Welcome to more March Madness and the Sublime—our 2020 theme.
This is the Modern Bracket (Classical and Romantic have concluded first round play).
Marla Muse, we have a poet represented in our Post-Modern Bracket, who was so disgusted at the inclusion of Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867) in our Romantic Bracket, that she quit Scarriet.
Marla Muse: Is this poetry eating politics, or politics eating poetry?
The committee is talking to her, so perhaps we can bring her back. Her fans, of course, are heartbroken. (Coleridge defeated Marx in first round play)
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We have much to cover today, so let’s get right to it. The Modern Bracket has a lot of prose excerpts.
Marla Muse: That means more reading!
Yes, but I think people can skim prose more easily.
Marla Muse: Not if it’s literary prose. I can read verse faster.
Good point, Marla. And we don’t want to encourage people to “skim,” anyway!
The first seed is Joseph Conrad, who turned his sailing experience into fiction. How sublime is this?
The sunshine of heaven fell like a gift of grace on the mud of the earth, on the remembering and mute stones, on greed, selfishness; on the anxious faces of forgetful men. And to the right of the dark group the stained front of the Mint, cleansed by the flood of light, stood out for a moment dazzling and white like a marble palace in a fairy tale. The crew of the Narcissus drifted out of sight.***
I never saw them again.***
Then on the waters of the forlorn stream drifts a ship—a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Good-bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.
This is the boyish fiction, the adventurous fiction, the manly fiction, the fiction fiction, most of us grew up with. You want fiction, lad? Translated Homer? No. Take a look at this! Joseph Conrad!
Sublime as hell.
And his opponent? None other than the 16th seed in the Modern Bracket, Philip Roth, from Goodbye, Columbus:
We had to take about two too many steps to keep the approach from being awkward, but we pursued the impulse and kissed. I felt her hand on the back of my neck and so I tugged her towards me, too violently perhaps, and slid my own hands across the side of her body and around to her back. I felt the wet spots on her shoulder blades, and beneath them, I’m sure of it, a faint fluttering, as though something stirred so deep in her breasts, so far back, it could make itself felt through her shirt. It was like the fluttering of wings, tiny wings no bigger than her breasts. The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy 180 feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.
The essence of the “modern sublime:” the pitiable small wings, the self-conscious awareness that “sublime” by the author could never be more sublime than “Newark,” the half-sad feeling that love could never be more than a semi-lyrical getting laid.
Joseph Conrad, the seaman, wins!
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The second seed in the Modern Bracket is Erich Remarque:
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
Eerie calm inside horrible death, officially, and personally. Perhaps the greatest war passage of them all. The cry of the sublime in the modern vision.
Remarque does battle with an excerpt from “The Bridge” by Hart Crane:
Like the great Gammeyer of Tarkington’s Gentle Julia, the poodle I knew seemed sometimes about to bridge the mysterious and conceivably narrow gap that separates instinct from reason. She could take part in your gaiety and your sorrow; she trembled to your uncertainties and lifted her head at your assurances. There were times when she seemed to come close to a pitying comprehension of the whole troubled scene and what lies ticking behind it. If poodles, who walk so easily upon their hind legs, ever do learn the little tricks of speech and reason, I should not be surprised if they made a better job of it than Man, who would seem to be slowly slipping back to all fours, in spite of Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford and Robert Frost.
The poodle kept her sight, her hearing, and her figure up to her quiet and dignified end. She knew that the Hand was upon her and she accepted it with a grave and unapprehensive resignation. This, her dark intelligent eyes seemed to be trying to tell me, is simply the closing of full circle, this is the flower that grows out of Beginning; this—not to make it too hard for you, friend—is as natural as eating the raspberries and raising the puppies and riding into the rain.
That “riding into the rain” is heart-breaking.
Marla Muse has fainted, again.
Thurber, the wit from Ohio, wins.
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