topic/literary-theory
Terry Eagleton,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
James Wood,
Zadie Smith,
Annie Dillard,
George Saunders,
Ben Lerner,
Richard Seymour,
Jon Baskin
Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening.
That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasion but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel.
The result is awkward, funny, and true, touched with the spirit of the (odd) person doing the telling.
One model of writing is that we strive upward to express ourselves precisely, at the highest levels of language (think Henry James). Another is that we surrender to our natural mode of expression, flawed though it may be, and, by way of concentrated work within that mode, raise it up, so to speak, creating a poetic rarefication of that (inefficient) form of expression.
When a corporate person says, “The stress being felt by some is, in terms of how we might view it is, we did not meet or exceed our goals that we all will remember Mark from Corporate communicated so clear last month in his critical missive,” that is a poem, because it is not right. There’s a true statement inside it (“We failed and are fucked”), but there’s also something true about its not-rightness, the flavor of which tells us things about the speaker and his culture that aren’t conveyed by “We failed and are fucked.”
So, it’s a poem: a machine for conveying bonus meaning.
the last sentence is clunky but i like the sentiment
We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.
That’s it.
Over and over.
It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.
“There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway,” said Randall Jarrell, a pretty good critic himself. “What is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.”
Still, I often find myself constructing rationales for the beneficial effects of fiction, trying, in essence, to justify the work I’ve been doing all these years.
So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?
Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know—it really does it. That change is finite but real.
And that’s not nothing.
It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.
[...] It means a great deal, however, for a Marxist theory of literature. If literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface. If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role, no matter how the writer actually conceives the problem intellectually. [...]
[...] Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions--like earlier propagandist plays against syphilis, duels, abortion laws or borstals--but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes. For Sartre its task is to awaken the free choice of the agent which makes authentic existence possible at all, as opposed to the neutrality of the spectator. But what gives commitment its aesthetic advantage over tendentiousness also renders the content to which the artist commits himself inherently ambiguous. [...]
Well, all the voices are mine. All the characters are just shards of the fractured me. That’s why I sympathize with them all, even the monsters.
yes!! in response to a prompt about him using lots of different voices
[...] The novel puts people in motion and, in that, tries to render invisible things visible and deal with questions that don’t have easy answers. I think fiction is a space in which you can use naïveté to bump up against ambiguities.
[...] The novel ideally is not reducible to the political. It’s a journey toward meaning that transcends the frame of politics. Blood Meridian—just to think of a great novel that traverses the political—is not simply a book about the violent policies of the American government paying out for scalps on the Western frontier. It takes up subject matter that is inescapably political, but it builds of systemic violence a work that comes to rest only in the territory of art, where the thing built is so elegant and strange that it cannot be justified or even really explained.
[...] the track is not for staying on, it’s for leaping off and then returning to. The notion of the page-turner always seemed foreign to me. I don’t want to be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happened next. I want to be falling off my seat in ecstatic pain because of what language and consciousness are doing on the page. With The Ask, the plot may not be up to Grisham standards, but I’m certainly trying to achieve a sense of hurtling that I think all good books have—maybe not toward a plot point, but toward something more devastating.
sam lipsyte
[...] The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader--titillates, repulses, excites, transports him--without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity. [...]