Customer Reviews

The Nature of Narrative (Galaxy Books)

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In the closing passage of this book, after reading some 200+ pages about narrative art as it progressed from the oral to the written form (a journey with some admittedly fascinating stops along the way), the author announces that the written form, i.e. books, is dying out and that the medium of film is its new successor. Yep, it's another one of those, "Thank you for investing you time in reading this, now let me spit in your face before I go" books, just like Rank's Art and Artist, but it's not quite as bad as Rank though. Rank announced the death of all art. This guy was just announcing the death of the book. I should have known from the beginning when he kept talking about "putting the novel in its place."

What really annoyed me was the way he kept talking like James Joyce was the cutting edge of modern literature, implying that everyone who doesn't write that kind of crazy garbage is out of touch with the times. He made it sound as if it were impossible or at least pathically naive to just tell a simple story in our complex modern age, because 'good heavens!!' its impossible to bridge the ironic gap between author and narrator and persona, and then there's Henry James over there trying refine the author out of existence, Silly Rabbit, and 'my goodness' how are you going to satisfy the modern mind's insatiable desire for verisimilitude and oh let's not forget the Theory of Relativity casting its cloud over everything. The Theory of Relativity is like a magical rabbit that modern intellectuals pull out of their hats in the most unlikeliest of situations. Anyway, I doubt most contemporary writers think or need to think about these sorts of things. And if they do...well, they just buckle down and do the best they can and get the story told and forget that they ever read books like this.