[ExI] Joyce (was: John C. Wright Interview)

[John K Clark]

"Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com>

> Easy entertainment is not the only motive for reading fiction; I'm
> astonished that I have to make this point.

It is actually a very modern idea that something can become a literary
classic without having been popular in any age and having never
entertained anyone.  Authors of fiction have always had more goals
than just entertainment, but this is the first time in human history
where entertainment is not a goal at all, in fact it is a goal to punish
the reader.

And I would maintain that JK Rowling has had far more influence on
human affairs than Joyce, certainly her sort of literary phenomenon 
is much more uncommon than the Joycian sort. It's one thing to 
produce some verbal razel dazzle that impresses a few collage
professors, but creating a meme that 400 million minds want to 
embrace is hard.

> It's like the "modern music" that everyone reviled and mocked at the
> start of the 20th century; it can be quite startling to listen to the
> scores of
> many mass-audience movies today and realize how completely they have
> absorbed the once-horrifying innovations of Stravinsky and his pals.

You are making my case for me,  Stravinsky's unharmonious music was
unpopular a century ago and it's unpopular today even among the small 
(and shrinking) group of classical music lovers.

Having said that I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I rather like
Stravinsky, in fact I like him a lot. But I'm a weirdo, he will never be as
popular as Mozart or Beethoven or the greatest musical genius who ever
lived, Johann Sebastian Bach.

I will now put on a very unusual hat, that of an art critic. I believe one
reason modern art sucks so badly is that it values originality over
everything else, even quality. Yes nobody has ever written a novel or
painted a picture or composed a symphony like that before, but there is a
reason for that, nobody did it before because it sucked.

Imagine a parallel world where Beethoven only composed 8 symphonies
not 9, and imagine that now centuries after his death somebody wrote a 
symphony identical to the one we know as Beethoven's ninth's. What 
would be the result? I predict it would be universally despised and music
critics would use a word that for reasons I don't understand has huge
negative connotations, they would say it is DERIVATIVE of Beethoven.

 John K Clark