Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize for Literature
Bianca Steele
the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I have only read one of her science-fiction books (The Marriages
Between Zones Three, Four, and Five), but from the article below, I'm
now curious about The Fifth Child as well.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/opinion/13lessing.html>
The following paragraphs caught my interest:
> A young friend of mine from North Yemen saved up every
> bit of money he could to travel to Britain to study that
> branch of sociology that teaches how to spread Western
> expertise to benighted natives. I asked to see his study
> material and he showed me a thick tome, written so badly
> and in such ugly, empty jargon it was hard to follow. There
> were several hundred pages, and the ideas in it could easily
> have been put in 10 pages.
>
> Yes, I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with
> Communism - as Swift, for one, tells us - but the
> pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in
> German academia. And now that has become a kind of
> mildew blighting the whole world.
Lessing laments the kind of world that will result from courses that
teach from this kind of textbook: the kind of book that alienates non-
initiates and supports a "high priesthood of science", apparently
excluding ordinary people who naturally use more traditional modes of
thought and language.
This seems uncannily similar to the way Oxfordians think of academic
historians.
--
Bianca Steele
Chess One
"Bianca Steele" <bianca...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1192292132.5...@i13g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Yes - it is a very telling remark. Of course, in terms of literature, it is
shared by those who actually write it. Uncertain who kicked it off - maybe
Dostoyevski, who kept referring to his own witness and experience of things
rather than idealogues.
Should you wish to read a contemporary reference, try the recent Waugh
title. Fowles also detested academic reportage - and was maybe the first
modern writer to state the value of the unknown. Though not intended as a
polemic on this subject, there is also the very good auto of Charles Dickens
by Jane Smiley. [about 4 other scorpios mentioned above!]
I think we have all of her books in the house - the first one I read was at
age 19, The Grass Is Singing. Possibly the warmest title is the one she
wrote about her cats, in London.
> This seems uncannily similar to the way Oxfordians think of academic
> historians.
Semiotically, the names of things are their labels, functioning as signposts
to an actual thing, or experience, which is not only singular and unique in
time - it is not fungible; which is to say, it is unlike some number you can
just throw into an [literary] equation. Secondly, by referencing the label,
there is an implication that the writer also has reference to where the
label/sign-post points, to what it means. As if it were academically
'understood' in the same way that someone with direct experience took it in.
I think this is an area of cheating - actually, a retreat from the
implications of actually living from one's own witness of life, and what the
French call a professional-deformation, which in this instance is to become
entombed by vicariously gained experience alone.
Whatever sort of academician, or whatever leaning in terms of the Work - it
is clear that the author intended to subvert that level of understanding, to
circuitously invoke subtle yet very potent factors of sub-conscious
experience. It works for the same [animistic and mythic] reasons that the
poetry of Ted Hughes works.
Even proto-Strat Rowse, admitted in his second autobiographical title, that
the quality of thought he obtained on his favorite moor [bleak Bodmin,
Cornwall] caused him to feel that what he did at Oxford was not entirely
decent.
So, Bianca, while I would accept your last point - it is a more universal
fault than what can only be laid at the 'Oxfordians' door.
Cordially, Phil Innes
> --
> Bianca Steele
>
Ms. Mouse
I am absolutely thrilled that she has won the Nobel. I particularly
loved her early novels--the Martha Quest Books and the Golden
Notebook, although I haven't read them in years. Though a fan of
SciFi, I didn't particularly like her earliest book in that genre,
especially as it somehow burst out of the hyper-realistic first three
Martha Quest Books and into the setting of a post-nuclear society. It
was a real change of tone and genre. I was uncomfortable with it and
didn't read further. Perhaps I will try again.
Bravo, Doris Lessing!
Mouse