Trevor, I love this, and really enjoyed listening to y'all's conversation. As we've probably talked about at some point, I walked the opposite path (from O'Connor to Girard) and found Girard oddly liberating: because he helped me understand how and why, that is by what interior logic, my characters were investing various material realities with complex symbolic meanings they *didn't* have, and thereby missing out on other, complex meanings the things in themselves *actually might* have. He showed me how envy and deviated transcendence lead to blindness and, more than that, how our characters (and by extension, our selves) might get free -- which for me was a tremendous impetus to get back to the page, back to work.
Anyway I'd love to hear this O'Connor-Girard relationship explored further sometime: while envy doesn't seem too alive or operative in her work (certainly erotic jealousy and triangular desire are almost absent or, when present, in some way twisted from the typical French paradigm), still, very many of her people are suffering from some form of deviated transcendence, often an atypical form.
Thanks Katy. I agree that the relationship between O'Connor and Girard would be worth exploring more. I love Girard's book on the novel. I tend to think the threat it poses to cultural forms is real, even if, for mysterious reasons, not every writer who encounters him will experience that. I think he was aware of it too. He said the last novel was Woolf's The Waves!
“the humble materials of fiction”…gotta wonder how much of my failure to succumb to DDN-paralysis is tied to my lack of novelistic humility—both in the sense that I have always deemed it among the highest forms of art (certainly above criticism!) and…that I am a raging narcissist?
"The day on which young Bergotte succeeded in shewing to the world of his readers the tasteless household in which he had passed his childhood, and the not very amusing conversations between himself and his brothers, on that day he climbed far above the friends of his family, more intellectual and more distinguished than himself; they in their fine Rolls Royces might return home expressing due contempt for the vulgarity of the Bergottes; but he, with his modest engine which had at last left the ground, he soared above their heads."
Trevor, I love this, and really enjoyed listening to y'all's conversation. As we've probably talked about at some point, I walked the opposite path (from O'Connor to Girard) and found Girard oddly liberating: because he helped me understand how and why, that is by what interior logic, my characters were investing various material realities with complex symbolic meanings they *didn't* have, and thereby missing out on other, complex meanings the things in themselves *actually might* have. He showed me how envy and deviated transcendence lead to blindness and, more than that, how our characters (and by extension, our selves) might get free -- which for me was a tremendous impetus to get back to the page, back to work.
Anyway I'd love to hear this O'Connor-Girard relationship explored further sometime: while envy doesn't seem too alive or operative in her work (certainly erotic jealousy and triangular desire are almost absent or, when present, in some way twisted from the typical French paradigm), still, very many of her people are suffering from some form of deviated transcendence, often an atypical form.
Thanks Katy. I agree that the relationship between O'Connor and Girard would be worth exploring more. I love Girard's book on the novel. I tend to think the threat it poses to cultural forms is real, even if, for mysterious reasons, not every writer who encounters him will experience that. I think he was aware of it too. He said the last novel was Woolf's The Waves!
“the humble materials of fiction”…gotta wonder how much of my failure to succumb to DDN-paralysis is tied to my lack of novelistic humility—both in the sense that I have always deemed it among the highest forms of art (certainly above criticism!) and…that I am a raging narcissist?
The edgy clink and thud of a coffee mug on a credenza was the sort of humble material I was thinking of...
Excuse me, Trevor, but the credenza in question is MARBLE
"The day on which young Bergotte succeeded in shewing to the world of his readers the tasteless household in which he had passed his childhood, and the not very amusing conversations between himself and his brothers, on that day he climbed far above the friends of his family, more intellectual and more distinguished than himself; they in their fine Rolls Royces might return home expressing due contempt for the vulgarity of the Bergottes; but he, with his modest engine which had at last left the ground, he soared above their heads."
This exactly!! (was kidding about the marble)