Jack Cox (1)
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26/11/18 Gasp! I I forgot to add my review here when I read this over a year ago!
Better late than never, here it is:
Regular readers know that I am making my way through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and have begun to recognise aspects of it that have made their way into other works of fiction – but I never expected that reading it would be good preparation for reading Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, recently shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for New Writing. The opening lines only hint at what lies in store:
I will say at the outset that there is much about this book to like but also much that puzzled me. I suspect that re-reading would reveal some answers, but that clever as this work of fiction undoubtedly is, I did not like it enough to want to re-read it now even if I could. (It is due back at the library). It might, however, be a book that niggles away at me demanding to be re-read in the way that Ulysses did, (and still does although I’ve now read it four times). Dodge Rose might be the brave start of a great author’s career.
Or it might, as others have suggested, be a prank written to prove a point … In fact, I was quite surprised to see from the photo at the ABC RN Books and Arts page that Jack Cox is actually a real person… because I had wondered, thoughts triggered partly by the allusive names of the title and its author, and partly by my adventures in reading Mud Map, Australian Women’s Experimental Writing whether Dodge Rose was written by a women’s collective. I can only rationalise this intuition by noting that feminist issues of power and agency jostle for dominance throughout the book. (Yes, I realise that men can be feminists too).
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/12/dodge-rose-by-jack-cox/… (mer)
Better late than never, here it is:
Regular readers know that I am making my way through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and have begun to recognise aspects of it that have made their way into other works of fiction – but I never expected that reading it would be good preparation for reading Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, recently shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for New Writing. The opening lines only hint at what lies in store:
Then where from here. When the train rolled over a canopied bridge the eyes of the boy in the opposite seat opened and closed to the broken sun but he dozed on. His head was rocked against a woollen sleeve. Eliza had stretched her legs out in the space beneath his feet and now she crossed them and pressed her thumbs to the bundle in her lap. The shoes above hers swung back and forth like pendulums staccato lights between the shadows that beat through the carriage through the bridge but for all his moving parts the boy remained oblivious and his brief eyes gave back nothing but the wrong end of his reveries. Eliza yawned and turned towards the window. Before wide green plots the spokes of the canopy blew past, then they were gone. (p.1)
I will say at the outset that there is much about this book to like but also much that puzzled me. I suspect that re-reading would reveal some answers, but that clever as this work of fiction undoubtedly is, I did not like it enough to want to re-read it now even if I could. (It is due back at the library). It might, however, be a book that niggles away at me demanding to be re-read in the way that Ulysses did, (and still does although I’ve now read it four times). Dodge Rose might be the brave start of a great author’s career.
Or it might, as others have suggested, be a prank written to prove a point … In fact, I was quite surprised to see from the photo at the ABC RN Books and Arts page that Jack Cox is actually a real person… because I had wondered, thoughts triggered partly by the allusive names of the title and its author, and partly by my adventures in reading Mud Map, Australian Women’s Experimental Writing whether Dodge Rose was written by a women’s collective. I can only rationalise this intuition by noting that feminist issues of power and agency jostle for dominance throughout the book. (Yes, I realise that men can be feminists too).
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/12/dodge-rose-by-jack-cox/… (mer)
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Caveat over.
One quarter of the way through this book, I started to suspect it was a hoax. Perhaps the best known Australian literary modernist (apologies to White), Ern Malley, was a made-up poet who submitted what he thought were bullshit 'modernist' poems to an important journal, which printed them. Critics have been finding great merit in those poems ever since. Dodge is published by an American publisher well known for publishing experimental work. Its author is not particularly well known; he seems to have only a couple of publications before this. Could it be, I thought to myself, Ern Malley II?
So I did some googling, and way happy to find the editor at Dalkey Archive saying precisely the same thing in a review essay plumping the book. Worst case scenario, we the literary world have not been taken in quite as easily as we were in the Ern Malley case.
I thought the book was a hoax because it's boring, predictable, derivative, and often unreadable, and has been hailed by all and sundry as a highly original work of genius, just like Joyce and Beckett. Note to reviewers: if a work is just like someone else's, whatever else it is, it isn't highly original.
What Dodge is, unless it's a hoax, is a work of genre fiction, where the genre happens to be high modernism. It follows all the rules (=breaks all the right rules): sketchy punctuation, authorial intrusions about the place of the book in the academic canon, cack-handed analogies and metaphors that make it 'poetic', incorporation of alternative discourses (here, the law of inheritance), and a Faulknerian second half. The content (a serious flaw in the modernist genre: having content) is hilariously similar to that in another Australian book I just read, Patrick White's Eye of the Storm, but White does approximately infinitely more with it.
On the upside, Dodge made something very clear to me: I don't care to read more of this stuff, unless it has clear literary-historical importance, or the rule-breaking has a purpose (Woolf), or the tiresome self-importance is made bearable by the sheer beauty of the prose (Joyce).
And it made me wonder why the angl0-modernist tradition is so focused on works like this one. Consider, 'we' have Eliot, Pound, and Joyce as the big three (I speak here of literary history, not intrinsic merit), where the French have Mallarme and Proust, and the Germans have say, Mann and Musil. Why are we the anglosphere so keen on books that demand of the reader an archaeological fascination with details: what is this quote from? what is this reference to? what Sydney street are we supposedly walking down?
I so much prefer the Musil or Proust version: if there's a reference to a work of art, that work is discussed with the reader; if there's a thorny intellectual question, that question is worried over with the reader. We walk with Musil and Proust, whereas Eliot/Pound/Joyce preach at us. A friend has suggested that this preaching at us has, oddly, allowed scholars to argue that Joyce (in particular) is a great democrat, since everyone understands as much of Joyce as anyone else. There's no need to think along with him, just to catch whatever few references you can. So everyone can have their interpretation.
But that's not 'democracy.' That's demagoguery. I propose that the real democrats are the authors who assume that their readers are their intellectual equals, and that their readers can work through their problems with the author. Cox is very much a Joyce/Pound/Eliot type, demanding that the reader do all the work, and refusing to work with them.
If this wasn't literature, we'd call that managerial capitalism.… (mer)