Form and Fiction

When in prison I again started writing I had no idea on form. I took this as license to experiment. It may also mean I have no idea what I am doing other than perform harm upon American literature.  Muriel Barberry seems to doing some of the same things:

Sensibility comes from form, and form from nature as viewed through the prism of sensibility: anyone who has ever walked down the paths of a traditional Japanese garden can feel this. Writing about Japan presupposes an understanding of both the mystery and the lesson, and finding a form that can do it justice, particularly when writing in French, that radically heteronomous language. It so happens that the triad of sensibility/nature/form corresponds to my intuitive modus operandi. I rarely pay attention to the stories I want to tell; I am sure they are there, tucked away inside me in a place where I cannot see them taking shape. The themes of my novels are recurrent, with a few specific exceptions, and I don’t worry about them, either: I am made up of them, they are powerful, and they will make themselves heard when the time comes. They are a part of my nature, just as nature is part of them.

On the other hand, I am passionate about varying the form my writing takes, and I devote all my energy to that end. To look at, or frame, a same landscape through different windows, and find therein, each time, an aspect that was previously invisible: that is what the painter in Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract does, and I see this as a metaphor for the art of the novel.

Just as we must find our own way as we navigate our inner self, without ever being able to encompass that entire self with a single gaze, the understanding we have of our existence is never anything more than an intermittent glimpse into the mystery—shifting like a fog bank, sometimes lifting, only to form again nearby. Truly seeing means finding the right frame through which to catch that elusive glimpse.

How I Learned to Let Form Do the Work 

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