THE POSITIVE MESSAGE OF NEW AMERICAN ART AND LITERATURE

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Agreement

There is one point on which Cozzens and Robbe-Grillet would assuredly agree, and that is on the novel being put together "by a creative consciousness, by will, by rigor. Patient labor, methodical construction, the deliberate architecture of each sentence as of the whole of the book--."
(For a New Novel.)

There were better novelists than James Gould Cozzens, but none more adept at the architecture of the novel. What he created, moreover, in his mature years, was of far more complexity and size than the baby-creations of Robbe-Grillet, while no less rigorous and finished. It's the difference between an automobile and a tricycle.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Automobile and tricycle, quite apt. The automobile had a glorious beginning, with style and superb engineering, and nowadays is awkward, ugly, constantly breaks down and obscures the sky with its exhaust after years. The tricycle's design has remained the same constantly, and still works perfectly, for its own purpose.

Karl Wenclas said...

Yes, and I'm sure when you travel to California from New York, you do so on a tricycle.