Comments on: R.I.P. Alain Robbe-Grillet

By: Anthony Osborne

Anthony Osborne — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:44:06 +0000

But didn’t Ballard, in an early interview, dub Joyce the word master? And all those cut-up novels he so admired Burroughs for … surely they are situated squarely within the ‘experimental’ area? As is ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’.

By: melbpsy

melbpsy — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:22:36 +0000

He was a huge Joyce fan, and later in the book he complains bitterly that his own Joyce-inspired books, playing with form and language, have never found the wider readership of Graham Greene. He seems torn between a recognition of the power of the ‘popular’ form over the ‘literary’ and a modernist devotion to pushing the novel to its limits.

I feel similarly torn. I love The Atrocity exhibition much more than Cocaine Nights, but the idea of Ballard infiltrating 3 for 2 tables in airport lounges is too delightful to lament…

By: Crispin Kipper

Crispin Kipper — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:49:10 +0000

Interesting post, melbpsy, especially considering Burgess was such a massive fan of Joyce (he even wrote a condensed version of Finnegans Wake). As for Ballard/Robbe-Grillet, I much prefer the former as he tends to make concessions to the bourgeois concept of actually expressing ideas. Admittedly, I’m only basing this on the half of In the Labyrinth I could be arsed to read…

By: melbpsy

melbpsy — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:58:13 +0000

Not entirely on subject but related to Ballard’s apparent distaste for the experimental form and post-Atrocity preference for ’straight’ narrative, I read the following about Herman Wouk in Anthony Burgess’ Confessions:

“Wouk will never win the Nobel Prize, but his fiction exemplifies what Fielding, Dickens and Balzac thought the novel was about. Here I lay myself open to charges of middlebrowism. But probably the novel is a middlebrow form and both Joyce and Virginia Woolf were on the wrong track.”