This is one of my favourite books, and its great philosophical seriousness to me lies with the fact that Arrowby takes himself and his adventures so very seriously.
*We* might be able to see how silly he is, in his desperate need to hold the centre in all surrounding stories (a theatre-director to the last!), but in some ways he remains a…
This is one of my favourite books, and its great philosophical seriousness to me lies with the fact that Arrowby takes himself and his adventures so very seriously.
*We* might be able to see how silly he is, in his desperate need to hold the centre in all surrounding stories (a theatre-director to the last!), but in some ways he remains at the end incapable of letting go of the belief that something momentous is always happening in his world. He might have set down one grand "plot" by the end, but his plotting nature remains. He will never truly see himself as we see him - just as we too are often caught fast by our own "plot armour" in life, unable to see how silly our own, relentless holding-of-the-centre also is.
Anyway, that to me makes this book an excellent pairing for your musing on literary types who, like Arrowby, act like those around them need to be "saved" from their mediocre (less literate) lives. There's an excellent argument to be made (and which is being made, by many) that we would do better to engage curiously with how the activity of "culture" is being enacted by this generation; and also, those of us who studied literary history know full well that today's moral panic has its own long history, too. How annoyed Nietzsche was with students who read pedestrian news rags instead of the Classics!
An education in the humanities can sometimes make silly theatre directors of us all: an insufferable demographic, really, when the sea of life rolls on, and we’re not ready for its indifference to us.
This is one of my favourite books, and its great philosophical seriousness to me lies with the fact that Arrowby takes himself and his adventures so very seriously.
*We* might be able to see how silly he is, in his desperate need to hold the centre in all surrounding stories (a theatre-director to the last!), but in some ways he remains at the end incapable of letting go of the belief that something momentous is always happening in his world. He might have set down one grand "plot" by the end, but his plotting nature remains. He will never truly see himself as we see him - just as we too are often caught fast by our own "plot armour" in life, unable to see how silly our own, relentless holding-of-the-centre also is.
Anyway, that to me makes this book an excellent pairing for your musing on literary types who, like Arrowby, act like those around them need to be "saved" from their mediocre (less literate) lives. There's an excellent argument to be made (and which is being made, by many) that we would do better to engage curiously with how the activity of "culture" is being enacted by this generation; and also, those of us who studied literary history know full well that today's moral panic has its own long history, too. How annoyed Nietzsche was with students who read pedestrian news rags instead of the Classics!
An education in the humanities can sometimes make silly theatre directors of us all: an insufferable demographic, really, when the sea of life rolls on, and we’re not ready for its indifference to us.