[ilds] durrell & kitsch

[Bruce Redwine]

Sure, Charles.  First, thanks for the excerpt from Marcus's analysis of Seymour Glass.  I like it.  Here's my take on what Marcus means by calling Pursewarden a "kitsch genius."  A little background.  Steven Marcus was a colleague of Edward Said at Columbia, both professors.  You'll recall Said's comment on Durrell, previously discussed on this List.  Said dismissed Durrell as a writer of "classy fiction" (The World, the Text, and the Critic [Cambridge 1983], 3).  He tells the anecdote of going to the Pentagon and talking to a college friend working in DOD (Said graduated from Princeton and Harvard).  This is during the Vietnam War, and Said wants to understand the type of people bombing the North.  The friend defends his boss and says McNamara, Secretary of Defense, has the Quartet on his desk, ergo the Secretary is an intellectual and no monster.  Said scoffs at the equation.  I assume Marcus and Said exchanged ideas often, and I take "kitsch" and "classy" as being synonymous.  I would use the word pretentious in this context, for I'm rather fond of "kitsch," so long as you know what you're dealing with.  Yes, kitsch does apply to the Quartet, "marvelously" so, as you note, and yes, I agree, Marcus's usage is entirely negative.

I think Marcus is primarily talking about a failure in presentation.  Seymour fails as a character because he doesn't live up to his billing.  Salinger spends a lot of energy building up this character, making him mysterious, creating an aura of sainthood.  When Seymour shows up, however, he's a letdown, a flop, something of a "phony," as Holden Caulfield might say.  This may be what Marcus means, and this sense of kitsch can be extended to Durrell's characterization of Pursewarden, whose great reputation as the caustic author of God Is a Humorist is intriguing but whose occasional pronouncements on art and life grow tiresome and pretentious.  Durrell's best solution for Pursewarden was to have him commit suicide in Balthazar, like Seymour's suicide in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."  Unfortunately, Durrell later resurrected Ludwig in Clea, where we learn too much about his "genius" from a section of his notebooks, where he sounds like Durrell himself delivering his opinions on the course of English literature.

True, Durrell and Miller had a program for reforming English literature, but are we to take this seriously?  Highbrow (bad) vs. lowbrow (good)?  English priggishness (bad) vs. French earthiness (good)?  High Moderns (bad) vs. Jacobeans (good).  Joyce (bad) vs. Rabelais (good)?  Are we to discount Joyce and Pound because they knew their classics?  Durrell scoffs at Joyce because he went back to The Odyssey to seek a new form (Paris Review 1960).  In that interview in PR, Durrell talks a lot about art and literature.  Does the average Frenchman really appreciate, in a way an Englishman can't, a good Camembert as much as he (or she) does a Picasso?  Have the French really integrated art and everyday living?  I don't know, but I doubt it.  All this talk sounds "classy" and "kitschy" to me, something fundamentally false.  Which brings us back to our discussions about Durrell the "wise" sage.


Bruce


On Jan 29, 2010, at 6:48 AM, Charles Sligh wrote:

> A last observation:
> 
> I think that Steven Marcus hands down the "kitsch" verdict as a negative.
> 
> Durrell (and Miller &c.) are not "highbrow" on the order to Joyce, 
> Woolf, and the various American Equivalents of the High Moderns.
> 
> But does that Marcus verdict really tell us anything new--especially 
> when from early on Miller and Durrell are aligning themselves in 
> opposition to the "high" modern line?
> 
> The /Justine/ phenom (perfume line and movie) is marvelously kitsch. And 
> Durrell writes his "Minor Mythologies" essay in order to break down the 
> dividing lines between high and low literary art.
> 
> C&c.
> 
> ***
> 
> Charles Sligh wrote:
>> I wonder what Durrell would make of the term "kitsch"?
>> 
>> I find one instance of the word in his writings:
>> 
>>    "In Miller you have someone who has crossed the dividing line
>>    between art and /Kitsch/ once and for all" (/The Happy Rock/ 3).
>> 
>> 
>> But what does that sentence mean?
>> 
>> Based on the matter of the previous sentence and word order, does Miller 
>> leave art (Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner) and plunge forward with 
>> fearless gusto into "Kitsch"?
>> 
>> Is that a good thing here? 
>> 
>> By the evidence of the first /Tropic/, I am supposing that it /is/ a 
>> good thing--no more tea cups and doilies and polite library lectures by 
>> professors discussing James Joyce and Virginia Woolf for Miller and his 
>> readers. . . .
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ********************************************
> Charles L. Sligh
> Assistant Professor
> Department of English
> University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
> charles-sligh at utc.edu
> ********************************************

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