.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

“Herzog wrote letters to order his thoughts; Bellow wrote a book, the one you are reading”… Article touches on a number issues for me. First of all, a perplexity about the various levels of text that occur in Herzog (which I somewhat addressed in a fictional context here: substitute “tweet” for “jot”), but also the idea that I’ve had about Markson’s This Is Not A Novel that it is most comparable to a Twitter feed — that it really is not a novel, and perhaps not even an artwork, because unlike Herzog, there isn’t a context provided for the “tweet.” (The context of This Is Not A Novel, such as it is, is that there is this real person, David Markson, who is an artful, knowledgeable person tweeting.) Finally there is the idea that Bellow was being unfair in Herzog, giving a highly subjective account of a real autobiographical episode of his life. Though I couldn’t say why, I wonder if that kind of unfairness is demanded by a novel, while the opposite is demanded by tweeting and social media — because after all, that is really us in social media, and most of us like to be regarded as being fair; and, too, whether we have been fair or not is rather more verifiable in social media than in fiction.

This entry was posted on October 20, 2018 at 1:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.