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Mazes: Essays by Hugh Kenner by Hugh Kenner
Mazes provides a pleasurable journey through a lively mind at its best. In this collection of fifty essays, critic Hugh Kenner turns an appraising gaze on an astonishing range of subjects - from Einstein's time dilation principle and Mandelbrot's fractals to Georgia O'Keefe and R. Buckminster Fuller, from computer literacy and the "poetry" of Richard Nixon to Buster Keaton and King Kong.
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First published January 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 15, 2024
From the essay on Barthes:
If we cannot read the Shakespeare Dr. Johnson read - something I heard T. S. Eliot say twenty-four years ago, over jugged hare - it is because we are perpetually changing Shakespeare into an author we can read. (We do not pay Jules Verne that compliment.) As for the author himself, it is meaningless to ask what he "meant." If he should come forward and try to tell us we should not understand.
It is superstitious--here Barthes is profoundly right--to ascribe to intrinsic nature the long working of culture. If it weren't, we'd be safe in leaving what we care about to look after itself.
When an inability to stay interested in Sappho lasted longer than the parchment she was copied on, the poems of Sappho were lost.
They are gone forever. Like the codes that say what the sense of the words doesn't seem to, that's a lesson Roland Barthes taught: we have it all in our hands. There's a lot that is easy to lose, and little to replace it with.
If we cannot read the Shakespeare Dr. Johnson read - something I heard T. S. Eliot say twenty-four years ago, over jugged hare - it is because we are perpetually changing Shakespeare into an author we can read. (We do not pay Jules Verne that compliment.) As for the author himself, it is meaningless to ask what he "meant." If he should come forward and try to tell us we should not understand.
It is superstitious--here Barthes is profoundly right--to ascribe to intrinsic nature the long working of culture. If it weren't, we'd be safe in leaving what we care about to look after itself.
When an inability to stay interested in Sappho lasted longer than the parchment she was copied on, the poems of Sappho were lost.
They are gone forever. Like the codes that say what the sense of the words doesn't seem to, that's a lesson Roland Barthes taught: we have it all in our hands. There's a lot that is easy to lose, and little to replace it with.
September 26, 2024
This is a collection of essays, articles and obituaries by Hugh Kenner. Kenner (1923 -2003) was a great literary critic. He wrote extensively on Joyce, Pound and Beckett. His book, "The Pound Era", is a masterpiece.
He had a huge range of interests. He wrote over 30 books. Most were on modern literature, but he also wrote books on Buckminster Fuller, the cartoonist Chuck Jones and a computer users guide. This is an eclectic selection of his shorter pieces.
Kenner enjoyed discovering interesting stuff and describing it in a clever and amusing way.
- In discussing the question of where literary reputation comes from, he quotes T. S. Eliott asking,
"Who, for instance, has a firsthand opinion of Shakespeare?"
-"The play, the short story, in part, the novel became "art forms". Art being the name we give an abandoned genre. (So television turns old movies into an art called "cinema)"
-Of Virginia Wolfe, "She is not part of International Modernism; she is an English novelist of manners, writing village gossip from a village called Bloomsbury for her English readers"
-"Critics and historians, (which all of us are informally, even when we may think we are simply reading)"
-He starts a review of the Oxford American Dictionary with several very clever paragraphs explaining that Homer's famous "wine-dark sea" is most likely a mistranslation of a Greek word.
"The English love a Lord, the Irish love a lawyer."
-A famous interview of James Joyce's father Stanislaus, was probably a prank forgery by Flann O'Brien. Kenner gets a kick out or Richard Ellman using the interview to make a point in his "definitive" biography of James Joyce.
-In 1982 he was dubious of the Library of America series of books because it had a limited view of what should be included. "In a hundred years, if the series is still around, it either will have atrophied into total irrelevance or else will have managed to embalm three novels by Ross MacDonald. Just watch. And you read it here first." (In 2016, the LOA published seven of McDonald's novels in two volumes.)
The collection covers a wide territory. Some of the pieces were over my heard. The thickets of literary criticism can be hard to wade through sometimes. The pleasure is in the variety. Kenner can talk interestingly about almost anything. He writes sentences that make me stop and reread and rethink.
He had a huge range of interests. He wrote over 30 books. Most were on modern literature, but he also wrote books on Buckminster Fuller, the cartoonist Chuck Jones and a computer users guide. This is an eclectic selection of his shorter pieces.
Kenner enjoyed discovering interesting stuff and describing it in a clever and amusing way.
- In discussing the question of where literary reputation comes from, he quotes T. S. Eliott asking,
"Who, for instance, has a firsthand opinion of Shakespeare?"
-"The play, the short story, in part, the novel became "art forms". Art being the name we give an abandoned genre. (So television turns old movies into an art called "cinema)"
-Of Virginia Wolfe, "She is not part of International Modernism; she is an English novelist of manners, writing village gossip from a village called Bloomsbury for her English readers"
-"Critics and historians, (which all of us are informally, even when we may think we are simply reading)"
-He starts a review of the Oxford American Dictionary with several very clever paragraphs explaining that Homer's famous "wine-dark sea" is most likely a mistranslation of a Greek word.
"The English love a Lord, the Irish love a lawyer."
-A famous interview of James Joyce's father Stanislaus, was probably a prank forgery by Flann O'Brien. Kenner gets a kick out or Richard Ellman using the interview to make a point in his "definitive" biography of James Joyce.
-In 1982 he was dubious of the Library of America series of books because it had a limited view of what should be included. "In a hundred years, if the series is still around, it either will have atrophied into total irrelevance or else will have managed to embalm three novels by Ross MacDonald. Just watch. And you read it here first." (In 2016, the LOA published seven of McDonald's novels in two volumes.)
The collection covers a wide territory. Some of the pieces were over my heard. The thickets of literary criticism can be hard to wade through sometimes. The pleasure is in the variety. Kenner can talk interestingly about almost anything. He writes sentences that make me stop and reread and rethink.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews