Ludic Cube

Angela Carter

  • Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words by Milorad Pavic, translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric
    Hamish Hamilton, 338 pp, £11.95, February 1989, ISBN 0 241 12658 4

According to Apuleius, Pleasure is the daughter of Cupid and Psyche – of Love and the Soul, that is, a sufficiently elevated pedigree, one would have thought. Yet the British still put up a strong resistance to the idea that pleasurability might be a valid criterion in the response to literature, just as we remain dubious about the value of the ‘decorative’ in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made ‘entertainments’ a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably – that is, trivially – and reading to some purpose.

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