B writes:
> But after Joyce? I think it shifts to France, as far
as Western lit. goes [with some important
exceptions].
I think one branch does. Joyce to me produced the great literary artifact/novel of 20th century literature. He is the master of the urban/urbane/printed text. Like Mann and Woolf and Musil he wrote for a literary coterie centered in an urban center who communicated through the printed text -- the letter, the essay, the novel. I think European-influenced novelists produced works that were centered on the idea of a printed text and did not overly worry about telling a story.
Though Faulkner, like Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald, went to Europe, he did not stay -- he returned to Oxford and decided to write there. I think one of the consequences of this decision was that Faulkner wrote in the traditon of oral storytelling (with particular attention to the Southern and Black traditions) with all its repetitions and aggregates.
While Europeans seem to craft more polished, cool, elegant works, Faulkner's work seems to pulse/throb with the excitement/immediacy of oral storytelling. I like what Garcia Marquez once wrote to the effect that if you took apart a page of Faulkner and managed to put it back together, you would have nails, screws, and some wood left over.
Faulkner himself said: "I'm a storyteller. I'm telling a story, introducing comic and tragic elements as I like. I'm telling a story -- to be repeated and retold." And I believe he meant that not only would his characters repeat and retell the stories, but his audience would as well. His novels are open-ended, constantly evolving, continually being retold (think Toni Morrison) while the European post-Joyce novel is self-sufficient in itself (think Robbe-Grillet and Nabokov). I think this is how we get novels that are less and less (Beckett -- to me as much French as Irish) until the idea of even telling a story is abandoned and instead of a storyteller we have an author function.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister