A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Americans have a Manichean idea of how writers as supposed to be: Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Certainly, Americans of my age older have this idea.
Hemingway: drinking hard, hunting hard, fishing hard, dropping in on wars and bullfights; a lean, masculine prose.
Fitzgerald: drinking hard, living in the city in a high style, sensitive instead of macho, a more lush prose.
The Hemingway writers, as I think them: Norman Mailer, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy.
The Fitzgerald writers: Jack Kerouac, Richard Ford, Paul Auster
Yes, most have drank themselves to death, thankfully.
But there was a third great writer of the Twenties and Thirties who provides a third way of being a writer.
Like Fitzgerald, he graduated an Ivy League school.
Like Hemingway, he was an ambulance driver in World War One.
Unlike either, he had a variable style and was concerned with ideas and big strokes.
He managed to outlive both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
The foregoing came to me today after reading John Dos Passos Coggin's The World at the End of a Line in The American Scholar, particularly the following:
Dos Passos loved and extolled the sea every bit as much as his friend Hemingway. From 1928 to 1935, before their friendship frayed under the strain of the Spanish civil war, the two men often fished the waters near Key West together, catching tarpon, sailfish, marlin, wahoo, mahi-mahi, and tuna. The tropics were also the doctor’s prescription for Dos Passos’s recurring bouts of rheumatic fever. They usually brought along a couple of bottles of champagne, but by custom these remained untouched until the first fish was caught. Everyone on Hemingway’s boat received a nickname: “Dos” or “Muttonfish” for Dos Passos, “Hem” or the “Old Master” for Hemingway, “Old Bread” for the boat’s engineer, and “Saca Ham” for the cook. Conversation on these expeditions remained light. “It was a delight to be able to chatter amiably on all sorts of topics without tripping over that damn Party line,” wrote Dos Passos in his 1966 memoir, The Best Times. Hemingway was as competitive at fishing as he was with everything, but nobody got too sore. “Hem was the greatest fellow in the world to go around with when everything went right,” Dos Passos wrote. Hemingway once invited Arnold Gingrich, the editor and cofounder of Esquire, to go fishing with the gang. “The man was in a trance,” Dos Passos remembered. “It was a world he’d never dreamed of. He was mosquito bitten, half seasick, scorched with sunburn, astonished, half scared, half pleased. It was as much fun to see Ernest play an editor as to see him play a marlin.”
Unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution. The friends operated at different speeds: Hemingway raced; Dos Passos cruised. Take, for example, the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Dos Passos enjoyed the experience primarily for the spectacle, the food, and the drink. Hemingway saw it as a test of manhood. There “were too many exhibitionistic personalities in the group to suit me,” Dos Passos wrote. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves.” Likewise when it came to fishing, Hemingway and Dos Passos had different motives. Dos Passos fished “for the pot”—to catch lunch or dinner. For that reason, he disliked fishing for tarpon, which figured among Hemingway’s favorite quarry, no matter the theatrics involved in fighting them. “I hated to see the great silver monsters lying in the dust on the wharf,” he wrote. “They aren’t fit to eat. About the only use is for mounting. Some people make knicknacks out of the dried scales. Sheer vanity catching tarpon.” Dos Passos looked to the sea as a salve for his spirit. It was in 1924, during a break from writing one of his best novels, Manhattan Transfer, that he discovered Key West. He understood that islands in general—and by extension, the sea—tended to refill his cup of inspiration. He called his happy affliction “islomania.”
I do not always know what to do with myths. I think my natural inclination is to knock the hot air out of them; certainly to give them a jaundiced viewing. Thank you, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Dos Passos kicks in the myth of how an American writer should behave and how he should write. More to the point, he offers an alternative for the American novel that created by the myths of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
I will shoot my mouth one more time before closing, saying that Ross Lockridge, Jr.'sRaintree County and Don DeLillo's Underworldstrike me as Dos Passos novels.
I should be reading John Dos Passos instead of reading about him. I am trying to get this blog up to speed and I cannot deny my curiosity which gets me into filling in the blanks of my education.I can report what I have read of Dos Passos impresses me greatly - he is a more supple writer than I thought likely from my reading about Dos Passos.
I think of this as a sign that Dos Passos is bit quite forgotten:
“all right we are two nations”
So wrote John Dos Passos in his 1936 novel The Big Money. For Dos Passos, America between the world wars had become a place defined by sharp divisions, pitting the oppressors against the oppressed.
Inhabiting one nation were the rich and powerful, those in a position, as Dos Passos put it, to “hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons.” In the other nation were ordinary people — immigrants, workers, the downtrodden — struggling to get by, but “beaten by strangers … who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul.”
The elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency reveals that we are once again (or perhaps still) two nations. But the divide between the haves and the have-nots is no longer adequate to describe the cleavages laid bare by the election of 2016. For Dos Passos, influenced by the Marxism that was then fashionable, class differences were of paramount importance. Today while still relevant, class alone provides an inadequate explanatory framework. Our cleavages are more profound and encompass status and culture, and by extension race, gender and ethnicity.
Dan Leach writes about his own experience embarking onto an anti-novel:
And since the speaker/situation foothold was the only foothold I ever needed to get started on the short stuff, I went to work on the novel as if it was the short stuff. Which is to say, I cracked open a new Word doc and a began to pepper its white space with scenes and fragments and voicy little riffs, all of which felt faithful to Junah’s intelligence and connected to Junah’s situation, but none of which necessarily corresponded to novelistic mechanisms such as the “structured” plot, the “measured” tone, and the “well-developed” character.
Okay, that sounds tempting to me - some doubts about doing the measured tone and the well-developed character abide in my mind. Plus, I decided long ago, while still in Fort Dix, that publishing was unlikely, I was too old to actually hone a style and writerly talents, that I might as well throw caution to the wind and write what I want to read.
Again, Mr. Leach, describes something that attracts me because it does describe the world as I experience - with and after my depression - it.
I was writing a hundred-page shoebox likely to resonate with readers on the basis of voice, fragment, and flow. What I wrote, in the end, was an anti-novel. A mixtape. A collage. A text which mimics its conceit: the book the reader holds is the time capsule Junah culls out of his lived life; the shards on the page, the shards of his memory.
He also reminds me what I need to do, to get back to, now I am using now to return to my writing:
And what I discovered (and it pains me to present this as an epiphany, since in 2020 I was three books and fifteen years into my career) is that a pandemic is not an excuse to write the book you can sell—it’s an excuse to write the book you can love.
