Modernist Fiction, Its Origins and Beyond... and other stuff

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of Robert Musil's death on April 15, 2022 we will read the Man Without Qualities. Please note that this is a placeholder, and we will do a Musil Seminar in 2023.

The Man Without Qualities is one of the great Modernist Novels of the twentieth century, frequently compared to In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. It is incomplete and fragmented as Robert Musil never finished it, spending over 12 years trying to complete it before his death on April 15, 1942.

The novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's last days, and the plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society, though the book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and so no one single theme dominates.

"The most ancient philosophies, obscure and almost incomprehensible as they are to us, often speak of a male and female principle...."

"We are sometimes told that emotion is simply identical with the internal and external events, but we are usually merely told that these events are to be considered equivalent to the emotion. Sometimes emotion is called rather vaguely, 'the total process,' sometimes merely internal action, behavior, course, or event. Sometimes it also seems that two concepts of emotion are being used side by side, one in which emotion would be in a broader sense the 'whole,' the other in which it would be, in a narrower sense, a partial experience that in some rather hazy way stamps its name, indeed its nature, on the whole. And sometimes people seem to follow the conjecture that one and the same thing which presents itself to observation as a complex process, becomes an emotion when it is experienced; in other words, the emotion would then be the experience, the result, and, so to speak, what the process yields in consciousness...."

"And God alone knows what would become of us if feelings did not appear in swarms, these loves and hates and suffering and goodnesses that give the illusion of being unique to every individual. We would be bereft of all capacity to think and act, because our soul was created for whatever repeats itself over and over, and not for what lies outside the order of things...."

Volume 1 purchase link:

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Qualities-Vol-Introduction/dp/0679767878/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539076233&sr=8-1&keywords=man+without+qualities

Volume 2 purchase link:

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Qualities-Vol-Millennium/dp/0679768025/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539076233&sr=8-2&keywords=man+without+qualities

We will begin a Chinese Literature Seminar starting in March 2023 to December 2025 where we will read the Six Classical Chinese Novels along with the 120 Short Stories of the San Yan. The Six Classical Novels of Chinese Literature consisting of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, the Scholars, and the Plum in the Golden Vase are widely considered among the greatest and longest novels ever written. In this fourth part of this new series, we will now try to read the Plum in the Golden Vase.

Written in the late 16th Century and first published sometime between December 28, 1617 and January 25, 1618 by an anonymous author only known by his pseudonym Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng or the Scoffing Scholar of Lanling. The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling was a literary genius, but also a dirty minded $&@#£¥. As David Tod Roy says in his introduction: "The work is a landmark in the development of narrative art, not only from a specifically Chinese perspective, but in a world-historical context... Although its importance in the history of Chinese fiction has long been acknowledged, the comprehensiveness and seriousness of its indictment of the Chinese society of its time and the innovative quality of its experimental literary technique have not yet been adequately appreciated."

Review from Goodreads:

"David Tod Roy's translation of the 金瓶梅 into English is the culmination of some two decades of work, with the fruit of his efforts being the first truly complete English edition of the work. This new edition, however, attempts to translate everything. This includes the poetry and puns, of course, with Chinese puns being notoriously difficult to translate. But further on, there are references to ancient Chinese astrology, medicine, religious texts, imperial succession, makeup, foodstuffs, architecture, and folklore. He follows the novel's rapid vacillations in tone, moving from Tang poetry to vulgar cursing in the space of sentences. Even ordinary couplets or seemingly ordinary turns of phrase are annotated, leaving the entire book an exercise in the thickets of intertextuality, the book itself composed of fragments of other works. Is it one of the six great novels? I'm not sure - I can't say. Who can read it? I doubt even a specialized Chinese reader would be able to understand all of these references. Maybe a group effort might be enough. Or an abridged version, but that would ruin the symmetry of the structure. There is precious little like it."

The novel consists of 100 chapters over 2492 pages that focuses on the life of the main character Hsi-men Ch'ing, who is a corrupt merchant with a harem of six wives and concubines. The erotic realism for which the novel is so notorious, turns out on closer inspection to be a powerful metaphor and condemnation of the government corruption of the ruling Ming dynasty and a parable against human sexual excess which continues onto this day. Please read Chapters 6-10.

Volume 1:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0691016143/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new

Volume 2:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0691126194/ref=sr_1_3_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1519612792&sr=8-3&keywords=plum+in+the+golden+vase

Volume 3:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0691150184/ref=sr_1_5_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1519612792&sr=8-5&keywords=plum+in+the+golden+vase

Volume 4:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0691169829/ref=sr_1_2_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1519612792&sr=8-2&keywords=plum+in+the+golden+vase

Volume 5:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0691169837/ref=sr_1_4_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1519612792&sr=8-4&keywords=plum+in+the+golden+vase

Please join us for a 10 part discussion and read through of Thomas Pynchon's 1973 postmodernist masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow.

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the "Schwarzgerät" ("black device"), slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000".

Time named Gravity's Rainbow one of its "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels", a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and it is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.

The plot of the novel is complex, containing over 400 characters and involving many different threads of narrative which intersect and weave around one another. The recurring themes throughout the plot are the V-2 rocket, interplay between free will and Calvinistic predestination, breaking the cycle of nature, behavioral psychology, sexuality, paranoia and conspiracy theories such as the Phoebus cartel and the Illuminati. Gravity's Rainbow also draws heavily on themes that Pynchon had probably encountered at his work as a technical writer for Boeing, where he edited a support newsletter for the Bomarc Missile Program support unit. The Boeing archives are known to house a vast library of historical V-2 rocket documents, which were probably accessible to Pynchon. The novel is narrated by many distinct voices, a technique further developed in Pynchon's much later novel Against the Day. The style and tone of the voices vary widely: Some narrate the plot in a highly informal tone, some are more self-referential, and some might even break the fourth wall. Some voices narrate in drastically different formats, ranging from movie-script format to stream of consciousness prose.

The narrative contains numerous descriptions of illicit sexual encounters and drug use by the main characters and supporting cast, sandwiched between dense dialogues or reveries on historic, artistic, scientific, or philosophical subjects, interspersed with whimsical nonsense-poems and allusions to obscure facets of 1940s pop culture. Many of the recurring themes will be familiar to experienced Pynchon readers, including the singing of silly songs, recurring appearances of kazoos, and extensive discussion of paranoia. According to Richard Locke, megalomaniac paranoia is the "operative emotion" behind the novel, and an increasingly central motivator for the many main characters. In many cases, this paranoia proves to be vindicated, as the many plots of the novel become increasingly interconnected, revolving around the identity and purpose of the elusive 00000 Rocket and Schwarzgerät.

Please read up to page 71 in the 1973 760 page edition, or page 72 in the 2006 Penguin Deluxe Classics Paperback starting from Episode 1 to Episode 10.

1973 760 page edition Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Classic-20th-Century-Penguin/dp/0140188592

776 page Penguin Deluxe Edition Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0143039946

Annotations Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Companion-Contexts-Pynchons/dp/0820328073

Please join us for a complete read through over the next several months of a complete set of 201 short stories by Anton Chekhov continuing with Stories 179-181: Whitebrow, 'Anna on the Neck', and The Murder.

Online Text Link:
https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/