[ExI] John C. Wright Interview

[Lee Corbin]

In an interview

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/12/exclusive-interview-with-john-c-wright.html

John C. Wright makes some interesting points:

> The only book that actually stirs me to hatred, however, is Ulysses by James Joyce. Mr. Joyce uses an experimental 
> stream-of-nonsense style in order to put across his modernized version of the Odyssey: instead of acts of heroic valor that carry 
> long-suffering Odysseus for ten years from fantastic islands beyond the world's edge, down to death and up again, from beggar to 
> king to arrive again to his house, wife, throne, and son, in this obscene modern book we have Leopold Bloom, cuckold, drifting 
> through turn-of-the-century Dublin. We see him do things like defecating in an outhouse, or pointing out a dent in a friend's hat. 
> All is surrounded by verbal gibberish.
>
> It has the same relationship to a real novel as a Rorschach blot has to a real painting. As in a Rorschach blot, any meaning, 
> including parallels to the Odyssey, can be invented freely by critics and students of literature and shoehorned to fit. Naturally, 
> this frees critics and students of literature from the onerous burden of having to study and understand a work of literature 
> before commenting on it. In effect, they get the same reward for no effort, where this book is concerned: small wonder it is 
> highly regarded in their field.
>
> My hatred is not for the book itself, which is deliberately written (such was the author's queer humor) to be as ridiculous as 
> possible. No; is for the influence this deceitful book, and all it clamoring fellow-travelers and fifth columnists, have had on 
> the literature of my lifetime.
>
> The literary world turned its back, for three generations, on the ideals of truth and beauty. Winter came and all the trees fell 
> nude, and no birds sang. The poetry has vanished from the earth as completely as it did the day the Tower of Babel fell, and for 
> the same reason: words were replaced by nonsense. Beauty is mute. For the first time in human history, and songs have fallen 
> silent. Instead, we have noise, chanting, drumbeats, and the only things heard praised are arrogance and mere ugliness.
>
> If you want to hear a song with a tune whose words ring out about the bright and glorious things in life, swords and strongholds, 
> kings and ships and shining stars, you have to wait until Christmastime.
>
> Aside from then, it is nowhere but in science fiction and fantasy that the old heroism, swords, strongholds, kings, ships, stars, 
> is preserved, stories of the scope and wonder of Homer's Odyssey.
>
> What would "ugliness for the sake of ugliness" be in Latin? Turpis gratia Turpis? Such is the motto of the age in which we live, 
> and I blame Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, and all those of like mind.

Lee