I know of only one of the novels in Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully), Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. They should be read, of course, but I want to add up the parts that make think this idea is sound, and that this is
... isn’t just a rebellion against novelistic dead weight—it’s a rebellion against any printed syllable that isn’t exploding with the concurrent mysteries of sound and sense.... Nelson’s anti-novel is like a mixtape without a single bad or boring song. Which is to say, each of the 240 fragments that make up Bluets sings like a standalone poem (yet also miraculously coheres into a book-length meditation on love and suffering)... which tells its story via a year’s worth of customer comment cards, all submitted by an unnamed narrator who treats the fast-food space as a conduit for existential riffing.... this book has sentences (or lines?) so sonically resonant and philosophically interesting that you will linger on a page for half an hour. This book even has a chapter (now infamous) in which the speaker achieves sexual intimacy with a Frosty..... Delivered in dense (but lush) fragments that braid themselves against disparate registers (imagine reading a mini-essay stuck between a folk tale and a catalogue)... This includes the epistolary intrusions of May Kasahara, the labyrinthine computer files of Cinnamon Akasaka, and the deeply discursive frame stories of Lieutenant Mamiya (which could easily exist as a self-standing novella); but it also includes pseudo-newspaper articles, excerpts from whatever history book Toru happens to be reading, and those infamous and enigmatic third-person vignettes towards the end which no scholar has ever adequately explained
Okay, the Frosty sounds demented as well as distasteful, and what really sticks is the mixtape analogy.
Award-winning author Alan Michael Parker displays his love for playful narrative and breaking all the rules in Bingo Bango Boingo, a collection of flash fiction and stories told through Bingo cards
Flip the page. Choose your game. Is it "Community Garden Bingo"? "High School Reunion Bingo"? "Don't Hate Your Daddy Bingo"? Or are you finally ready for "Change Your Life Bingo"?
Featuring 40 Bingo cards, interspersed with flash fiction and an opportunity to try the Bingo game yourself, this is a wholly original collection. Delightful, unexpected, and tongue in cheek--they're stories, they're Bingo cards, they're wild, you'll like them.
Taking a look now at Have You Considered an Anarchist Approach to Plot?, its thesis is:
All too often, plot is taught as architecture, as per Freitig’s Triangle: rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. But we suggest that plot might better be understood as an emotional strategy: a controlled burn of surprise, contradiction, revelation. And—we might add–especially, connection.
Architecture and plotting makes me think of a criticism/comment about Thomas Hardy's plots being architectural. Hardy would never do what Davison and LaPlante suggest.
First, what do we mean when we say “throw bombs”? We mean inserting any unanticipated event that is completely disconnected (on the surface, anyway) from what came before it.
There are two kinds of bombs: external and internal.
First, external: a surprising (even shocking) event beyond the control of the characters. An earthquake, tornado or some other act of God. Or a stranger or other unidentified character doing something out of the blue that completely disrupts the story.
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Internal bombs are when an unexpected chain of events is put into motion—but instead of being random and uncontrolled, it can be directly (if subtly) caused by your character(s). In other words, due to who they are, they bring it on themselves.
Here you must be careful not to make it either obvious, or—at the other end of the scale—outrageously unbelievable. It can seem out of character (see nonconforming oddities in our first essay in this series) but it should also be attributable to a herethero unknown (unconscious, hidden) aspect of your character.
What both types of bombs have in common: they should leave you, the writer, with a problem: no idea what will happen next. If you turn your back on cliched or familiar reactions, this can be difficult. If traditional plotting devices are off bounds, you must consider how the bomb changes the characters, the theme, and the situation of the story in surprising yet convincing ways. (Thanks, EM Forster for that nugget of wisdom.).
So, why cannot bombs be thrown in an anarchic way?
Davison and LaPlante write about using a character's emotions to drive a story:
The other plotting strategy we’d like to explore is when a story is driven, not by events, but by the emotional movement of a character. In our forthcoming book from W.W Norton, The Lab: Experiments Writing Across Genre, we use the example of Lydia Peelle’s story, “Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing.”
You can chart the emotional progression of the story’s first-person protagonist as she navigates the loneliness and heartbreak of a divorce. But this is no cliched break-up story. Instead, you can see how the narrator goes through alternating moments of connection and disconnection as she struggles to heal emotionally. The tension between these coming-togethers and alienations from self and others is palpable, although nothing of real significance happens. And you’re often surprised by the things that connect versus the things that emotionally separate this narrator from other people, and the world.
I can imagine doing this with fragments - the see-sawing of emotions, the triggers for those emotions, seem to be very conducive to fragmentary telling. Arias comes to mind.
Then are ideas that Milan Kundera put into his Art of the Novel - that the novel is expansive enough to include an essay, a short story. What I got all those years ago from Kundera was the limit was our imagination and the story needing told.
How does the necessary complexity get into Kundera’s fiction? The process is illuminated in The Art of the Novel by two dialogues which draw on detailed illustrations from his novels and which valuably help one to understand how they work. Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.
In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he’s interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: “The world is about to end and I’m eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …” Or another: “The aliens’ spaceship arrived every Thursday.” In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: “The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said ‘Make A Wish’ in gold letters.”
John Dos Passos was once mentioned in the same sentences as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Just before I was arrested I started reading his USA Trilogy. I was starting to again get interested in books and writing. My copy disappeared after my arrest and I was never able to get a copy in prison through the interlibrary loan program. When the college courses began and there was a creative writing class offered one of the teachers was able to get me some excerpts. I remain perplexed by the book.
I found Dos Passos on The Paris Review site after my release from prison. The following bits hit home regarding my own writing but may be they will interest you, too.
INTERVIEWER
Have you become the social historian at the expense of the artist?
DOS PASSOS
There’s just no way that I can tell. I have to do what I’m interested in at the time, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily inartistic about being the historian. I have great admiration for good history. All of my work has some certain historical connotation. Take Three Soldiers. I was trying to record something that was going on. I always felt that it might not be any good as a novel, but that it would at least be useful to add to the record. I had that idea when I began writing—with One Man’s Initiation—and I’ve had it right along.
I started this back in August but I must admit most of the actual reading was on October 16, 2021. Just me being confessional.
I seem to recall the Studs Lonigan mini-series but do not recall watching it. Yet from there I learned the name of Studs Lonigan. Somewhere I connected Lonigan with James T. Farrell. While in prison, having decided to fill in the holes of my education in literature, I decided to read the Studs Lonigan trilogy. I accomplished this thanks to the inter-library program.
