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Tue, 28 Jan 2003 15:19:39 -0800 |
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Carrol Cox wrote:
> But there are major works
> concerning which the critics have laboreed mightily to identify the
> form, without major success (success being measured by the consensus a
> given view attains). It is always easy to give a label and call it form.
>
> Examples: _Winter's Tale_, _Canterbury Tales_, _Paradise Regained_,
> _Dunciad_, _Don Juan_, _Moby Dick_.
>
> The "form" that is missing from the _Cantos_ seems, primarily, the kind
> of form that eases the work of explication by providing a framework on
> which to distribute the commentary.
Well said. Put another way, the great works are like trees looming well
above the underbrush of ex-post-facto meta-works. Some more examples
might include "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Dhalgren".
In any case, the only rational capsule description of the Cantos'
form/content that works for me is as of a painting in language, over the
stretch of some decades, of the inside of EP's mind. Which was in many
ways not a pretty place or one where you'd want to spend much time...
but ah, the brush-strokes, the mastery of line and colour! -Tim
PS (semi-related): Is there anyone else who thinks that the attempt to
link Joyce's "Ulysses" to the Odyssean story is a vast practical joke
perpetrated by the author and that the linkage is entirely spurious?
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