Are some of the major canon figures less "political?" I…
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Are some of the major canon figures less "political?"
I was having a hard time phrasing this title, just hear me out:
I've been reading several essays from Orwell, and when he talks about literature he has mentioned something that I never really understood before, and that is that - in a very broad and honestly too simplistic way of phrasing it - is that some of the most celebrated novelists (he mentions Woolf and Henry James) were less concerned with themes or ideas, and more concerned with the actual art of words. As in sentence crafting, how to actually structure stories, what words go well with each other. And that these stories might be kind of 'boring' or 'about nothing' if you were to describe them, but are nevertheless masterpieces. Orwell basically says (paraphrase):
"The 1930s/40s are intensely political times, therefore writers will inevitably write about politics. Woolf, Joyce, and James could not exist in this time because no one wants to read writers who focus on the craft of wordsmithing. And when these people were writing, their world was boring enough that they could focus on the kinds of writing they choose to."
This was illuminating for me. Because I have read and enjoyed and understood (to some degree) high class, "high art" literature that snobbish people would accept as good books. Some examples being:
Shakespeare
Tolstoy
Chekhov
McCarthy
(I'd include Orwell but he's apparently not really in that same canon stratosphere).
But you know who I have read who I have not really "gotten the point" of?
Virgina Woolf
Henry James
Alice Munro
Am I onto something here? Wherein, these two groups of writers tend to focus on different things, and in the former it's more accurate to say that they are writing about "big" themes like politics, history, philosophy, life and death, etc?
Whereas the later group are more interested in wordsmithing and maybe more intense character studies, which while they may comment on them don't focus on say, the political themes?
And btw I'm not saying there is not or cannot be overlap between these two types of writing styles of course. Just that the latter group is more concerned with the wordsmithing and prose rather than the social commentary?
#entertainment
I was having a hard time phrasing this title, just hear me out:
I've been reading several essays from Orwell, and when he talks about literature he has mentioned something that I never really understood before, and that is that - in a very broad and honestly too simplistic way of phrasing it - is that some of the most celebrated novelists (he mentions Woolf and Henry James) were less concerned with themes or ideas, and more concerned with the actual art of words. As in sentence crafting, how to actually structure stories, what words go well with each other. And that these stories might be kind of 'boring' or 'about nothing' if you were to describe them, but are nevertheless masterpieces. Orwell basically says (paraphrase):
"The 1930s/40s are intensely political times, therefore writers will inevitably write about politics. Woolf, Joyce, and James could not exist in this time because no one wants to read writers who focus on the craft of wordsmithing. And when these people were writing, their world was boring enough that they could focus on the kinds of writing they choose to."
This was illuminating for me. Because I have read and enjoyed and understood (to some degree) high class, "high art" literature that snobbish people would accept as good books. Some examples being:
Shakespeare
Tolstoy
Chekhov
McCarthy
(I'd include Orwell but he's apparently not really in that same canon stratosphere).
But you know who I have read who I have not really "gotten the point" of?
Virgina Woolf
Henry James
Alice Munro
Am I onto something here? Wherein, these two groups of writers tend to focus on different things, and in the former it's more accurate to say that they are writing about "big" themes like politics, history, philosophy, life and death, etc?
Whereas the later group are more interested in wordsmithing and maybe more intense character studies, which while they may comment on them don't focus on say, the political themes?
And btw I'm not saying there is not or cannot be overlap between these two types of writing styles of course. Just that the latter group is more concerned with the wordsmithing and prose rather than the social commentary?
#entertainment
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