I wrote notes of my reading and will hope to have them online here in the future. Let say I was impressed with Farrell more than I was with Lonigan. This might be a case of an unappealing protagonist. He is neither Hemingway or Fitzgerald but neither is he Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. I suggest reading a trilogy with the leading character who is a jerk says something about the quality of an author's writing.
Secondly, Farrell is a Chicago writer. Enough of one to be in the Chicago Hall of Fame. This makes him a Midwestern writer, which makes him of interest to me.
Third, I have been John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy for the past month. Farrell was a Leftist; a real one, not what our modern day Republicans call a leftist. Dos Passos also writes about such Leftists.
Farrell wrote and published fiction steadily during these years, arguing that there is an interdependency between the advancement of culture and the struggle for human liberation, although Farrell's fiction differed from that of John Dos Passos, who wrote explicitly political novels. Some of Farrell's work, such as his antifascist novelette Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (1939), dramatized important political issues, but his Studs Lonigan trilogy demonstrated that he was primarily a novelist of human character. Farrell was acutely sensitive to the psychological costs of living in a class society, and his conceptions of individual consciousness and social destiny were infused with a materialist outlook. This is most evident not only in the Studs Lonigan trilogy, but also in Farrell's second series, the O'Neill-O'Flaherty pentalogy: A World I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938), Father and Son (1940), My Days of Anger (1943), and The Face of Time (1953). Although the pentalogy centers around the life of Danny O'Neill, Farrell preferred that the five books be called the "O'Neill-O'Flaherty series" because the main characters are derived from both families. Both the Studs Lonigan trilogy and also the O'Neill-O'Flaherty series, conceived about the same time and thematically interconnected, provide an expose of the false consciousness created by the institutions of capitalist society. A third series, the Bernard Carr trilogy�consisting of Bernard Claer (1946), The Road Between (1949), and Yet Other Waters (1952) -- evolved somewhat later but was still linked to the revolutionary Marxist period in Farrell's literary development.
And what I have learned is that Farrell was a good enough writer that he should not be so neglected nowadays. Charles Fanning titled his article for Bridgewater Review Rediscovering James T. Farrell (wherein he makes a good case for such a rediscovery). The Modern Novel makes comments on the three novels of the Lonigan Trilogy (and only those novels); the following comes from the analysis of the trilogy's last novel, Judgment Day:
But it is Chicago that is almost as interesting as Studs. The change in the neighbourhoods, with immigration, is a key theme and one which drives the racism. Portraits of the unemployed during the Depression, marches, bank collapses and the anti-Hoover feeling are all vividly portrayed. And, with two heroes, you definitely feel that you are getting your money’s worth in what is an underappreciated work of American literature.
By his own testimony, Branch, who's also a Mark Twain specialist, is almost alone among scholars and critics in his belief that Farrell deserves resurrecting. "I've thought for some time that he was overdue, but nothing's happened. That's why I was glad I could get this little book published, hoping it would help.
"But it seems to me that these revivals come very, very late for writers," Branch added. "Take the case of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Right now, scholars are finding more and more neglected writers. Eventually, there'll come a time when Jim Farrell gets his proper due."
A big reason Farrell hasn't gotten it already, Branch said, is that "he's been dumped on by so many schools of critics: Marxists, Catholics, formalist academics who prefer Henry James' writing." The neglect is such that the only Farrell book in print, among the more than 50 he published, is the Lonigan trilogy, available in a "Prairie State" edition from the University of Illinois Press.
According to Branch, Farrell has been mistakenly devalued as a mechanical photorealist, a compulsive overwriter whose novels, composed at top speed in a torrential, reportorial prose, are socio-anthropological casebooks rather than imaginative works of psychological literature. "One critic compared him to a war correspondent, who went out into the front-line trenches with a tape-recorder, which is ridiculous. There's a great deal of invention in his writing."
In the Lonigan trilogy, Farrell's seemingly turgid, longwinded style, Branch asserted, was "a very deliberate and meticulous attempt to get a language that would convey Studs' consciousness. Farrell could write, and did write, in many other styles, but this particular objective one was extremely well suited to what he was trying to achieve, and it's one of the glories of the trilogy."
Writers frequently suffer from the vagaries of fashion and it's not unusual for a novelist to be forgotten within a few years of his death. In James T. Farrell's case it would seem that the collapse of his reputation has been almost complete, and it's probably only in a few universities, mostly in the United States, that his name now evokes any interest. And yet, at one time, his novels and short stories were easily available in both hardback and paperback editions and he was often mentioned alongside Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and other leading American authors. That Farrell’s standing has declined so much is curious and invites at least a brief examination of his work.
***
If the kind of political fiction I’ve referred to does have its limitations then it may be that Farrell's reputation will have to rest on the novels and stories which deal with Studs Lonigan, Danny O'Neill, and the Irish-American world of Chicago in the first thirty or so years of this century. His rites of passage explorations move around this landscape, recording everything in vivid detail. And, contrary to many assumptions, it's not necessarily the slum neighbourhoods which are described. When he later wrote about how he had conceived Studs Lonigan, Farrell was careful to point out that he had deliberately set the book in a relatively-affluent area where people had steady jobs and owned their own houses, so that he could avoid a kind of vulgar economic determinism which would make Stud's downfall easily explainable. He was enough of a Marxist to suggest that the onset of the Depression hastened his decline by wiping out his savings and destroying his job, but he said that personal failings had started the slide as Studs drank, gambled, ran with gangs, and generally gave himself up to the life of the streets. What Farrell was getting at was the way in which social conformity - the pressure to go with the crowd, agree with the group, and subjugate the sensitive side of one's personality in favour of a rough macho image - could destroy an individual. When he wrote his Danny O'Neill novels, which roughly parallel Studs Lonigan in their time-sequence, his central character found a way out of the restrictive cultural environment, just as Farrell himself had done. The world he described may be a specific one, and its surface details consequently dated, but the situations evoked are still very real today.
Might politics explain Farrell's fall from literary grace? It was for Nelson Algren and for John Dos Passos.
Another explanation could be his interest in working people. My friend K complains about MFA writers and his complaint may be relevant here. How many of our current writers know the working class? Of those those who do find have such knowledge, what interest do they have in writing about working people? .
