Still Educating Sam Hasler: Writers: French Tragedies, Writing and Reading Tips, A Review and A Poem, Coetzee

I read Racine while in prison; Phèdre is the only title I can think of this morning. This morning while reading Elijah Perseus Blumov's A Visit To Our Sister’s: A Brief Tour of the French Poetic Sublime, Part One, I finally came to an understanding of French tragedy.

Mr. Blumov nailed my reaction to French tragedy:

The Anglophone reader who engages with the great French drama of the 17th century will inevitably succumb to the temptation to make comparisons with Shakespeare. The temptation of the Francophone reader of Shakespeare to make the same comparisons is likewise irresistible. Historically, such comparisons have often led to mutual bewilderment and intolerance– too often, English speakers have found the French playwrights stilted, stuffy, and pompous, and French speakers have found Shakespeare crude, undisciplined, and outlandish. Such knee-jerk reactions are unfortunate, but comparing national literatures can also be a fascinating and fruitful enterprise: place the great French and English dramatic poets side by side, and you will find the limitations and strengths of both vividly illuminated. It is easy, for one raised on Shakespearean bardolatry, to assume that our Will, at least at his best, represents the perfection of the poetic drama. Encounter Racine, however, and you will have to contend with a completely different vision of perfection. The Shakespearean drama is a universe unto itself: filled with occasions for both laughter and tears, brimming with charming, complex characters, and soaring with imaginative language; the Racinian drama is a well-oiled machine of doom, efficient and relentless, capable of heating the claustrophobic crucible of the drawing-room stage to an emotional temperature almost unbearable. These two visions produce two different kinds of experiences, both magnificent. How can we say one is inherently superior to the other?

Reading his essay, it seems to me that the comparison should not be between Shakespeare but the Greeks and the Romans.

But he also gave me a deeper understanding of what the French did well:

Unlike Greek tragedies however, which often conclude with a movement toward a transcendent synthesis of previously conflicting forces or an injunction to moderation, the tragedies of Racine are breakneck trainwrecks of emotional ruination sans salvation, and that is why they may strike us as thrillingly modern. A Jansenist (like Pascal) convinced of the utter depravity of the human soul, Racine offers us a vision of the human being as a wretched plaything of their own heredity and brain chemistry, anticipating (and influencing) both Naturalism and Existentialism. Racine also innovates by bringing the madness and torture of lovesickness, which had been briefly touched on by Euripides and developed by Apollonius and Virgil, fully into the realm of tragedy. Nowhere are all these elements more evident than in Racine’s 1677 masterpiece, Phèdre.

There seems more to work with there than I had thought of before today.

He also brings to the forefront something I had never thought of as being French literature but as indicative of French writers.

The idyllic beauty and refined elegance of sunny France contrasted with the dark souls and brutal bluntness (what we call frankness) of many of its inhabitants and produces an uncanny effect which I and many others have long found deeply intriguing. The stereotypically French blackness of vision has drawn many readers to the likes of Sade, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Céline, and Sartre, but, as I hope to show you, the existential Gallic sensibility and taste for the sublime has taken many other (often complementary) forms as well. What seems consistent in the French spirit is an uncompromising, extravagant fierceness of conviction and a cold-blooded will to clarity which often leaves the mild-mannered, sentimental, common-sense Anglophone reader slightly baffled, simultaneously skeptical and impressed.

One thing that I have tried to do with my Indiana stories is to escape our tradition of sentimentality. Not sentiments, but that sweetening to the point of saccharine that ignores the problems of our current reality, as well as the ugliness of our past. In short, what lies we tell ourselves of our Midwestern virtue.

Of those virtues, common-sense is one we think is our birthright. Having seen Indiana keep Republican control of our politics, and thus of our economic lives, to the detriment of Hoosier lives and livelihoods, I no longer think we should so blithely claim our common-sense. Self-injury is not commonsensical.

For the first time I must admit I wish I could touch on the anger, the raging anger, that I felt 15, 20 years ago. Yes, it was a product of my depression, but if I could channel it now into my writing, I think I could write better.

All the same, it makes me think a little more French might be needed now.

As for things to think about: Writing Better Character Conflicts With the 5 Conflict Management Styles (Helping Writers Become Authors). This is more practical than what has gone before.

The idea of five distinct conflict management styles comes from the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), developed in the early 1970s by psychologists Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann. Originally designed for workplace and organizational settings, the model maps how people handle conflict along two dimensions: how a person pursues one’s own goals (i.e., a spectrum of unassertiveness and assertiveness) and how one considers others’ goals (i.e., a spectrum of uncooperativeness to cooperativeness). From there, they used these two axes to map five core approaches to conflict: competing, collaborating, compromising, accommodating, and avoiding.

The five are:

The Statements
My character pushes hard for his/her own way, even if it risks upsetting others.
My character seeks solutions that work for everyone involved in the disagreement.
My character will give up part of what he/she wants if it helps resolve the conflict.
My character often lets others have their way to keep the peace.
My character avoids bringing up issues unless there’s no other choice.
My character enjoys finding creative solutions in which everyone feels satisfied.
My character is willing to settle halfway if it ends the argument quickly.
My character puts the other person’s needs first when harmony matters most.
My character changes the subject or withdraws to avoid escalation.
My character insists on his/her own position, believing he/she’s right.

