Reality Hunger Read Online Free

contact with a great work. In Mozart’s day, few people heard one of his symphonies more than once; with the advent of cheap audio recordings, a barber in Java could listen to them all day long. By 1910, the motion picture had given actors a way to reach a much wider audience, effectively linking people across time and space, synchronizing society. For the first time, not only did your neighbors read the same news you read in the morning, and know the same music and movies, but people across the country did, too. Broadcast media—first radio, then television—homogenized culture even more. TV defined the mainstream. The power of electromagnetic waves is that they spread in all directions, essentially for free.

    Plot itself ceased to constitute the armature of narrative. The demands of the anecdote were doubtless less constraining for Proust than for Flaubert, for Faulkner than for Proust, for Beckett than for Faulkner. To tell a story became strictly impossible. The books of Proust and Faulkner are crammed with stories, but in the former, they dissolve in order to be recomposed to the advantage of a mental architecture of time, whereas in the latter, the development of themes and their many associations overwhelms all chronology to the point of seeming to bury again in the course of the novel what the narrative has just revealed. Even in Beckett, there’s no lack of events, but they’re constantly in the process of contesting themselves: the same sentence may contain an observation and its immediate negation. It’s now not the anecdote that’s lacking—only its character of certainty, its tranquility, its innocence.

    Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.

    After Freud, after Einstein, the novel retreated from narrative, poetry retreated from rhyme, and art retreated from the representational into the abstract.

books for people who find television too slow

    Abstract expressionism: the manipulation of reality through its technique of spontaneous creation on the canvas.

    I listened to a tour guide at the National Gallery ask his group what made Rothko great. Someone said, “The colors are beautiful.” Someone else mentioned how many books and articles had been written about him. A third person pointed out how much people had paid for his paintings. The tour guide said, “Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.” This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I’ve ever encountered.

    In 1987, Cynthia Ozick said, “I recently did a review of William Gaddis and talked about his ambition—his comingon the scene when it was already too late to be ambitious in that huge way with a vast modernist novel.” She reviewed
Carpenter’s Gothic
. The “vast modernist novel” to which she was referring was
The Recognitions
. It’s difficult to overemphasize how misguided her heroic (antiheroic) way of thinking is.

    The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

    The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe. The present period is one of administrative numbers.

    The life span of a fact is shrinking. I don’t think there’s time to save it. It used to be that a fact would last as long as its people, as long as kingdoms stood or legacies lived or myths endured their skeptics. But now facts have begun to dwindle to the length of a generation, to the life spans