And let me not let the readers off the hook. Publishers will not buy what they cannot sell and what do the readers of Jonathan Lethem or Jonathan Franzen care about the lives of those poorer, working jobs for the minimum wage? I have answered this for my own writing in the negative. I suspect this divide might also have expression in our current American political divide.
If we read writers like Farrell and Algren and Dos Passos out of the American canon, we distort the meaning of American literature. We may even distort the meaning of America.
THE RETURN OF STUDS LONIGAN by Bette Howland is a reappraisal of Studs Lonigan and Farrell:
It’s no secret that Farrell came to resent the success of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Over the course of his long and amazingly productive career, all his other work would be measured against it. The Danny O’Neill series, Bernard Clare ; the novels of the Universe of Time; volumes of short stories, journalism, literary criticism; his steady and persistent portrayal of “the American way of life” through the lives he knew so well. He became a writer taken for granted; he wrote “too much.” (Those thick glasses”crystal balls in his old age”weren’t props; he was driven in part by fear of going blind.) His own favorite novel was his last, the deeply personal Invisible Swords ; but by then not many were paying attention. In the final months of his life, Farrell was signing copies of a new edition of the trilogy for the publisher: another autograph, another dollar. He needed the money. At the same time a television miniseries was portraying Studs, yet again, as the movie tough guy he so longed to be. Fifty-some books on the shelves, and Farrell remained the author of Studs Lonigan.
Farrell was not a lesser Dreiser. He never considered himself, as so many critics have, a disciple, and except in his own gloomier moods didn’t agree with Dreiser’s ideas. (Luckily, Dreiser didn’t always agree with his own ideas himself.) Farrell never lost his sense of having to put up a fight, to define himself against . This came with being a writer “of plebeian origin”:
He sees things from the outside, not the inside . . . .His subject is his own world around him . . . .The feelings of alienation he meets sometimes make him hardened, stubborn and resistant. He spends his youth in struggling to get what a son of Groton acquires as if by natural right.
A son of Groton might have his own ups and downs, but the issue here is legitimation. “Dreiser had to plead his case as a writer,” Farrell wrote. “Just as he had to discover for himself, so his sympathetic readers similarly had to discover.” Dreiser gave Farrell permission”this is what one writer can do for another. It was a spiritual debt, and Farrell passed it on.
You can make your own decision, Google Books has Studs Lonigan online here.
I suppose, like John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Raintree Countywas too long, too complicated to teach in the schools.There is also a Dos Passos connection with how Lockridge uses imaginary news reports as a counter-voice to his narrator. Also like Dos Passos, I cannot imagine anyone following in Lockridge's footsteps. The Great American Novel died as a genre, or so I believe. Gore Vidal covered some of the same territory in Lincolnand in 1876, but to my recollection, those novels feel cramped in comparison to Raintree County. For a historical novel, the only historical characters given speaking parts are Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant - and they only appear in cameos.
On the other hand, I think there might a Lockridge influence in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but I cannot point to anything specific. Tonally, they are quite different.
Lockridge's achievement does not deserve to be forgotten.
I read Keeping Readers at Arm’s Length with Distanced POV from Live Write Thrive while I was still working my way through John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. He made use of film techniques. The article mentions one that I think was used by Dos Passos:
Using the camera shot POV is a great technique novelists can borrow from filmmakers. For some writers, the idea of showing a scene completely devoid of emotion, reaction, internalizing, and opining may seem counterintuitive—or downright counterproductive. Isn’t the whole point to tell a story up close and personal?
Sure. But there may be times when you want to see action happening without coloring it with any subjective tint. When you want a feeling of emotional distance.
The Trilogy uses three points if view of which two qualify as objective.
The blog offers up a tip on how to implement the pov:
"Remember, the objective of every Scene is to lead to the high moment at the end, and it will take a number of shots to get there, and some shots often will follow after that high moment as well. Filmmakers will sometimes "storyboard," which means they actually sketch out frames of images implying which shot will be used when, how, and focusing on what. If you're good at drawing or can even manage a few stick figures, you could try laying out your scenes on big pieces of poster board. But you can also jot down camera shots in a list, playing around with them until you have a sequence that will meet your needs."
I suggest dipping into Dos Passos for how pov may well involve the tone and texture of one's prose.
Although Fitzgerald’s Follies from Liberties is mostly hidden by a paywall, this was available and has some interesting points.
...Fitzgerald overdid something to which Erasmus’ Folly admits — that she had been raised up and nourished by Bacchus. Fitzgerald’s alcoholism constrained his literary output and led to his premature death at the age of forty-five. The adult Fitzgerald could not take care of himself. We do not associate Fitzgerald with anything like wisdom literature. He never wore a beard, that “ensign of wisdom,” according to Erasmus’ Folly. He could not be confused with Tolstoy, who did have a beard and who broached the biggest and the best questions, boldly titling a novel War and Peace. (Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise, in which this side of paradise — a phrase from a poem by Rupert Brooke — is more or less a brilliant undergraduate career at Princeton University.) Fitzgerald did not even write novels of ideas. He was no Thomas Mann, no communicant with the philosophical heavyweights, no worldly interpreter of high politics. Until his death, Fitzgerald agonized about not being sufficiently educated or well read. He never graduated from Princeton, and it bothered him. In The Great Gatsby, the book that will always define him, Fitzgerald expends marvelous prose on a small and insignificant man. It is a perfect novella to depict the dreams, the extravagance, the alleged greatness of a bootlegger whose golden girl got away. Gatsby lacks any guiding wisdom. He lacks gravitas. The incognito protagonist, he lacks a real profile even in his eponymous novel. He is an empty vessel of social climbing and romantic longing who embraces the folly-filled tawdriness of his cultural moment. Gatsby is the boy who never outgrew high school, not to mention college (which he falsely claims to have attended). His shallowness and frivolity would have made him a bit player in War and Peace, a petty officer. Or Tolstoy would have chosen to transform Jay Gatsby, to reform him, leading him through a moral awakening. Tolstoy would not have left Gatsby’s folly intact, as Fitzgerald is very willing to do. According to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend and later his literary executor, Edna St. Vincent Millay compared Fitzgerald to “a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond.” A similar image occurred to John Dos Passos: “when he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to be full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as diamond.” Fitzgerald fretted about wasting his diamond-like literary talent on the literature of immaturity, or he was sensitive to the accusation of doing this. In 1934, in an unpublished preface to Gatsby, he wrote of being “kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! It was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” Without cultivating an aura of wisdom, however, the beardless Fitzgerald did write wisdom literature. He wrote it not by denigrating folly, not by dismissing it, and not by treating folly as peripheral to wisdom....
