Quote of the Day: Melville and Updike

So I finished Couples by John Updike last night and started thinking about how well his marriage of content and form worked. I've been doing a lot of thinking this week about what makes something literature and I almost came to the conclusion that a proper melding of content and form makes something literature. I guess the definition of literature has been on my mind lately because I keep coming across the question in my reading this week. I came across a blog post yesterday attacking the work of David Foster Wallace right after I got done reading an interview with Cormac McCarthy where he said that he didn't consider Proust literature because he doesn't ever address the issue of death. It is true. Proust really does skim over death, unlike Mccarthy, who is obsessed with it as anyone who has read The Road can testify. So the question then is, how important is theme? I am still working that one out. It would be nice to say that anything that deals with humanity is worthy of our attention, but is that really true?

Anyway, I thought of these two contradictory quotes. Herman Melville said, "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it." And about a hundred years later, John Updike said, "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." Right now I am leaning towards the Melville side of the argument. My review of John Updike's forty-one-year-old novel will be up later even if I am coming a little bit late to the party.

On a completely unrelated note, don't you just love the look IT guys get on their face when they ask you if you did or didn't do something to your computer and all you can do is hang your head in shame because you know you've done wrong? It's akin to the same look a disappointed father would give his son for turning out to be a failure even though he's not surprised at all because he's been telling him the whole time he was never going to amount to anything. *

On a lighter note, I am getting excited to go to Florida next week and hone some new skills.




* This didn't happen to me but it did happen to Sigmund Freud and it affected his work significantly. There's a reason his most famous theory involved sons wanting to kill their fathers.