Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Glice
Very conscious daahrlink.
I think my point is something to the affect of: there are a handful of writers who have a mastery of English who frighten me; Self is one. Self also entirely fails to say anything that makes me think he's anything other than a wastrell. He has a vocabulary in the region of Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Joyce, Eliot, Hardy but he has the writing style somewhere around Catherine Cookson (but, astonishingly, a far shitter writer).
|
Yes, I guessed as much about your self-conscious Self-isms. I think the problem with WS's style, as opposed to someone like Derrida, is that it has no broader function. As we know, the French postmodernist writers were using language as a commentary on language itself while Will Self seems only interested in dazzling the reader with his expanded vocabulary.
Regarding NWRA's mention of Ishiguro as a great british novelist - I tend to put him in with McEwan: as a great writer
technically, but one that fails to really address big issues in his work in a way that American writers like Bellow, DeLillo, Updike and Wolfe do. The Remains of the Day is a beautiful novel, but ultimately has very little to say about anything. Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, on the other hand, while not as technically polished, has a grand scale to it that the British really haven't managed to produce, probably since Dickens. It's as though the British literary 'establishment' find such subjects vulgar. Ballard's latest novel Kingdom Come is a great attempt at trying to nail the national zeitgeist, and it's interesting how he remains for many within that establishment something of an outsider, pushed into the ghetto of the science fiction genre.