The counselor for my group sessions talked about how obvious and, therefore boring, were the themes of The Great Gatsby. Hard to disagree when I think Fitzgerald is a much better writer of short stories. (You can search this site for my other notes on Fitzgerald.) Impossible, however, to deny the quality of Fitzgerald's prose.
If there is any writer of ideas from amongst Fitzgerald's contemporaries, it has to be John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. I do not think either of them write as finely as Fitzgerald. Faulkner is a treasure trove of style without ever slipping into the noodling delicacies of Fitzgerald. Dos Passos has not the baroque sentences of Faulkner, nor is his prose stylish for the sake of style.
In his defense, I would say Gatsby persists by virtue of his vacuity. Being American, we are a country prone to vacuity. Perhaps the allure of reinvention - certainly its myth - gives us the ability to escape the wisdom possible from self-reflection.
I recall reading somewhere that Fitzgerald was a favorite of The Beats, like Jack Kerouac. This makes sense if Fitzgerald is the scribe of immaturity.
I also had to remember that it was Fitzgerald who said there were no second acts in American lives. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Justification for his own way of life?
‘What is Enlightenment?’ is concerned with every citizen’s public right to use their reason: everyone in a civilised society, Kant argues, should have the freedom to question the status quo and take part in a debate about how society should be governed and maintained. But such public rights and freedoms need to be balanced by the citizen’s private or civic responsibility to obey the law, and observe the status quo, when required to.
In other words, even while we discuss and philosophise about how to improve society, we have to live in the one we currently have, and civilisation would break down if people chose, for instance, to stop following laws they considered unjust or refused to pay their taxes because they disagreed with the levels of taxation.
‘What is Enlightenment?’ is fundamentally a clarion-call to people about the need to ‘dare to be wise’. What is required is not merely intellect but also a willingness to engage one’s reason and exercise that reason upon the everyday things that govern our lives: political systems, financial structures, education, trade, and much else. Enlightenment is mankind’s coming-to-maturity, a willingness to think for oneself and emerge from an immature state where we hand over the power and responsibility to authority figures, whether they’re priests, doctors, teachers, or politicians
Now, I am going to work on submitting my stories.
"Problem Solving" went to Route 7 because nothing else was open now.
Headlines from The Guardian were arrived in my email.
I finished the story. KH now has a copy, poor fellow.
A nap and a trip to McClure's happened earlier today. The rain had stopped, then it started again. Now it is just wet outside.
The search for CC has hit another wall. Fears of relapse. Funny thing is CC and KH and K would all have an agreement about my attraction for crack cocaine. I have felt none such thing, even when I was running with the crackheads. Certainly, I have felt no desire since I have been in Muncie. The thing was having a secret life. Well, those compartments all got collapsed back in 2010. These notes do not, I think, put them back together again. The thrill of a secret life was my motivation before my arrest. No thrill when all is known. That my behavior feels like such utter silliness now also helps.
WXPN played the album Wilko made with Roger Daltrey, and I liked it for all of not having a clue who was Wilko Johnson.
Listen and enjoy:
"Problem Solving" got another review, but a rather nice one:
Thank you
for allowing us to read your submission. While there was a lot that we
loved about your work, we won't be moving forward with it for this
issue. We truly hope you will submit with us again in the future.
When
she learned she could make a living doing this, she never let the
thought go. Later, she would call it her “positive obsession” and would
put it all on the line. Her mother’s youngest sister, who was the first
in the family to go to college, became a nurse. Despite her family’s
warnings, she did exactly what she wanted to do. That same aunt would
tell Butler, “Negroes can’t be writers,” and advise her to get a
sensible job as a teacher or civil servant. She could have stability and
a nice pension, and if she really wanted to, she could write on the
side. “My aunt was too late with it, though,” Butler said. “She had
already taught me the only lesson I was willing to learn from her. I did
as she had done and ignored what she said.”
Butler
would grow up to write and publish a dozen novels and a collection of
short stories. She did not believe in talent as much as hard work. She
never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they
should learn, study, observe, and persist. Persistence was the lesson
she received from her mother, her grandmother, and her aunt. In her
lifetime, she would become the first published Black female
science-fiction writer and be considered one of the forebears of
Afrofuturism. “I may never get the chance to do all the things I want to
do,” a 17-year-old Butler wrote in her journals, now archived at the
Huntington Library in Pasadena. “To write 1 (or more) best sellers, to
initiate a new type of writing, to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer
prizes (in reverse order), and to sit my mother down in her own house
before she is too old and tired to enjoy it.” The world would catch up
to her dreams. In 2020, Parable of the Sower would hit the
best-seller list 27 years after its initial publication and 14 years
after Butler’s death. After years of imitation, Hollywood has put
adaptations of nearly all of her novels into development, beginning with
a Kindred show coming to Hulu in December. She is now experiencing a canonization that had only just begun in the last decade of her life.
###
What the archives show is how much she struggled with hope herself. She was “a pessimist if I’m not careful.” When she was working on a novel, her drafts tended to reveal the crueler sides of human nature. She didn’t like Lauren Olamina at first because she saw the character as a power seeker. Earlier iterations of Parable depicted her as a calculated leader who orders assassinations on her enemies and puts shock collars on those who try to leave Earthseed. But the version of Lauren in the finished book is wise, practical, strong — someone who could grow a community into a movement. If Butler had been writing idealized selves since childhood, Lauren was the young adult she wished she had been, and her rise into myth has come to resemble her character’s. You could understand this as a function of her desire for commercial success: We all need heroes. But another way to see it is that hope is not a given. It was through rewriting that she was able to imagine not only the darkest possible futures, but how to survive within them. Hope and writing were an entwined practice, the work of endless revision.
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas.
Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going
and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas
themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and
doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for
everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have
an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing
science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the
impossible.
Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of
my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who
swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent
of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at,
but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great
science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have
written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across
the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in
a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the
possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could
have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
INTERVIEWER
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?
BRADBURY
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t
been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last
fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the
importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been
neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty
years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction
of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except
in terms of intellectual snobbery.
I say he is still right about the novel of ideas. We may have even more need of it now with the rise of fascism. I will venture this opinion: MFA candidates do not need ideas, only style. My own former profession turns out people who have no education in history or politics or philosophy. Why should the writing schools not turn out writers who know only writing.
