Word: balzac
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Much of Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature...
...Barth, whom Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from realism for his "neo- fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast of literature as truly a smorgasbord. I wouldn't want a world in which there were only Balzac and Zola and not Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. The idea that because we live in a large and varied country we therefore ought to write the sweeping, panoramic novel is like arguing that our poets all ought to be like Walt Whitman rather than Emily Dickinson...
...Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
According to Balzac, "Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation." According to P.J. O'Rourke, "Manners are a way to screw people over without their knowing it." Although 150 years separate the master novelist from the Rolling Stone nihilist, their contempt for social artifice is identical. The difference, of course, is that one of them has a savage comic flair. The other one wrote in French...
...fact, can be found in the general stacks--books like D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and even the Kinsey report. The works of the self-styled Marquis de Sade, Honore de Balzac and William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch also take up space on the three rows of shelves that make up the "XR" collection...