File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9712, message 169


Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 20:39:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Henry Miller and the Academy Who Doesn't Read Him


At 08:13 PM 12/29/97 EST, you (Pat Sloane) wrote:
>I sometimes wonder if Miller picked up his style from Petronius' <Satyricon>,
>which is non-stop bawdy from beginning to end.  Petronius has a long editorial
>aside where he justifies all the obscenity.  He says, we all do these things
>so why not be honest. Drop the pretence and the euphemism.

The Modernists certainly were fond of Petronius, for programmatic reasons
I'd suspect. Joyce echoes a number of things from Sat. in Ulysses, such as
(just in episode 14, which I know a good deal about) the dinner-table sexual
discussion and banter, an explicit allusion by someone at the table to the
Ephesian matron story, the ending of the "Cena Trimalchionis" episode with
the arrival of the fire-brigade (as also at the end of episode 14), etc.
Waugh borrows from the Cena in the scene at the party during the 1926
general strike in Brideshead Rev., incl. the fire brigade's arrival. Etc.
etc. Pound too. Don't I detect some Petronius in early/middle-period T.S.
Eliot, Pat?


>I suppose you
>actually could set up a dichotomy between hypocrisy and sexual explicitness,
>take your choice.  But I think there's also something deeper.
>
>When you write up your resume, you're outlining your public persona, the face
>you want to present to the world.  You're the president of a company, or a
>professor at a university, or whatever, and here's a list of your
>accomplishments.  Well, that's one picture of human life.  All these sober
>serious people accomplishing serious things.  Miller, or Petronius, or
>Hieronymus Bosch, have another picture, and a picture that I think of as
>essentially medieval.  It's that human life is absurd, and we're all ruled by
>our hormones. So what's actually going  on is that people are falling in and
>out of bed with one another, and getting into all these sexual complications.
>So life maybe is actually a madhouse.
>

Are these perspectives mutually exclusive, or complementary aspects of a
complex whole? (He asked rhetorically....) BTW, re "essentially medieval":
after the publication of Ul., Joyce told Arthur Power that his function in
cultural and literary history had been to revive medievalism at the expense
of both rationalism and sentimentalism/romanticism -- both of which Joyce
apparently saw as simplifications and distortions....

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing-AT-nyu.edu or downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu



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