I dropped in on HarlanEllisonBooks.com just to see how one of the great short story tellers was faring 2 years after his death. It looks like he is doing fine.
It is 7:38. I need a break from the computer.
I have showered, and started yawning so hard, my body shakes. Thinking it is time to end this post.
This peculiar blending of artfulness and artlessness was saluted by
Sartre as a literary feat in his 1938 article “John Dos Passos and 1919.” Sartre writes of Dos Passos: “he has done everything possible to make his novel a
mere reflection. […] The reason is that his art is not gratuitous; he
wants to prove something. But observe what a curious aim he has. He
wants to show us this world, our own—to show it only, without
explanations or comment” (Sartre, 2003 363). Later in his essay, Sartre
emphasizes that the world Dos Passos presents to the reader is, however,
no mere reflection, but a carefully constructed object: “I know of
none—not even Faulkner’s or Kafka’s—in which the art is greater or
better hidden” (Sartre, 2003 364). Considering the trilogy as a work
where art is “hidden” might seem paradoxical, given the way in which the
author openly displays the structure of his novels, in which the
various modes of narration are typographically separated from each other
and identified by their titles (“Camera Eye,” “Newsreels”…). By
comparing Dos Passos to Kafka and Faulkner, Sartre implicitly
characterizes this hidden art as eminently modernist, thus going against
the conception of modernist novels as artefacts concerned with showing
their art rather than hiding it. The technique of montage, to which
Sartre refers, thus appears as both a way of bringing the novel closer
to a hypothetical “truth” of existence and a device that enables the
writer to reintroduce, through the impersonality of collage, a form of
narrative authority, of “hidden artfulness.”
If you are not interested in writing fiction, or my navel-gazing
meditations on my own writing, feel to move on. I continue what I
started in Cormac McCarthy's Style - Commentary on MFAs Writing the Future and On The Novel: Thank You, Milan Kundera I.
Here I am thinking out loud and keeping notes for myself and offering
ideas for others. That my "Love Stinks" has received rather negative
views has been a bit of a shock. Working through this shock, the
material coming out when Kundera died, impelled this run of writing.
You have said that you feel closer to the Viennese
novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch than to any other authors in
modern literature. Broch thought—as you do—that the age of the
psychological novel had come to an end. He believed, instead, in what he
called the “polyhistorical” novel.
MILAN KUNDERA
Musil
and Broch saddled the novel with enormous responsibilities. They saw it
as the supreme intellectual synthesis, the last place where man could
still question the world as a whole. They were convinced that the novel
had tremendous synthetic power, that it could be poetry, fantasy,
philosophy, aphorism, and essay all rolled into one. In his letters,
Broch makes some profound observations on this issue. However, it seems
to me that he obscures his own intentions by using the ill-chosen term
“polyhistorical novel.” It was in fact Broch’s compatriot, Adalbert
Stifter, a classic of Austrian prose, who created a truly polyhistorical
novel in his Der Nachsommer [Indian Summer], published in 1857. The
novel is famous: Nietzsche considered it to be one of the four greatest
works of German literature. Today, it is unreadable. It’s packed with
information about geology, botany, zoology, the crafts, painting, and
architecture; but this gigantic, uplifting encyclopedia virtually leaves
out man himself, and his situation. Precisely because it is
polyhistorical, Der Nachsommer totally lacks what makes the novel
special. This is not the case with Broch. On the contrary! He strove to
discover “that which the novel alone can discover.” The specific object
of what Broch liked to call “novelistic knowledge” is existence. In my
view, the word “polyhistorical” must be defined as “that which brings
together every device and every form of knowledge in order to shed light
on existence.” Yes, I do feel close to such an approach.
Philosophy,
by contrast, argues to prove a point and, with its own multifarious
means, tries to be right and reach conclusions. Kundera’s novels,
however, are expansive and support irreconcilable yet arguably valid
points of view. They employ polyphonic complexity and are rife with
irony and ambiguity, all the better to explore the full range of human
experience. One could drop (as Broch did in the final book of his
masterpiece, The Sleepwalkers) a philosophical essay into a
novel, and it becomes a point of view among points of view, an element
among elements. Even Kundera’s authorial voice in his novels, while
providing acute, even aphoristic philosophical commentary, is subject to
the same irony. It is finally no more than one perspective among many.
Nor does its “authority” lead to resolutions or secure conclusions.
Here, I may fail with "Love Stinks" - its ambiguity is not in its conclusion. It is only part of a longer story, and the whole does have - for now, it is ion my head - an ambiguous ending for in the end the principals and their family are left in the wider world of 2017. But the irreconcilable... that I need think about. Back to The Paris Review's interview:
INTERVIEWER
A
long essay you published in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur caused
the French to rediscover Broch. You speak highly of him, and yet you are
also critical. At the end of the essay, you write: “All great works
(just because they are great) are partly incomplete.”
KUNDERA
Broch
is an inspiration to us not only because of what he accomplished, but
also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain. The very
incompleteness of his work can help us understand the need for new art
forms, including: (1) a radical stripping away of unessentials (in order
to capture the complexity of existence in the modern world without a
loss of architectonic clarity); (2) “novelistic counterpoint” (to unite
philosophy, narrative, and dream into a single music); (3) the
specifically novelistic essay (in other words, instead of claiming to
convey some apodictic message, remaining hypothetical, playful, or
ironic).
INTERVIEWER
These three points seem to capture your entire artistic program.
KUNDERA
In
order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of
existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of
condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.
Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of the two or three novels that
I love most. But don’t ask me to admire its gigantic unfinished
expanse! Imagine a castle so huge that the eye cannot take it all in at a
glance. Imagine a string quartet that lasts nine hours. There are
anthropological limits—human proportions—that should not be breached,
such as the limits of memory. When you have finished reading, you should
still be able to remember the beginning. If not, the novel loses its
shape, its “architectonic clarity” becomes murky.
INTERVIEWER
The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting is made up of seven parts. If you had
dealt with them in a less elliptical fashion, you could have written
seven different full-length novels.
KUNDERA
But if I had
written seven independent novels, I would have lost the most important
thing: I wouldn’t have been able to capture the “complexity of human
existence in the modern world” in a single book. The art of ellipsis is
absolutely essential. It requires that one always go directly to the
heart of things. In this connection, I always think of a Czech composer I
have passionately admired since childhood: Leoš JanáÄek. He is one of
the greatest masters of modern music. His determination to strip music
to its essentials was revolutionary. Of course, every musical
composition involves a great deal of technique: exposition of the
themes, their development, variations, polyphonic work (often very
automatic), filling in the orchestration, the transitions, et cetera.
Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always
existed in composers’ heads—if they had to, composers could write
sonatas without a single original idea, just by “cybernetically”
expanding on the rules of composition. JanáÄek’s purpose was to destroy
this computer! Brutal juxtaposition instead of transitions; repetition
instead of variation—and always straight to the heart of things: only
the note with something essential to say is entitled to exist. It is
nearly the same with the novel; it too is encumbered by “technique,” by
rules that do the author’s work for him: present a character, describe a
milieu, bring the action into its historical setting, fill up the
lifetime of the characters with useless episodes. Every change of scene
requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations. My purpose is like
JanáÄek’s: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique,
of novelistic word-spinning.
I think this, again from The Paris Review, tracks what I read in Kundera's book that led me to thinking of the novel as a collage. It was afterwards, I read Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. My posts on Dos Passos are here. (Then, when I re-read Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County at the end of my prison career, I found I had run across another version of disaprate parts, Lockridge's imaginary newspaper articles, and simulaneity when I was a teenager. My notes from re-reading Raintree County are here. But he falls under Kundera's criticism of homogenity. I think of the imaginary newspaper pieces as a counterpoint - yes, KH, there is where I got the idea!)
KUNDERA
The novel
can incorporate outside elements in two ways. In the course of his
travels, Don Quixote meets various characters who tell him their tales.
In this way, independent stories are inserted into the whole, fitted
into the frame of the novel. This type of composition is often found in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels. Broch, however, instead of
fitting the story of Hanna Wendling into the main story of Esch and
Huguenau, lets both unfold simultaneously. Sartre (in The Reprieve), and
Dos Passos before him, also used this technique of simultaneity. Their
aim, however, was to bring together different novelistic stories, in
other words, homogeneous rather than heterogeneous elements as in the
case of Broch. Moreover, their use of this technique strikes me as too
mechanical and devoid of poetry. I cannot think of better terms than
“polyphony” or “counterpoint” to describe this form of composition and,
furthermore, the musical analogy is a useful one. For instance, the
first thing that bothers me about the third part of The Sleepwalkers is
that the five elements are not all equal. Whereas the equality of all
the voices in musical counterpoint is the basic ground rule, the sine
qua non. In Broch’s work, the first element (the novelistic narrative of
Esch and Huguenau) takes up much more physical space than the other
elements, and, even more important, it is privileged insofar as it is
linked to the two preceding parts of the novel and therefore assumes the
task of unifying it. It therefore attracts more attention and threatens
to turn the other elements into mere accompaniment. The second thing
that bothers me is that though a fugue by Bach cannot do without any one
of its voices, the story of Hanna Wendling or the essay on the decline
of values could very well stand alone as an independent work. Taken
separately, they would lose nothing of their meaning or of their
quality.
In my view, the basic requirements of novelistic
counterpoint are: (1) the equality of the various elements; (2) the
indivisibility of the whole. I remember that the day I finished “The
Angels,” part three of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I was
terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a
new way of putting together a narrative. The text was made up of the
following elements: (1) an anecdote about two female students and their
levitation; (2) an autobiographical narrative; (3) a critical essay on a
feminist book; (4) a fable about an angel and the devil; (5) a
dream-narrative of Paul Eluard flying over Prague. None of these
elements could exist without the others, each one illuminates and
explains the others as they all explore a single theme and ask a single
question: “What is an angel?”
Part six, also entitled “The
Angels,” is made up of: (1) a dream-narrative of Tamina’s death; (2) an
autobiographical narrative of my father’s death; (3) musicological
reflections; (4) reflections on the epidemic of forgetting that is
devastating Prague. What is the link between my father and the torturing
of Tamina by children? It is “the meeting of a sewing machine and an
umbrella” on the table of one theme, to borrow Lautréamont’s famous
image. Novelistic polyphony is poetry much more than technique. I can
find no example of such polyphonic poetry elsewhere in literature, but I
have been very astonished by Alain Resnais’s latest films. His use of
the art of counterpoint is admirable.
***
KUNDERA
Because
he has none! People often talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s,
or Musil’s. But just try to find a coherent philosophy in their
writings! Even when they express their ideas in their notebooks, the
ideas amount to intellectual exercises, playing with paradoxes, or
improvisations rather than to assertions of a philosophy. And
philosophers who write novels are nothing but pseudonovelists who use
the form of the novel in order to illustrate their ideas. Neither
Voltaire nor Camus ever discovered “that which the novel alone can
discover.” I know of only one exception, and that is the Diderot of
Jacques le fataliste. What a miracle! Having crossed over the boundary
of the novel, the serious philosopher becomes a playful thinker. There
is not one serious sentence in the novel—everything in it is play.
That’s why this novel is outrageously underrated in France. Indeed,
Jacques le fataliste contains everything that France has lost and
refuses to recover. In France, ideas are preferred to works. Jacques le
fataliste cannot be translated into the language of ideas, and therefore
it cannot be understood in the homeland of ideas.
Again, Man Thinks, God Laughs provides me some thinking here.
Central
to Kundera’s cynicism in a world that thinks it has all the answers is
the novel’s refreshing humility. When accepting the Jerusalem Prize for
the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1985, Kundera mentioned that
he had always been inspired by the Jewish adage, “Man thinks, God
laughs.” He liked to imagine that the medieval French comic genius (and
former Franciscan monk) François Rabelais “heard God’s laughter one day,
and thus was born the idea of the first great European novel.” It
pleased Kundera to think that “the art of the novel came into the world
as the echo of God’s laughter.” This laughter undermines our ready
truths and self-assured certainties, a disturbance that many of us find
unsettling. This laughter gave rise to one of Kundera’s most memorable
phrases: “But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is
master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There
it is, the unbearable lightness of being.”
Yet
lightness and uncertainty are invaluable ways of knowing the world and
our place in it. Plato and Aristotle, each in his own way, argued that
philosophy was born in the wonder that emerges when our certainties
collapse. Wonder and a healthy cynicism about our grand historical
certainties are what made Kundera’s work such valuable investigations of
reality. Although his fictions’ proximity to philosophy is striking,
Kundera resisted being characterized as a philosophical novelist. In an
interview with the writer Christian Salmon, the latter suggested that
Kundera’s novels could be characterized as “phenomenological.” Although
Kundera could appreciate Salmon’s point, he confessed that he was wary
of such terms because he was “too fearful of the professors for whom art
is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends.” The
novel is not philosophy by other means. It does not illustrate
philosophical ideas or stealthily make philosophical arguments.
