(no subject)

[ursula]

I've begun reading Titus Groan, which I think will go very slowly and in between all sorts of other books, since although I am interested I am temperamentally at odds with it, and anyway it is very dense. What I'm really noticing is how close it is to the novel-within-a-novel of A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower. That story didn't quite work for me in the original-- in part because I take too good care of my equanimity to want it to work, but also because it seemed a cousin of Christabel LaMotte, rather than being its own thing. But set against Titus Groan, Babbletower suddenly has a context: the same thickly layered overpowering description, the same insistent sexuality, and destructive charismatic revolutionary characters who are very much akin . . .

I looked around a bit to see if anyone else had noticed the connection, and found this interview:

http://www.paradigme.com/sources/SOURCES-PDF/Pages%20de%20Sources07-1-1.pdf

The interviewer is trying a bit too hard, perhaps, but this I thought was worth repeating:

I remember I had a brief day of being very angry with Iris Murdoch because I had been doing a lot of thinking about Marsyas because I had been reading Edgar Wind about pagan mysteries in the Renaissance, and the I thought, don't be ridiculous, the true power of the myth is that she has it and I have it. This isn't true of everything. But it is a different attitude to art from the modern sense that originality is all, that you must say something that nobody has said before, and paradoxically most people who try to do that say things that everybody has said before. All avant-gardes resemble each other quite shockingly and they do a very narrow number of things in exactly the same way as other avant-gardes. The same is true of people writing personal confessions about their personal relationships. They tend to repeat, whereas curiously someone thinking of something to do with Marsyas or the Fountain changes it a little bit, might do something more original. But it does depend, of course, which is the very terrifying thing, on having readers who know other Fountains and other Marsyases.