I fell asleep during my first reading of it numerous times, including the climactic end. It’s probably the only great canonical work of fiction that’s done that to me consistently. Proust is easy to put down, as he’s dense; Pynchon nods at times; Joyce was an unending delight (except for Finnegans Wake, that “persistent snore in the next room” (Nabokov again, lol); but Melville hath murdered my wakefulness many, many times indeed.
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What I was getting at was if you could imagine some alternate reality whereby whaling forums, blogs or somesuch existed in Melville’s day, one might expect said 19th century netizens to be unreceptive to Moby-Dick, perhaps dismissing it without reading it, perhaps pointing to all the negative reviews, being that it deigned to tred on their turf in a pretty lofty high-falutin’ way.
It is pretty obvious that I will have to defer to you on matters of literary criticism. I never a made it though any Pynchon for instance (not for lack of trying), and had to look up ‘mimetic’ just now. I will leave it to you to inlighten me as to whether ‘The Circle’ is written in the “realistic-mimetic tradition” or not. I think we can agree that great writers are generally outsiders who have the incredible gift (among many) of mastering arcane knowledge (in effect becoming experts to a certain degree). I stand by my belief that real art must be conducted at arms-length from social trends and technical elites.
Wouldn’t it be more fair to compare the book with other examples of pulpy dystopian near-future social satire/science fiction? I’m sure you could cite more relevant examples than I could. Ask yourself, of the canonical books in that particular genre, wouldn’t we be missing the forest for the trees if we focused on hair-splitting the technical details? I for one am willing to overlook such flaws, if the work bears merit in deeper ways. To reiterate, ‘The Circle’ may not. What do you say we read it and revisit this discussion it at a later date? I bet with your literary expertise you would be able to come up with a lot of interesting angles that I would not.
Sounds fun, Lewis. It may be awhile before I get to it, as I’m a terribly unprogrammatic reader, whimsical and whatnot.
Re: utopias, I don’t think so. More’s Utopia, while fantastical, works hard to give the fantasy a feel of verisimilitude, even concocting examples of Utopian poetry. In the twentieth century (and speaking from memory), Brave New World has a realistic feel: soma, the creches, the planned qualities of the world, all are extrapolated from things happening in Huxley’s own time. 1984 is crushingly realistic, down to the dirt and the grime of dystopian London, the prison at the end, the rat cage. The Handmaid’s Tale and Fahrenheit 451 and A Clockwork Orange, ditto. (Whereas Atwood’s Oryx and Crake I recall as a bit more strained in its plausibility and the feel of its universe, a bit too many “Woo! Genetics!” moments.) They might get things incorrect or make up silly technologies, but they all operate in relatively realistic, “real”-seeming worlds. The point of the review of Egger’s book is that it does not, from its depiction of tech to its depiction of humans who interact with the tech. It’s entirely forgivable to get details wrong: we still read Jules Verne, for example, who quite often just makes things up when they’re convenient. But it’s less forgivable to have an entire book that feels wrong to both experts and lay readers alike.
If I’m honest, I left him in that goddamn bar ordering a drink.
Let us leave him there, then.
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Good a place as any, the bar. No-one’s going to drown you, or bite your leg off (hopefully. Depends on the bar, I suppose).
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