David Cronenberg's Literary Influences

Cronenberg names Pynchon, Barnes, Kafka and Céline as early influences

David Cronenberg

From New York Magazine:

What did you want to do with your life back then?

I did aspire to be an obscure novelist. I thought you could probably do your best work outside of fame, because you’d be following your integrity. [Like] Kafka, who barely published in his own lifetime. I loved finding people like Djuna Barnes. I figured someone like me would discover me years from then.

What were you writing?

Sci-fi, mostly, but some stuff like Thomas Pynchon. There was that hallucinogenic view of the world, and V. was such a wonderful novel. I read it in the sixties in France, and also Journey to the End of the Night, by Céline, a little later that year. There was a clarity to it, a weird and exuberant cruelty. He was seeing war in the coldest, most revealing light. You would not read that book and think that you wanted to be a soldier. No romanticism. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg on his Life and Work
• David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis, DeLillo and Robert Pattinson
• Mark Kermode's Top 5 Cronenberg films
• Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method
• David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Will Self: Modernism and Me

An autobiographical essay for The Guardian

Will Self. Photograph: David A. Selby

Will Self reflects on his connection to literary modernism: 'As a bookish adolescent I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid. My unstructured absorption of the European canon was only intensified by my refusal to submit to the strictures of a conventional English literature degree course: I never took in the historicist perspective that leads ineluctably from Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, through Spenser and Shakespeare to the robust, door-stopping certainties of Victorian triple-decker novels. Instead, already by the time I lay in that Jericho aquarium, I was a devotee of those works marked by an inability to suspend disbelief in their own formal properties. Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Melville's Moby-Dick and Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time – these works spoke paradoxically directly to me in their very sense of indirection. I understood intuitively rather than systematically that all these works were examples of a form we might call "pre-modernism", insofar as they anticipated the same existential problems that afflicted Joyce, Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Eliot and other literary modernists to come. That the novel in its inchoate state was more capable of self-questioning experimentation is unsurprising for all sorts of social, cultural and historical reasons, but we can equally ascribe to the writers themselves a sensitivity to what Gabriel Josipovici, in his book What Ever Happened to Modernism?, characterises as an essentially timeless awareness: the simple impossibility of going on, if to go on is to continue with well-established ways of depicting the world in art.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self and the Art of Contemporary (Conference)
• Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay
• Is Modernism Boring?
• Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism?

John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel

This October from Cambridge University Press

John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel

A promising new publication from Cambridge University Press, published this October: 'Samuel Beckett's narrative innovations are among his most important contributions to twentieth-century literature. Yet contemporary Beckett scholarship rarely considers the effect of his literary influences on the evolution of his narrative techniques, focusing instead on Beckett's philosophical implications. In this study, John Bolin challenges the utility of reading Beckett through a narrow philosophical lens, tracing new avenues for understanding Beckett's work – and by extension, the form of the modern novel – by engaging with English, French, German and Russian literature. Presenting new empirical evidence drawn from major archives in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States, Bolin demonstrates Beckett's preoccupation with what he termed the 'European novel': a lineage running from Sade to Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Gide, Sartre and Celine. Through close readings of Beckett's manuscripts and novels up to and including The Unnamable, Bolin provides a new account of how Beckett's fiction grew out of his changing compositional practice.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival 2012

Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956

Online blog compiles a list of the texts Beckett found interesting

Beckett on Camus' (pictured) novel, The Stranger: 'Try and read it, I think it is important'

This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press in North America, has compiled a list of Samuel Beckett's reading material from the latest edition of the Letters (1941-1956):

Andromaque by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: “It is lively stuff.”

The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”

Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux

Mosquitoes by William Faulkner: “with a preface by Queneau that would make an ostrich puke”

Repeat Performance by William O’Farrell: “Excellent, once past the beginning.”

The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is important.”

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

The 628-E8 by Octave Mirbeau: “Damned good piece of work.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• The Irish Times publishes Beckett Letters
• Second volume of Beckett Letters published

William Burroughs talks to Philippe Mikriammos

A conversation published online by Dalkey Archive Press

William S. Burroughs. Photograph: Bob Willoughby

Philippe Mikriammos interviews William Burroughs about autobiography, archives, the picaresque novel, cut-ups, influences, withdrawal, A Clockwork Orange, evil, politics, living in New York, and other topics (link via Biblioklept) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs