Thinking About Writing Novels

About all I can do is think. Today was another one of those days of fogginess. I do not know whether it is because of the hernias or not taking my meds as I should. I tried napping and never really fell asleep, only wasted time. I got up after 8 pm and decided to order a sandwich and work on this blog. I have not stepped out of the apartment building since this morning. Not that I feel anything lost, other than time.

Submissions made over the weekend:

 “After Making Landfall”

 Mulberry Literary 

New Orleans Review “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984”: Missouri Review.

Something from the other day: Jack White: Frozen Charlotte Album Review | Pitchfork 

Before the portions quoted below, there as a discussion about French grammar and I wonder if that does not make a difference between their novels and ours. English is far less formal than French. Think about it. 

Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp by Kathryn Scanlan (Paris Review)

A traditional “realistic” novel strives to develop characters with believable physical and psychological detail, but Bessette’s approach might actually be the more lifelike one: while she pursues her narrative with a detective’s intent, the novelist remains more or less visible as the source of the artifice, and she never lets us forget that what we are reading is a text. Put another way, it’s useful to know that Bessette once described her writing as “auto-biographie realiste, non fantaisiste”—“realistic, non-fanciful autobiography”—which makes me think of Gertrude Stein, whose work Bessette read and admired. In his afterword to a later edition of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948), Stein’s short novel about several mysterious incidents that occurred one summer while Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were living in a country house in eastern France, John Herbert Gill writes: “Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer’s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined … The ‘continuous present’ in which Gertrude Stein’s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down.” For Stein—and, because everything she wrote was filtered through her particular consciousness: the first and last person.  

***

There’s the sense here, as Alice Oswald says, that “it’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.” Add to this Bessette’s notion that “traditional prose … even when it has thoughtful and intelligent things to say, remains a very commercial product.” A Poetic Novel, then, is perhaps one from which all the excess—words, commerce, false comfort—has been wrung, because the author (and her reader) is living under duress, in extremity, at a time when the finitude of life is quite clear. All of which is not to suggest that a Poetic Novel must be somber and heavy, because Twenty Minutes of Silence is nimble, playful, funny, irreverent. I particularly like the exchanges between Monsieur the Chief Inspector and his Deputy, who remind me of Chandler’s brutally absurdist cop duos (The Little Sister’s Fred Beifus and Christy French, for instance). Bessette’s impatience with the traditional elements of a novel is apparent: it seems she simply did not write what didn’t interest her. To make a profound book by stripping it to the bone (to the “I,” the first and last person)—to write, as a scrawled note in her literary archives declares, “the biggest novel of the world by the smallest novelist of that world”—that was her ambition. 

This is all for “Chasing Ashes”. I do not know what it will, only that it has to be different.

César Aira’s Art of Not Editing by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer (Paris Review) has this paragraph, it is what I want:

And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. 

Not that I this Aira's talent:

... Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers.

I just feel like my own stuff is so constituated.

Although I am not put off by Dostoyevsky nowadays, I think that has more to do with having joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, there is something true in Mark Nayler's Dostoevsky is a dreadful writer (The Spectator).

Given Dostoevsky’s reputation as one of the untouchables of literature, I was surprised at how bad his prose is. It lacks grace and balance. Instead of taught, stylish sentences, Dostoevsky works in messy, interminable paragraphs that erode the reader’s goodwill. I’m partly grateful, though, because his exhausting prose at least forced me to reflect on the complex relationship between reader and writer.   

And this is not how I would not want to be thought of:

My negative reaction to Dostoevsky, as I recently discovered, places me in distinguished company. Vladimir Nabokov once described him as “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.” Ernest Hemingway had mixed reactions: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” he asked. For Henry James, Dostoevsky’s novels were “loose baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings.” James couldn’t finish Crime and Punishment. Reading it, he said, was “like having an illness.” 

We too often blame ourselves if we don’t like or “get” a classic work of literature, thus absolving the writer of all responsibility. But after battling my way through almost 1,500 pages of Dostoevsky, I’m in no mood to be generous. The fault is mainly his.  

Two rejections came in:

Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall." After careful consideration, we've decided this submission isn't right for AGNI.

Kind regards, The Editors

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And this for a submission from last year:

Thank you for your submission to Press Pause Press. We did not find "Coming Home" a fit for Press Pause at this time, but we appreciated the chance to consider your work, and we wish you the best of luck finding it a home.

Sincerely,

The Press Pause Press Team

 

 

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