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(Rate Your Students)
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politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, December 15, 2005

THE REALLY BIG THING


Via The Valve, this interview with Philip Roth in The Guardian thrills the aesthete in me and dismays the pedant. I mean, I love this exchange:

So where does the real Philip Roth end, and where does literature begin?

The real Philip Roth looks at me, impatiently, as if I am being stupid.

"I just don't understand that question," he says. "I don't read or perceive books in that way. I'm interested in the object, the ... the thing, the story, the aesthetic jolt you get from being inside this ... thing. Am I Roth or Zuckerman? It's all me. You know? That's what I normally say. It's all me. Nothing is me."


Aesthetic jolt is just the ticket. But then he has to overdo it:

I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot.


The problem with shutting down the literature departments and killing the critics, is people’ll start to make mistakes. Like, at one point in the interview, Roth says:

As Henry James said on his deathbed: 'Ah, here it comes, the big thing.'


“The big thing” seems a bit vulgar for James, even on his deathbed. What James said was, “So this is it at last: the distinguished thing.”



Does Philip Roth care that he has Henry James saying something on his deathbed more likely to have been said by Ed Sullivan? Perhaps not. But UD is happy there are still a few literary snots who do.