.
While we’re on the subject of medieval literature, it might seem absurd to some that Chaucer and Boccaccio are not on this list (but Kingsley Amis and Robert Crumb are!). I haven’t read the latter, and have only read a few tales from the former, which aren’t very interesting — or rather are nowhere near as interesting as the glorious language (the original English I mean) they, and the many lovely aphoristic asides, are rendered in.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.