#critic

Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he cannot ignore. How good it would be, he suggests, if one could find in life ' the simplicity inherent in narrative order. 'This is the simple order that consists in being able to say: "When that had happened, then this happened." What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: 'it has the look of necessity.' But the look is illusory; Musil's hero Ulrich has 'lost this elementary narrative element' and so has Musil. The Man Without Qualities is multidimensional, fragmentary, without the possibility of a narrative end. Why could he not have his narrative order? Because 'everything has now become nonnarrative.' The illusion would be too gross and absurd. Musil belonged to the great epoch of experiment; after Joyce and Proust, though perhaps a long way after, he is the novelist of early modernism. And as you see he was prepared to spend most of his life struggling with the problems created by the divergence of comfortable story and the non-narrative contingencies of modern reality. Even in the earlier stories he concerned himself with this disagreeable but necessary dissociation; in his big novel he tries to create a new genre in which, by all manner of dazzling devices and metaphors and stratagems, fiction and reality can be brought together again. He fails; but the point is that he had to try, a sceptic to the point of mysticism and caught in a world in which, as one of his early characters notices, no curtain descends to conceal 'the bleak matter-of-factness of things. ↗

— Frank Kermode

#experience

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye. ↗

— Bernard Malamud

#everything #eye #highly #looking #spectator

I'm not afraid of criticism or what somebody may think. ↗

— Don Mattingly

#criticism #i #may #somebody #think

Because the New Testament provides the primary historical source for information on the resurrection, many critics during the 19th century attacked the reliability of these biblical documents. ↗

— Josh McDowell

#attacked #because #century #critics #documents

The final outcome cannot be known, either to the originator of a new theory, or to his colleagues and critics, who are bent on falsifying it. Thus, the scientific innovator may feel all the more lonely and uncertain. ↗

— Peter D. Mitchell

#cannot #colleagues #critics #either #feel

I say to consumers: instead of relying totally on critics, drink what you like and like what you drink. ↗

— Robert Mondavi

#critics #drink #i #instead #like

I haven't seen the show, but when it was finished I felt good about what we had done. I don't know how it will stack up with Survival, but that'll be up to the critics. ↗

— Vic Morrow

#critics #done #felt #finished #good

We can do things the cheap way, the simple way, for the short-term and without regard for the future. Or, we can make the extra effort, do the hard work, absorb the criticism and make decisions that will cause a better future. ↗

— Mike Rounds

#better #better future #cause #cheap #criticism

My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country, so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom, Zarela Martinez, was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic. ↗

— Aaron Sanchez

#biggest influence #country #critic #cuisine #far

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach. ↗

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#more #reader #should #stomach #than