Opacity & Surrealism, Not Necessarily Together

I keep thinking there will be others reading these posts. That this effort is a bit like throwing into the ocean messages in a bottle.

I find myself very intrigued by Indigo Bailey's Not Showing, Not Telling. That I never have lived in the world of social media, what she writes about never occurred to me.

In her essay ‘Tell-All’, Turkish Australian author Eda Gunaydin writes of a dumped memoir project. ‘I shit you not, I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe,’ she teases. ‘But why should I tell anyone about it?’ Gunaydin questions cultural obsessions with ‘confessional literature’, wherein such revelations no longer hold a specific purpose (such as religious salvation or political action) and have instead become commodities. In the ‘knowledge economy’, Gunaydin argues, confession ‘is the price of entry’.

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As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself,’ writes Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation. Hailing from the island of Martinique, the French Afro-Caribbean theorist challenges ‘transparency’ as a political and aesthetic ideal. For Glissant, Western thought privileges the visible, assuming that to empathise with another is to ‘grasp’ them. He rebuffs the logic that identities must be understood to be recognised and respected. As an alternative, Glissant envisions society as a tapestry in which the value of its ‘texture’ doesn’t depend on an excoriating analysis of each component. According to his theory of ‘opacity’, striving for unbridled access to other people’s subjectivity is more reductive than embracing unknowing.

This paragraph made me think of The Education of Henry Adams, which has a decades long gap in his autobiography:

Whether in text or in film, stories always have gaps—the implied movement from one location to another, the most banal moments of a character’s routine. In the process of curation, certain facts must be missed, details glossed over. Often, the challenge for a writer or filmmaker is to maintain a watertight sense of continuity in the midst of this artifice—to create a flow of images that feels natural to the audience. But gaps can also be blown up, becoming perceptible sites of absence: abrupt pauses in narration, sudden time-shifts between scenes or chapters, ellipses signposting the unsayable.

And why not let the reader's imagination work? Seems I might be onto something:

Replacing overexposed images of brutality and trauma, a story’s breakages can reveal the limits of a given reality, becoming entry points to speculative worlds. Throughout Vagabond, Varda plays upon the desires of Mona’s audience and alibis to reach the grisly, cathartic spectacle of her demise. Yet, at its would-be climax, the film lurches into phantasmic absurdity: Mona is chased by a gang dressed as grapes whose origin is as inexplicable as her own.

While recently revising stories that I have been working on (and off) for almost a decade (okay, there was a lot of "off"), but I am left wondering if I am leaving out too much, if I am underwriting. Now, I need to think if I should just leave blank spaces. 

Do read the whole essay.

Nothing in Ms. Bailey's essay negates the role of surrealism. maybe it even allows it. Anyway, check out Some Surreal Books from Around the World,