Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Lannan Selection) by Professor Hugh Kenner (PDF)

Description

An enlightening study of three writers, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians begins with an explanation of the effect of the printing press on books. The “book as book” has been removed from the oral tradition by such features as prefaces, footnotes, and indexes. Books have become voiceless in some sense–they are to be read silently, not recited aloud. How this mechanical change affected the possibilities of fiction is Kenner’s subject. Each of the three featured authors approached this situation in a unique, yet connected way: Flaubert as the “Comedian of the Enlightenment,” categorizing man’s intellectual follies; Joyce as the “Comedian of the Inventory,” with his meticulously constructed lists; and Beckett as the “Comedian of the Impasse,” eliminating facts and writing novels about a man alone writing.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) was one of America’s great literary critics. He wrote on a range of subjects that includes Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and geodesic domes.As Bruce Bawer wrote in Bookforum, “the late Guy Davenport (1927-2005) left behind an oeuvre that is one long lesson in the history of civilization, and to read any part of it story, essay, or translation is to be enthralled by his unflagging intellectual energy and engagement.” His books include The Geography of the Imagination, The Death of Picasso, Herakleitos and Diogenes, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff Team, DaVinci’s Bicycle, and many more.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Moving from Kenner’s collection of early essays, Gnomon, to The Stoic Comedians is a relief. Kenner is one of my favorite critics, a polymath with interesting things to say about, well, just about anything. My favorite of his books is a little chapbook on cartoonist Chuck Jones, and his The Counterfeiters is in running for the best work of literary criticism in the twentieth century.Gnomon, unfortunately, is a mean-spirited petty book, spiced with the kind of “kill the adversary” mentality that makes so much graduate student writing tiresome. But The Stoic Comedians is classic Kenner: inspiriting, provocative, and amusing all at the same time. The complication is that by convincing me that he “is right” about Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett, he’s also convinced me that I have been right to dislike them for all these years. Kenner explores some of the themes that make The Counterfeiters such a fine book. He traces the inevitable trajectory of fiction that resulted from the invention of the printing press, which replaced the organic function of oral literature with the machinery of the written word. It’s not the only trajectory, any more than all firework sparks fly together. But it is the trajectory that leads to Samuel Beckett, the master of contentless fiction that is about nothing except itself. How literature got there from Flaubert’s obsession with “data” is Kenner’s theme, and he handles it beautifully. That the book is a convincing case against reading Beckett, Joyce, and even Flaubert is a wonderful irony Kenner does not intend.The politics of Kenner’s aesthetic have always been conservative. He has no truck with writers he regards as populist, communist, or “liberal”: He treats Whitman with scorn in Gnomon (which also lampoons the idea of teaching “regular folks” to read poetry). He dismissed Moby-Dick with a hipshot quip I can’t remember, and Fielding, Dickens, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Dreiser are hardly mentioned in his surveys of significant literature in English. The Stoic Comedians avoids Kenner’s two annoying foibles (sneers at “liberal” writers and elevation of forgotten “geniuses” of conservative fiction like Wyndam Lewis — who is identified in Gnomon as the greatest English writer since Milton) and takes as its topic three writers only philistines and apostates would dare challenge the reputations of. He does an excellent job of describing how and why they matter.As I said, the book is illuminating and entertaining. And it’s convincing; Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett are indeed masters of their craft, and Kenner has identified that craft very precisely and accurately. Unfortunately, that craft is comparable to playing the Star Spangled Banner on your cheeks with a spoon.

⭐

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