In "Agnes", the problem is that Agnes does stick to her guns - that the world is cruel and love suffers from that cruelty and her children need to be prepared for that pain.

Others depend on the circumstances. Mark and Stacy are meant to be hardliners on certain topics. But the major point on which they make the hardest stand is that they love one another while having a history of love having wrong for them; therefore, they constantly test one another.

My pulpier stuff have conflicts imposed from without. They are right because the other side is wrong - whether protagonist or antagonist.

But I need to keep an eye on this - sharpen it up.

I don't recall having writer's block as much as I have been forgetting things of late - a word's meaning, a word's synonym, a mashing of mental gears - but I like this substack, and so I am passing along Writer's Block (A Round Up) by Kristen Weber.

I think myself timid with figurative language. It seems as much as I want to leave the approach of flat reporting, I lack the nerve. How Much Is Too Much? A Balanced Guide to Hyperbole & Personification (The Forever Workshop) discusses hyperbole before getting cut off by a paywall.

Hyperbole is a figure of speech that employs extreme and deliberate exaggeration to emphasize a point, evoke a strong emotion, or create a vivid impression. It is not something that should be taken literally, but rather a significant and well-known lie that reveals important information to the reader.

When I speak, when I tell stories, I have no problem with hyperbole. So why do I use it so little in my stories? Shuffling what I am working on, I cannot really think of anywhere exaggeration comes into play or would help. Some of my characters are exaggerations.

Hyperbole is used to make others feel the levels of emotional intensity that the speaker or narrator is feeling. But of course, like any other device, it has to be done right.

I have been working with characters who keep their emotions restrained - where restraint is either causes the problem or the problem comes from the fracturing of the restraint.

The flaws mentioned (It’s Overused, It’s Unclear and Uncommitted, and It’s a Cliché) are all ones I agree with. If I can justify my lack of use, it will be the first flaw.

I was curious about the sentences mentioned in Magic Sentences: A Review of Miss Abracadabra (The Common), so I gave it a look. The sentences are worth reading and paying attention to. It seems, from them and the whole of the review, so would be the whole of the novel.

Miss Abracadabra’s real coup is capturing the consciousness of a woman as written by the male author. In this gender-sensitive era, that sort of high-wire showing off should trigger a klaxon of impossibility, as egregious as Ariana Olisvos: Her Last Works and Days by David Dwyer that won the Juniper Prize in poetry in 1976. Purported to be the work of an elderly poetess “Ariana Olisvos,” the impersonation raised the hackles of many feminists of that era, but it did win the prize. The audacity of Tom Ross taking on a young girl’s voice—well, you can’t ponder the problem of being pregnant seriously without attempting to “be” a woman. Eventually his relentless use of interiority goes so deep into Rain that the reader doesn’t question the gender divide. As Rain says: “Funny how you can look at everything, she thought, and still not find the answer.” The book wants us to understand Rain as human, someone who finds herself lacking yet tries to make the best of a situation that seeks to get the best of her.

I also read A Tour of America (The Common), a poem by Moriel Rothman-Zecher, thinking it might sharpen my thinking on "Chasing Ashes". Not sure if it did that, but I think it is a bravura bit of poetry.

7 Ways to Watch and Read More Intentionally. Again, leave it to Helping Writers Become Authors shake me up.

Which is more important: writing intentionally or reading intentionally?
It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question, but ultimately I believe intentional media consumption is more important. Why? Because the personalized landscape of our individual media consumption is the fertile ground out of which grows everything we might hope to create. Someone who chooses media with the utmost intention is unlikely to then create without intention. Even if they did, I have to believe the careful attention to input would still favorably impact the output.
In short, we are what we read (and watch).

It has taken me all year to read Gore Vidal's The Golden Age, and that is the only new novel I have even started this year (I did re-read Rex Stout's Too Many Cooks). Politics continue to distract me, and so do internet essays. I can say that the few movies I have seen have not been so trashy. Then, I watch them on the computer, so I cannot waste the bandwidth.

The post also raises the stakes for me, since I think this what I want for my writing:

No, in my opinion, what we are ultimately reacting against—and, out of sheer exhaustion, increasingly putting up with—are specific trends that have taken us away from the true heart—the true soul—of what story really is.

***

Problematic storytelling devices we should be conscious of when consuming (and should not excuse) include:
Plot-driven stories that neglect character arcs (i.e., characters made to serve plots rather than plots made to serve characters).
Entertainment-first storytelling vs. artistic integrity (i.e., seeking stories that will supposedly sell vs. writing stories of originality and personal intensity).
Flat stereotypes vs. rich archetypes (i.e., writing tropes and plot formulae vs. meeting, understanding, and mining the deeper archetypal wisdom of story transformation).
Storytelling instead of story channelling (i.e., creating stories primarily or entirely from our left brain’s logic vs. listening to what wants to come through the right brain).

The seven tips for intentional reading should be read in full.

I have read J.M. Coetzee with interest; his prose may be too cool for an emotional attachment. However, I have not read his novel Disgrace. Because I think he needs to be read, I am passing along J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable (Public Books). You may find good reasons to read him.

Well, I have made my way through articles I delayed reading, and so I will close this post.

sch 8/21

A nap and back at things late at night, I thought I might as well clear out videos I have saved on YouTube.

Spotting bad writing: