tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7190184.post3480807639823936387..comments2024-02-18T13:16:48.272-05:00Comments on The Philosophical Worldview Artist: Every Man His Own W. G. SebaldDouglas Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06195660217530594218noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7190184.post-62275906947056879602016-06-04T16:03:20.715-04:002016-06-04T16:03:20.715-04:00Douglas,
Hi, thanks for that "screed." T...Douglas,<br />Hi, thanks for that "screed." Together with your essay "Proprietary Names," it prompts me to write with a question. I'm interested in the long continuous speeches Bernhard has his characters made (as in "Gargoyles," for example). I would call them, loosely, rants. You twice use the word "screed" to describe your own piece, which I think has structural affinities with Bernhard's rants. (In the same way, I think your "Proprietary Names" owes its cadence, its manner of exploring ideas, to Proust, entirely aside from the affinities of subject matter.) Those parallels, and some good passages on Bernhard's grammar -- especially, for me, the opening of the section "The Translation" in "Notes on Thomas Bernhard's Ungenach" -- make me curious about how you might define "rant."<br /><br />I think the present of analocuthons and other non-grammatical constructions would be a necessary component of what I think of as Bernhard's rants, but at the same time they seem to need to be translatable, as you point out in that section "The Translation." There would be other qualities, for example the narrator's apparent inability to track his own argument, an inability that would be periodically recuperated. A wholly ungrammatical, merely repetitious, or wholly "translatable" text would not, in this way of thinking, be a rant.<br /><br />I wonder if any of this strikes a chord. I have various reasons to be interested in this subject, but the apposite one here is that I am interested in the possibilities of partly broken grammar and logic in various writers, from Perec and Enard to Bernhard and Schmidt. But that's enough for a comment. Glad to get responses by email, jelkins at saic.edu. jamesprestonelkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02480095376765987733noreply@blogger.com