Letters to the Editor
donald
Published Letters: 1 Editor's Choice: 1
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poor ARG
[Read the article: The man who ruined the novel]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am so sad to see another bad review of the life and career of ARG. From what I know, ARG was an unpleasant person, and probably pretentious and all that, but what his novelistic achievement represents is a belated (Modernist) attempt to keep the novel form alive as art. Far from damning subsequent efforts in the experimental novel, he should, along with Beckett, give hope that it still might be possible to write artistically and philosophically challenging novels rather than long prose entertainments that mimic obsolete forms from the 18th and 19th centuries.
As far as his films go, Marienbad is NOT his film. Everyone in the obits says - well, at least there was Marienbad. That's Alain Resnais folks. ARG did make films, but no one seems to have seen any of them. With two or three exceptions this is probably fine, for none of them are as good as Resnais. But they show a similar, uncompromising commitment to art: not simply experimentation, which is a misnomer here. But to sabotage, to undermining the obsolete props of the novel (and film) - linear narrative, stable characters, and so forth - and thus attempting, in the only way art can, to undermine the ideologies that the standard novelistic machinery reproduces. The fact that no one seems to see this any more in ARG's work is a sign that we should be mourning much more than _his_ death.