[ilds] durrell & kitsch

[Marc Piel]

Hello Bruce
Maybe Kitch is in the eye of the beholder.
Probably I have a professional deformation. Don't 
forget I am a designer where form, function and 
esthetics  are key in my perception. Maybe an 
Englishman can enjoy Camembert as much as a 
Frenchman can enjoy Fish&Chips. Maybe not. Maybe I 
just don't understand or that my irony does not 
accept the association of LD and kitch. For me 
they are opposites, but you said they were the 
same. Or did I really misunderstand?
Marc

Bruce Redwine a écrit :
> Thanks, Marc.  I'm flattered to find myself in the unexpected company of Steven Marcus and Edward Said.  Perhaps you can present an argument, rather than make declarations, à la Ludwig Pursewarden?
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> Bruyce
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> On Jan 29, 2010, at 3:05 PM, Marc Piel wrote:
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>> The word kitch is considered derogatory, denoting works executed to pander to popular demand alone and purely for commercial purposes rather than works created as self-expression by an artist (or professor). I invite everyone to reread this post  carefully and see what a huge quantity of kitch there is in this post from Bruce.
>> Marc
>>
>> Bruce Redwine a écrit :
>>> 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. . . .
>>>>>
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