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Extremely good video. I'm gonna be thinking about some of the things you said in this one for a while. I think when it comes to a book like Ulysses you should expect to have to read it more than once. That idea is probably pretty unappealing to a lot of people given its length! But I will always have so much more respect for art that expects you to work at it.
This gets me to thinking of how, in many respects, what we call "postmodern" is simply the radical application of modernist techniques and critiques to the cultural and material contents of modernity and modernist ideology itself. The equilibrium on which the ideas of progress, artistic or cultural or political, core to modernist projects rest is inherently tenuous, the tensions which create these balances resting upon contexts which can only exist in reference to one another within very particular contexts in and of themselves. It was inevitable that post-structuralism would be born of structuralism, as the realisations key to the latter beg those questions which are answered, perhaps disquietingly, by the former. One can feel this tension in Mark Fisher's writing, more so than most Marxist writers engaging with postmodernity on its own terms. And maybe this sounds weird, but I find that negativity refreshing, liberating even. To take a page from the anti-civ and post-civ anarchists, in the absence of the future as something to fall back on, what stretches before us is an eternal present open to infinite beautiful and terrible possibilities.
Did modernist writers ever use the future as something to “fall back on”? The modernist idea of utopia seems inherently cracked at its inception, a fracture which post-modernism seems to gloss over in its quest to declare the end of the future and the procession of its eternal present.
This idea of popular modernism is new to me but I needed it badly. Recently I've been thinking about the tension between literary and genre fiction. To my mind, genre fiction defines itself by particular tropes, whereas literary fiction largely seems to define itself in the negative, as having the absence of tropes. If you put tropes in, you've made a genre piece, even if you do something particularly weird or brilliant with them. This was fine when more experiments with form were happening, but many modernist and postmodernist techniques are now tropes in their own right. This has created a problem where literary fiction, seen as the 'respectable mode' and given particular cultural capital, is choking itself off at the roots. Sally Rooney is usually touted as the current author speaking most articulately about present conditions, but even she has despaired (inside and outside of her work) about the modern novel's ability to say anything. My thinking has been that the reluctance for literary fiction to ever debase itself with anything "popular" is exactly what it needs to let go of, and likewise genre fiction should aim to speak more about real-world conditions with more advanced techniques. This concept of popular modernism illustrates it so precisely.
I think the link to popular modernism was absolutely the term that helped me understand why I found Disco Elysium so compelling (it's deeply invested in what ordinarily gets written off as genre tropes too)
@@JonTheLitCritGuy This reply got me thinking that video games might have gone through postmodernism before reaching modernism. Which I suppose is maybe that metamodernism I've heard about, but idk what that really is.
Love the comparison of Ulysses to Disco Elysium. In fact, I'd love to see you do a deep dive into examining the themes of Disco Elysium. So what if it's already been done? You have such a unique, interesting perspective on things.
this essay is great! i loved the way you explained things that are very complex in a very understandable way. it hit everything that i've been very interested lately. thank you.
Very interesting video, My main (only perhaps) problem is that the volume could probably be louder. I might actually have to try to read Ulysess after this, though I sometimes struggle actually finishing books... Disco Elysium I think indeed is great in how wide its appeal is, despite its experimentality in both a literary sort of sense, but also from the perspective of it as a video game (I think it's also a really excellent use of video games as an artistic medium)
In short, or probably not. 'Ulysses' is a wonderful novel, for many of the reasons you say. I'm nervous to make a 'class first' point, but Joyce (and I would argue, Beckett), were a world apart from some of their peers. Pound was a fascist, and Eliot was fascist adjacent. And that is apparent in their work. There's a spectrum here too beautiful to behold - and while I get the 'canonist' distinctions between an old world and a new (the first world war being a damned horror of a waste of life and the engine of literary modernism), I think I might have enjoyed more a look, on your part, say, on Hélène Cixous' theory of Ecriture Feminine, or even Mary Ann Evan's contribution to realism's relationship to verisimilitude. I'm not so sure it's all that teleological. There are writers right now, in the 'old' realist mode who still 'take us out of it', many of them self-published. There's the popular culture of fan-fiction opening up new avenues dark and light, modern and popular too. I get the argument that we should distinguish the distinct - that that is an historical imperative, but I'm not so sure we haven't gone awry with our literal literary theory here. I've played 'Disco Elysium' twice and not got the end. Largely because of an already outdated doomscroll mechanic, which kinda wouldn't let me reach the end. Unless I spent 'hours' 'reading books' within the game, just to pass the time. Reading Dicken's 'Bleak House' over Christmas this last year was way more 'immersive', and made a more profound impression. 'Soma', 'Everyone's gone to the Rapture' , 'Stories Untold' and even 'Doki Doki Literature Club' got more to an effective and affective point. Of course, none of us can know what's going to stick. I hope, like me, people are going to talk more about James Baldwin in a hundred years than they will Ezra Pound. I hope more people will be interested in Eimear McBride than Virginia Woolf. I know... it's not a zero sum game. In short, or of course not, is what we are considering here a value? I'm a 58 year old, working-class, neurodivergent (although I more than often think, given the state of things could be 'normative') physically disabled bloke - and sorry, but to get more parenthetic, Faulknerian, Dickinsonian - here - despite being overwhelmed by Fisher and David Foster Wallace - and not to be cruel, me being a fellah who threw himself in front of a train in 2004 and lost a limb et al - they do read like people who were like me but who didn't make it. I wish they had made it. They would have got better I think, and had more to say more precisely or at least more ... at least sometimes fun. Weirdly, for someone who has a slight antagonism to sports, I do love tennis, and it's what it is that I find Nabakov's - through Humbert's consideration of the game through an awful self-justification of an unforgivable perversity (that Nabakov should have left well alone in my view) much more compelling than DFW's. Back to the value. In short. The degree I have, got in late 90s, was even then of less value than the degree than I would have got in the 70s. And a degree today, is just a fucking expensive library card in what to all intents and purposes is a business centre. I know you know why. But what has occurred to me of late - in the spirit I guess of some of those hoary old modernists (who were clearly missing the point) is that we should insist upon critical thinking as part of epistemology. I'm working class. I love working class people. Working class people hate me. I hate working class people. As that old (early) modernist William Shakespeare said, "There's the rub."
This is a great comment -- I agree absolutely with the differences between Joyce and many of the other modernists and it's true that I think the question of value is really important too -- though we're all trying to awake from the nightmare of history, right? And true, there's no way of knowing what will stick for some people -- Disco Elysium isn't for everyone (though from what you say 'Everyone Gone To The Rapture' sounds like something I should check out). Thank you for watching!
@@JonTheLitCritGuy Cheers, love. It occurs to me I don't remember your name. Although I listen to 'Horror Vanguard' pretty religiously. To my point, and your answer here. if I were to be as terse as I promise. Critical thinking is essential and should be taught from the off. Cheers.
@@JonTheLitCritGuy honestly, I'm always torn on whether to just go out and get a game you're discussing because I want to experience all of these things first-hand, or to finish the video because the passion you have for it is so apparent and really wonderful to see. Thank you for sharing these with us! 🙂
