That : the sense of individual work of art in mass-market culture
reread my review of a few years ago (the book's posthumous William Gaddis, "Agape , agape " , still not translated into Italian) I realize that as yet contains stimulating ideas (the book, not transposed). It seems to me that even the words of Gaddis foreshadow the use of the web for literature and art still not met. I realize finally that he completely forgot what I had thought when I wrote the rece valid, that therefore propose again here.
Overtime, the last text of William Gaddis out a few years after the death of (Occurred at the end of 1998), by its express will.
is a monologue of about 90 pages in which a terminally ill writer of pulmonary emphysema (as Gaddis) tries to summarize and put together a text that has worked for decades, a text that was to be a history of mechanical player piano in the U.S. as an emblem the massification of artistic creation and destruction.
The plant and autobiographical self is all too evident from the start: Gaddis really picked up on that material for at least 40 years, an enormous amount of material to work that he decided to turn into a short novel, " Agape, agape ", indeed. In this choice
- As well as building self - is contained in part the meaning of the text and the thesis that supports: the renunciation of writing a text for life exemplifies the fact succumb single artist amassed in front of the technological society, and yet this waiver is not a defeat, as is clear from the last pages of text.
The protagonist of " Agape, agape " complaint then the killing of the artist as a result of technology, standardization of taste, of democracy: a thesis undoubtedly elitist and reactionary, and certainly not new (Eliot, Pound, Jünger , Zumthor move on ropes like, to say the first that come to mente):
" ...because that's what it's about, that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look..."
E ancora: "...where individual is lost, the unique is lost, where authenticity is lost not just authenticity but the whole concept of authenticity, that love for the beautiful creation before it's created that that, (...) That natural merging of created life in this creation in love that transcends it, a celebration of the love that created it they called agape , that love feast in the early church, yes .
The apocalyptic-elitist argument that art can only meet the standardized ' entertainment and technology has allowed this (Gaddis cites several authors, even when Flaubert says, "The only dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity of the bourgeoisie ") is radical and new, in fact - much less acceptable.
But the meaning of the text of Gaddis, IMHO, is not that.
His quote Tolstoy ( The Kreutzer Sonata ), Melville (Moby Dick ), Bernhard ( The unsuccessful , real inspiring model of Agape, agape, so that Gaddis writes in his notes that it seems that Bernhard had stolen his ideas even before he had), du Maurier (Trilby ), Huizinga, Freud etc. no need to argue that thesis, but to show the similarities between different minds in different times and brotherhood ( · ga'pe , in the context) between these individuals that the result is still possible of artistic creation - and the engine can still result, even today, of artistic creation.
"... they'd say I'm afraid of the death of the elite Because It Means the death of me of course I can not really blame Them, I've been wrong about everything in my life it's all Been fraud and fiction, let everybody down except my daughters ... "
Gaddis speaks of himself, really. And the game in the final pages of the narrative self vanishes and is the author speaking directly to the reader, no longer play or irony (perhaps this, too, came the need to impose some years of waiting, after his death, Before publishing the text).
Some verses of Michelangelo I (present in all the works of Gaddis) this explicit autobiographical reference: " O God, O God, O God / Who hath taken away from myself upon me would be more at / O more than I could, what can I do? O God, O God .. . The writer
old and sick, before the drafting of a work that has to give up writing, tip attention to that "himself he could do more," the possibilities of an artist as a young man frustrated by the mass-market technology. Frustrated why? Maybe for having sought the consent and immortality in an age where this is impossible without self-denial, of course ("What immortality if today there is a new generation every 4 days? ," says Gaddis) . The defeat
individual (the losing party or the writer Friedrich of "Trilby " Svengali, but also Gaddis writes that " My first book has become my enemy ") is therefore the result of too much ambition and self-centered especially misguided: not the mass-market can benefit from the work created by "himself that he can do more", but the author and, above all other men with a feeling akin to his. In this sense the work of art without compromise still makes sense. A thesis
elitist to the end, no doubt, but that takes credibility as a 'confession' individual (for more on his deathbed).
addition to this, we must not forget to say " Agape, agape " is a beautiful book.
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