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A madcap money caper involving back-stabbing bookies, arms manufacturers, starlets and acting dogs, unexpectedly ending in character development
Folks
- Jake Donaghue, a writer who only has enough courage to do translations of shoddy French pop novels, suggestible, sentimental, and serious; loathe to make decisions, so lives by impulse; Jean Pierre’s winning the Prix Goncourt makes him settle down and stop drifting
- Magdalen, his former landlord, set up to be screwed by her new bookie boyfriend and by Sadie, but she gets the last laugh by hooking up with a new movie company and becoming the new It girl
- Finn, Jake’s unofficial servant who just kind of hangs out and helps when needed; mysteriously disappears when he gets enough money to return to Ireland
- Starfield, the bookie; friendly to Jake b/c he thinks Jake was sweet on Magdalen, but gets mad when Jake steals the dog and withholds the cash winnings from races
- Anna Quentin, Jake’s love interest; dabbles in theatre; folksinger in a nightclub, eventually moves to France to sing on the radio there; she loves to love and get in relationships, but her love for Hugo is too much and overthrows everything she knows
- Sadie, Anna’s sister, a famous movie star who ends up in love with Jake, who loves her sister, who loves Hugo, who loves Sadie; treacherous and rich
- Hugo Belfounder, arms manufacturer come movie producer, based on Howard Hughes; gave up arms manufacturing for fireworks manufacturing; philosophical (met Jake at an experimental cold center, which paid them to be there; they met and kept talking and talking), inspired Jake’s first book, which makes Jake think he betrayed Hugo and stop their friendship; Hugo doesn’t take things as seriously as Jake; ends up closing all his businesses and go to work as a watchmaker
- Dave Gellman, philosopher friend of Jake’s
- Mrs. Tinckham, owner of a cafe/newsstand; everyone’s confidant, she provides Jake a safe-house amid cats and smoke
- Lefty Todd, leader of the New Independent Socialist Party (NISP), incites a mass demonstration at the movie studio among toga’ed extras and the manual workers of the studio; he seems to know everyone; has “scientific principles”
- Jean Pierre, the author Jake translates who manages a good book, which throws Jake for a loop and ends up inspiring him to give up cash to write books he means to write (stops drifting)
- Mars, the aged acting dog which Jake buys at the end, thus ruining his last change at getting rich
Themes
- Public Events
- London: film set revolution
- Sorelian demonstration of mass violence: spontaneous, who knows what will happen or if it matters materially, but it seems to mean a lot anyway (he gets the dog, after all)
- Rome falls again: spectacle, fakery
- Paris: Bastille Day fireworks create mass unity with Belfounder fireworks (but he loses Anna in it)
- Seems like the celebration got him nowhere, but the fight does
- Understanding versus Action
- 250: Jake tries to understand everything and sympathize, but Hugo says you have to keep “blundering on” if you want to find truth
- “This was the last act whcih would provoke no question and require no reason” (262)
- Lists: 38-9, 40, 264
- Cafes: 13-4, 30, 72, 203
- Writing and Words
- He’s a hack (8)
- Ideals are gone now (17)
- Epics are impossible to write now (17)
- Tempted just to write enough to make a living, not make art (19)
- Saussurean theatrics: 61-3: words aren’t accurate descriptions; they don’t mean what they say; they are posing and they are rhetoric
As Modernism
Pro-Modernism
- Obsession with writing and words
- Obsession with new cultural forms (cinema, newspapers, taxis)
- Series of anticlimaxes: the progress of a realist book is controverted
Anti-Modernism
- Conspiracy
- The world is not discontinuous after all (182) (it’s not fragmented)
- “Destiny” was what he planned to do himself (we do have agency, it’s just hard to see)
- Here is the end of modernist fragmentation and meaninglessness
- We’re on the way to postmodernism, where all is connected, even if absurdly
- It ends with a miracle: Mrs. Tinckham’s low-class cat breeds with the beautiful Siamese down the street
- Miracle of the low-high divide being demolished
Contingency, Necessity, and Modernism (via Eysteinnson 123-5)
- Iris Murdoch writes anti-modernist essays, tries to get her own writing back to realism
- Says modernism is the “Totalitarian Man,” “Hegel’s man who abhors the contingent and the accidental…
- “What is feared is history, real human beings, and real change, whatever is contingent, messy, boundless, infinitely particular, and endlessly still to be explained….
- “Totalitarian man rules out of existence everything which cannot be given symbolic significance in his consciousness” (123-4)
- “Modernist works want to be “small, compact, crystalline, self-contained myth” (123)
- She’s going off of Eliot and Hulme (cf Speculations loving Abstraction and Empathy and the “hard, dry things”)
- Her own work does kind of glorify in contingency (notice how the set-up for finding the Woman who will complete the narrator doesn’t come through, despite the long scene at end of chasing her)
- Such thinkers like to say that Modernism is Necessity while Postmodernism is Contingency, modernism is neat and clean while postmodernism is messy; so modernists are constantly trying to clean up messy life
- This view is too limited (what about Nietzschean affirmation?)
- Eysteinnson: You only see them as stable, crystalline objects if you read them that way (it’s an interpretation, not something that’s inherently there in the object)
Revised on August 23, 2008 09:11:13
by
Shawna?
(71.58.78.59)