I don't think any great novel has been cynical. I don't think any great art has
ever been cynical. To be cynical
is fundamentally to deconstruct, to carp, to cavil. The test of greatness, the core residuum of its existence,
by contrast is of making--building.
I don't say that there must, in a great work, be no trace at all of
cynicism--for to make the universe is to make a universe complete, and no
universe is complete without cynicism. I suggest only that it cannot be the
animating force, the core elemental structuring device.
2 comments:
Catch 22?
For me at least Catch 22 doesn't hold up. A fun book for high-schoolers, it reads, in adulthood, like a sitcom gone on too long. For the first twenty mintues the laughs are a pleasure. After that, one starts to note the same joke is being repeated, over and over, in unvarying iterations. It is a book that fatigues--not in the way that Proust, fatigues but in the way of a prating twelve-year old. Whether its cycnicism--for cynical it surely is--accounts for this wearying, limited quality I don't know. My hunch is that it does.
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