Monthly Archives: November 2006

“Something loud and vulgar”

There’s a very famous remark of Stendhal’s, which Irving Howe discusses in Politics and the Novel. “Politics in a work of literature,” Stendhal said, “is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.”
I’ve been thinking about [...]