Saturday, February 07, 2015

Art and ideas

… The TLS blog: Herring aid. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The TLS contributor David Collard put it like this in a comment on my first post on this subject the other week: "Is there such a thing as a novel without ideas? Tread carefully . . .". A fair point; terms need to be defined. Taylor writes: a novelist might not be, in anybody's eyes, including their own, a "novelist of ideas", but at the heart of their work there may nonetheless lie "some kind of behavioural proposition". And as in pages, so on stages – and on canvases, picture postcards etc.
I have no problem with novels or plays of ideas, as long as the ideas are in dialogue as it were. What I can't stand is didactic art, in which the novel or play is just propaganda for one idea or another.

2 comments:

  1. Saul Bellow wrote a novel in which the main character was clearly Allan Bloom, under another name. When a friend mentioned this, I said that I thought that Bellow was much better with con men and fast women than he was with big ideas, and that the same could be said of Tolstoy. Could you bear to read the last, quasi-philosophical pages of War and Peace over and over again?

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  2. I confess to having skipped the essay Tolstoy scatter throughout War and Peace both times I read the book.

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