What has been said about my "Love Stinks" can be said here: it is like a reality TV show. What was meant is a comedy. Dark, but with laughter. I think readers can laugh at the characters, and they can find times to laugh with the characters. None of which seems to have come through by my readers outside of prison. (Still waiting on you, niece and MW and T2, as I write this.)
But what about laughing at literary tradition when that tradition gets in the way of telling a story? KH tells me I have made "Love Stinks" difficult with its formatting. I thought the problem would be the intrusions of memory, flashbacks, which I saw as being like in a film, a quick cut in and out. No, what bothered him were what I designated the counterpoint scenes. In those scenes, I have the assembled group watching a video made by one of the children, and I formatted what was going on the TV screen as if it were a screenplay while also recording the reactions of the audience. The latter are displayed in parentheticals. What is recorded functions as an objective counterpoint to the subjective sections of the principals. The reactions are what I think would okay in reaction to the recording. I knew no other way to get what I wanted in another way. So, I wrote it the way it unspooled in my head and assumed the form could handle my methods. Now, it seems I did not think of readers.
INTERVIEWER
In
The Joke, it is Jaroslav who develops a musicological theory. The
hypothetical character of his thinking is thus apparent. But the
musicological meditations in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are the
author’s, your own. How am I then to understand whether they are
hypothetical or assertive?
KUNDERA
It all depends on the
tone. From the very first words, my intention is to give these
reflections a playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or questioning
tone. All of part six of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (“The Grand
March”) is an essay on kitsch which expounds one main thesis: kitsch is
the absolute denial of the existence of shit. This meditation on kitsch
is of vital importance to me. It is based on a great deal of thought,
experience, study, and even passion. Yet the tone is never serious; it
is provocative. This essay is unthinkable outside of the novel, it is a
purely novelistic meditation.
***
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by farce?
KUNDERA
I
mean the emphasis on plot and on all its trappings of unexpected and
incredible coincidences. Nothing has become as suspect, ridiculous,
old-fashioned, trite, and tasteless in a novel as plot and its farcical
exaggerations. From Flaubert on, novelists have tried to do away with
the artifices of plot. And so the novel has become duller than the
dullest of lives. Yet there is another way to get around the suspect and
worn-out aspect of the plot, and that is to free it from the
requirement of likelihood. You tell an unlikely story that chooses to be
unlikely! That’s exactly how Kafka conceived Amerika. The way Karl
meets his uncle in the first chapter is through a series of the most
unlikely coincidences. Kafka entered into his first “sur-real” universe,
into his first “fusion of dream and reality,” with a parody of the
plot—through the door of farce.
INTERVIEWER
But why did you choose the farce form for a novel that is not at all meant to be an entertainment?
KUNDERA
But
it is an entertainment! I don’t understand the contempt that the French
have for entertainment, why they are so ashamed of the word
“divertissement.” They run less risk of being entertaining than of being
boring. And they also run the risk of falling for kitsch, that
sweetish, lying embellishment of things, the rose-colored light that
bathes even such modernist works as Eluard’s poetry or Ettore Scola’s
recent film Le Bal, whose subtitle could be: “French history as kitsch.”
Yes, kitsch, not entertainment, is the real aesthetic disease! The
great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true
novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great
entertainments are terribly serious—think of Cervantes! In The Farewell
Party, the question is, does man deserve to live on this earth?
Shouldn’t one “free the planet from man’s clutches”? My lifetime
ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the
utmost lightness of form. Nor is this purely an artistic ambition. The
combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately
unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well
as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their
awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.
Think about it - the human imagination is the limit of the novel.
Which, I think, brings me to On the Aesthetic Turn by Anastasia Berg from The Point. She discusses the morality of art from the perspective of the reader. As I am learning, if the reader does not understand, or accept, the artistic venture fails. Yes, yes, there are plenty of examples of where art failing to find a contemporary audience finds one in the future - there is the career of Van Gogh and there is the history of Moby Dick. I am neither. I do not mean throwing away the work - did that once and see that as an act of cowardice that I cannot repeat. I do mean it means listening carefully to the criticism (contrary to some of our American politicians, criticism is neither canceling nor censorship) to pick out the changes justifiable in light of the project, and revising to communicate better get across one's vision. Neither Van Gogh nor Melville needed to revise their vision - their vision being quite clear in the works - and did need until the day that people saw better their visions. No, I want to turn to Ms. Berg's essay for why not to give up, which I think is not alien to the vision of Kundera:
If good art and its criticism can free us from anything, it can free us,
first and foremost, from the totalizing fantasies that are fed by such
images—whether of mountains shot by fascists, or of the perfect faces
generated by algorithms, or of a society cleansed of its treacherous
elites or deplorables. It can liberate us, in other words, from the
comforting delusion that we can ever transcend our human limits, defeat
death, unhappiness and evil once and for all, or live in anyone’s vision
of heaven on earth. This does not mean, however, that we can ever be
liberated from the infinite pull of beauty itself, or be able to attend
to images only when we feel like it. It is rather like this: we can
decide what to do, but we can never decide what to dream.
And then back to Man Thinks, God Laughs:
In
the later years of his long life, Kundera worked hard to tidy up his
works, supervising and revising translations, and deciding on the final
form, contents, and appearance of his oeuvre. He presented his works,
not himself, to those that would find their dogged humility and sense of
wonder and humor inspiring, even liberating. The work of the novelist
is not to promote one’s own inner or outer life but to produce works
that, for all their difficulty and ambiguity, seek to illuminate the
ever-unfolding mystery of all things human.
Whatever may be my faults as a writer, I started writing as part of therapy and I continued to pay witness to the lives I have seen. They have value, and if I can write a proper story - one that captures their lives with a language that matches their value, then I will feel successful. Whatever may be your faults, keep working - keep scribbling and thinking and revising. The novel has a place in the life of humanity. The novel combines the psychological, the rational, the historical in a manner that, I think, sidesteps the decadence of Western culture proclaimed in Beyond Progressivism, even if the novel cannot give us a declarative answer to being human, only to join us with humanity in all its weirdness. That I think is what Kundera and Cormac McCarthy were about. We should all try for the same goal.
