Yes, all introspective art is emotion recollected. Wordsworth said tranquility but I believe that he also meant distance in time and space, or at least in isolation.

Joyce used to say that while he physically left Dublin it was always alive in his mind. He also wrote that if Dublin were to be destroyed it could be reconstruced from his work.

I am listening to the show now with great appreciation. Thanks!

I too love the literature programs.

I loved O’Brien’s passion for her work and Chris’ passion about literature.

I would love to hear more programs on literature, of all kinds: poetry, fiction, drama.

“After reading Wild Decembers Philip Roth told O’Brien that although he’d always thought of her as being like that other “passionate” literary lady, Collette, he’d changed his mind. “You’re not like Collette after all,” he’d decided. “You’re more like Faulkner.” As it turns out, William Faulkner is second only to James Joyce in O’Brien’s personal pantheon; Wild Decembers has in it echoes of both writers.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-04-20.htm

This is quite an endorsement.

I haven’t read any fiction by O’Brien yet, but juding from work on Joyce and Beckett I have a problem visualizing her as a writer of purple prose. If she does deploy emotionally tinged descrpitive passages she is probably being ironic or describing event from a character’s point of view.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/empurpled

empurpled

adj : excessively elaborate or showily expressed; “a writer of empurpled literature”; “many purple passages”; “speech embellished with classical quotations”; “an over-embellished story of the fish that got away” [syn: embellished, over-embellished, purple] n : a chromatic color between red and blue [syn: purple, purpleness]

I would like to know how O’Brien’s reads Philip Roth. Does she see him as a comic writer or as a tragic one who only came into his own only in his latest novels?

btw: I first became aware of Edna O’Brien’s writing through Philip Roth.

“Much is made of Beckett’s despairingness, his Cartesian soul nailed to its Cartesian cross, yet he is not a depressing writer, not depressing in the way Henri de Montherlant or Thomas Bernhard can be, because, as with Shakespeare, his darkest words are shot through with beauty and astonishment, his impassioned keenings the best witness that there is to the human plaint, his disgusts brimful with exhilaration. He was a maniac who managed with consummate skill to convert that mania into lasting poetry.”

I would only add that as in Shakespeare’s work even in its expression of the darkest despair there is in Beckett also a comedic sense which like a sunray cuts through the gloom and makes us observe with the Stratford poet that as long as one can say that this is the worse, then it’s not the worse.

I can’t remember Shakespeare’s exact quote, but I have always felt that the sentiment was the source of his deep understanding of the human comedy.

The same is true with Beckett who rephrases Shakespeare’s lines in his magnificent, “I can’t go on, I will go on.”

I also very much agree with O”Brien’s view that Henri de Montherlant or Thomas Bernhard are thoroughly depressing. They are also a couple of reactionary writers who are unreadable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/books/reviewWagner.t.html_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

Not quite as generous in praise as the comments above: here’s a quote…

From her first novel, “The Country Girls” (1960), onward, she has had the nerve to look unflinchingly into the eyes of passion; if it’s possible to accuse the result of being faux-Joycean, empurpled, it’s also possible to feel, more often than is comfortable, that with her breathless force she truly conveys the destabilizing agitation some call romance.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “empurpled” before. I’m not quite sure what it means.

Did she? What’s the title?

I am actually a stronger fan of Beckett than of Joyce, though I have read and reread Ulysses a number of times.

I am looking forward to the show.