One-man classics factories and kamikaze attacks on the status quo

A fascinating essay about the two strains within German literature: the one-man classics factories (Goethe, Brecht, etc.) and authors who launch kamikaze attacks on the status quo (Kleist, Kafka, Celan, etc.) Here's the entire essay:

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2010/02/03/peter-wortsman-in-translation/

It's also worth noting that this phenomena isn't only a German thing. Regardless of national origin, there always seem to be equally talented upholders of the status quo and the opposite camp of literary kamikazes.

How does this dichotomy hold up in our atomized, hyper-mediated, uber-snarky culture? With a culture so fragmented and international (via the Internet, etc.), can one really be "against" anything? Especially when everyone has their own little group and ghetto where like minds only talk to each other.

Who are some good one-man classics factories? And who are the kamikaze artists?

I think the oft-mentioned Monsieur Bolano is a kamikaze. And Brit writer B.S. Johnson is definitely another (check out Jonathan Coe's bio of Johnson, LIKE A FIERY ELEPHANT)...

Kamikaze of the status quo:

France:

Marquis de Sade

Antonin Artaud

Michel Foucault -- in his own utterly opaque way.

Ferdinand Celine

Samuel Beckett

Jean Paul Sartre

US:

Thomas Pynchon

William S. Burroughs

William Vollmann

Tennessee Williams

Jonathan Littell

UK:

William Blake

Will Self

Harold Pinter

One-man classics factories:

France:

Honore de Balzac

Emile Zola

US:

Joyce Carol Oates

Norman Mailer -- although he had his kamikaze moments.

Tony Kushner

UK:

Anthony Burgess

Charles Dickens

I'm sure there are more. Let the debating begin!

Joyce Carol Oates is inarguably a factory of some kind. I'm just not convinced it produces classics...

I'd stick Roth and Updike in that category, though.

Although Dickens was certainly a classics factory, I think he qualifies as a kamikaze as well. I doubt such classics as Oliver Twist could be said to be "status quo" in their criticism of English culture at the time.

5: It brings up a valid point about authors and labor history. Dickens was definitely more conservative and gradualist than, say, Zola But criticizing the status quo doesn't automatically make one a kamikaze. A common fallacy created by the 8 year tyrannical hellscape of Dubya and the Town Hall Tea Party minions who have controlled the rhetoric of debate with the ferocity and fanaticism of Chinese Red Guards, minus the fashion sense. So one could see how lightly reprimanding the bourgeois parasites and useless institutions like the British monarchy could be seen as revolutionary. Then again, Dickens wrote the Christmas Carol and the Old Curiosity Shop, sops for the status quo, replete with sentimental manipulation and adoration of the Existing Order. Dickens was a literary genius of the first caliber, but I really don't see him mounting the barricades or writing anything genuinely experimental that might alienate his audience of prudish housewives busily draping their piano legs.

I wonder in which camp the gay rightwing militarist and literary genius Yukio Mishima would fit? The same with Jean Genet?

Rimbaud, definitely Rimbaud. The Kamikaze Kid.

One man classic factories--how about D.H. Lawrence? Lived on his own terms, wrote of passion and intimacy with a candor that made him a pariah in his day. Exiled himself to Australia, wrote for his own Muse and no one else...

I don't think it's accurate to call writers with long careers "kamikazes". A kamikaze writer would be someone who arrived on the scene, delivered a brilliant, new, challenging work or two, then dies or stops writing.

Rimbaud is the archetypal literary kamikaze.

I'm not sure who would fall into that category today. David Foster Wallace? But he wrote articles for major magazines and taught at a University. That is not very kamikazeish. He did kill himself, however.

The problem is that literature (nay, art in general), no matter how crazy, is not a challenge to the status quo. Every single author mentioned here as a kamikaze is now part of the canon... some of them were/are while still alive.

On the one-man classics factories, Roth would be the archetypal figure for this, and he's still churning them out. It's hard to wrap my mind around how many good novels he's written.

>9 inaudible: - "The problem is that literature (nay, art in general), no matter how crazy, is not a challenge to the status quo. Every single author mentioned here as a kamikaze is now part of the canon... some of them were/are while still alive."

One generally launches a kamikaze attack in hopes of changing the status quo in the vision of whatever movement they themselves belong to, though. As long as their work was against the status quo of the time of writing/publishing, should that not qualify? The "status quo" is not static.

9: I don't think the article implied writers with long career as kamikazes. He cited Kleist, who committed suicide at age 34. Rimbaud died early as well.

There is a long literary tradition of self-destructive iconoclasts. A tradition of those against tradition. Paradoxical but true.

10:

"As long as their work was against the status quo of the time of writing/publishing, should that not qualify? The "status quo" is not static"

I think you make a good point. Although Roth can be considered the "archetypal figure" for one-man classics factories today, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969) were seen as challenging and provocative when first published. When a career spanning more than 50 years is examined, I think both categories may be applied to an author.

The same can be said for Herman Melville His career seems to be a self-destructive path to avoid fame and fortune. He had an uncanny knack for not giving a damn about his audience. Even Moby Dick, the Canon par excellence, is full of digressions, oddball characters, mysticism, and a stage-play right in the middle of it. At root, it's your standard maritime adventure quest. But he is downright experimental in a way we won't see until Ulysses

Then there's Pierre, or the Ambiguities, the Confidence-Man, Bartelby (Beckett before Beckett), and his strange short stories.

I'm tempted to put Colette up as a one-woman classics factory!

i'd think i'd put Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in between. Far too well thought through to be "kamikazes," none the less far more influential in the course of changing literature and history than just about anyone mentioned above.

15: Nonfiction writers -- Marx the economist, politician, philosopher, polemicist, etc. and Freud the psychologist -- are a different ball of wax. It would be too easy to make conservative writers "classics factories" and radicals "kamikazes." The dichotomy seems too pat.

On the other hand, the person who embodied both "classics factory" and "kamikaze" -- to the point of cognitive schizophrenia -- would be Ezra Pound His poetry is some of the best in the English language, but his active treason, economic crackpottery, and faux cornpone prose style smack of someone on a kamikaze course. His poetry became more and more allusive and abstruse, so only 6 comparative literature majors could actually read and understand the stuff. But the embrace of fascism mirrors that Classicism-Kamikaze attitude, since fascism, at root, is about a return to some Golden Age (Mussolini wanted to recreate the Roman Empire) and the militarist adoration of youth and death (Romanticism on the crack cocaine of industrialized weaponry and colonialist conquest).