{"id":11606,"date":"2021-06-16T11:41:01","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T10:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=11606"},"modified":"2021-06-16T11:41:01","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T10:41:01","slug":"the-literary-outsider-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/06\/16\/the-literary-outsider-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Literary \u2018Outsider\u2019 Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does an age of frenetic online activity afford time for literary masterpieces, especially Outsider Novels, transcending what is considered \u2018normal\u2019?<\/span><\/p>\n

He whose vision cannot cover
\nHistory\u2019s three thousand years
\nMust in outer darkness hover
\nLive within the day\u2019s frontiers.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

The above stanza is from a twelve-book, poetry collection by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was inspired by the work of fourteen century, Persian poet, Hafez.<\/p>\n

Rather than take the above stanza as concrete, it is worth taking it as an allegorical device, and metaphor, for what this piece sets out to champion: the work of the literary Outsider.<\/p>\n

With various electronic devices such as, the laptop, smartphone, iPad, and media outlets like Netflix, YouTube and other broadcasters, vying for our attention(s) \u2013 and successfully so \u2013 one must enquire into whether serious, attentive reading means anything anymore?<\/p>\n

Has the modern age \u2013 the tempered, electronic milieu \u2013 filtered out literary tomes?<\/p>\n

The very idea of \u2018The Outsider\u2019 literary work may be unnerving in what is an age of tantamount addiction to a frenetic social media; what the writer Will Self refers to as \u2018bidirectional media<\/a><\/span>.\u2019 The resulting anxiety disinclines us to engage with what many may deem \u2018difficult\u2019 books, or \u2018heavy\u2019 tomes. Knocking the bottom out of the known literary universe.<\/p>\n

It might be said in relation to reading such books: who has aeons of uninterrupted time? In response you might say that the pandemic and lockdowns have afforded us such time. Note: no banana breads<\/span> were harmed in the writing of this piece.<\/p>\n

Critics sometimes venture towards difficult literary works from a canon such as that identified in Harold Bloom\u2019s tautological, yet, feverish and impassioned, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages<\/em><\/a><\/span>. These are the works of literature which ebb in from the external to the field of the Literary Arts, and which Bloom eulogises in his reviews.<\/p>\n

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In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

War and Peace<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Who has read Tolstoy\u2019s big bangers? War and Peace<\/em> anyone? History\u2019s frontiers fought over during the Napoleonic Wars, backed up with sweeping pastoral symphonies; with a charge of Russian calvary sweeping through the narrative, backed with Tchaikovsky\u2019s 1812 Overture. A silver Samovar dispensing tea in the officers\u2019 mess, the colour of unearthed rubies; tea sweetened with a cube of sugar, held between the drinker\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n

Or Tolstoy\u2019s more subdued asides, with bucolic scenes of bleating lambs; and navvies sitting down in a wooded glade to consume their lunches. While out there in high summer, in the protracted Russian steppe, brown bears nosey along through tall grass to hallowed fishing grounds. With a scurry of gnats flitting at their ears.<\/p>\n

Or what about Joycean<\/a><\/span> punnery \u2013 the nightbabble of Finnegans Wake \u2013 or Beckettian<\/span> gurglespeak?<\/p>\n

If the safe, go-to novel is a halfway-house where thoughts run easily along the neuron-led rafters; where sable-eared bats hang, unruffled, in the belfry; where a forgotten greenhouse with cracked panes of burping green glass dwells in the back garden of the mind, they are there serving as a concrete, model village. Known territories; safe catch-all neighbourhoods, which imbue the reading-self with tangibility.<\/p>\n

There has been a loss of faith in big difficult books due to less than attentive mindsets; and upon latching on this, Mediocrity Inc., sweeps in to garner easier-to-read works, which dominate book charts. What does this say about the demographics so enamoured by ease of access?<\/p>\n

Literary, like most paradoxes, operate through conflating, and contracting, obligations. They are in a constant state of flux. (Not helpful for the binary-seeking world of the definite article, which Mediocrity Inc., often seek out to nail to the masthead.)<\/p>\n

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Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, William Blake (1808)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Self-Made<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When all the joy of writing is being sucked out of it by marketing mentalities, then things are in a bad way; they are, rather, Miltonesque: bleak; morally obtuse. Greed has taken over the minds of formerly, we hope, reasonable people.<\/p>\n

Quality dissipates in such trends.<\/p>\n

If you put your faith in the superficial, then the meaning of actual literature \u2013 that with substance \u2013 is diluted. Worship at the golden calf and you cannot expect your palpating thirst to be quenched.<\/p>\n

However, the brave, writing for themselves, writer(s) will always venture out towards a different plane to help buck these acclamatory, accepted trends. The strongly composed novel could be summed up as a transference of the quotidian whereby one\u2019s will becomes the whole of the fictional law in an expansive, infinite world.<\/p>\n

Will Self is such a writer whose output is \u2018challenging\u2019. A writer, thinker, who goes it alone and does not yield to the Mediocrity Inc., whose plaintive, rebellious, immature cries rail that they know better, but which do not.<\/p>\n

Outsider Novel<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The stolid mentalities who often quip, \u201cI couldn\u2019t get into it\u201d, say this, because, I believe, they are not prepared to challenge their perceptions of what the Outsider Novel means to them \u2013 an ungraspable leviathan which slips away into the listless fog.<\/p>\n

Five or six literary Outsider \u2018heavy\u2019 novels from the Western Literary Canon dominate and stand on the rostrum; representing the cornerstones of the literary house that encapsulate the Canon.<\/p>\n

Two have already been alluded to, and then there is: Laurence Sterne\u2019s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman<\/em>. Bellicose in its exposition from conception to the screaming infant through to his uncle\u2019s nose and to maturity.<\/p>\n

One of the first \u2018Outsider\u2019 works, it is inspired by the Rabelaisian, and inhabits the world of the absurd and the fabulist. There are long paragraphs on his Uncle\u2019s Toby\u2019s European adventures with his servant, Trim, and of course, reams of information on the prowess of his conk. It will have you amused if not bewildered at the thought of how he got away with publishing it in the 18th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> is a tome in tribute to the mimesis of life, and everything which Joyce termed \u2018A shout in the street.\u2019 It takes the epic towards modernism, and a rebirth of consciousness in the early-to-mid twentieth century. There are diegetic elements to the inner monologues of the characters and the streets of Dublin. You will find an urban mammoth with its quarry caught upon its wide tusks, braced with metal struts to keep the weight of the tome from falling.<\/p>\n

This is no Cuneiform script to procrastinate over, it is a layered, complex novel to be discovered. Through two main characters, Leopold Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus we find an unparalleled commentary on twenty-four-hours in Dublin on June 16th, 1904. That is the plot. Simple. Yet, all-encompassing. Tributaries, feeding into the literary infinity pools of the Liffey, and further afield.<\/p>\n

Hopefully readings of Ulysses<\/em> will soon resume in Sweny\u2019s Pharmacy<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\n

Neil Burns takes issue with the 'artsy sentimentality' of those objecting to James Joyce's 'Dead House' on Usher's Island being converted into a hostel.https:\/\/t.co\/d3HPHAckUe<\/a>@Andrea_Rey48<\/a> @FintanOHiggins<\/a> @CSBlenner<\/a> @broadsheet_ie<\/a> @CllrEoinOBroin<\/a> @wadeinthewate11 @IlsaCarter1<\/a><\/p>\n

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) November 6, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n