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O U L I P O O U L I P O Wassily Kandinsky
“The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order: a machine that will produce avant-garde work to free its circuits when they are choked by too long a production of classicism.” —Italo Calvino
The struggle of Literature is in fact a struggle to escape the confines of Literature.
By analogy Language is to the writer what paint is to the painter… Both share a common history : a long, long story about the power of mimesis: the power of the medium to RE-present the world.
The goal of the artist: mimesis of nature; enlightenment through embodied/landscaped ideas: ideas--us. Narrative--represented through realistic forms enhanced by vanishing point perspective The mark of the master artist is craft/technique and the employment of craft toward moral, humanistic ideals. The arts seek epiphany in content and rational, scientific correctness in form
In the first half of the 18th century, photography, not painterly realism, is suddenly the apotheosis of the mimetic impulse.
Though art has long been cumulative and, in this sense, self-reflective, as the turn of the century approaches, artists begin to create ruptures with the past that also upset cultural values, tastes, assumptions. Manet: dejeuner sur l’herbe, 1863
In Manet, we already see the art leaving the canvas, aware of its medium, aware of its situation (in the gallery) and somewhat tired of tradition. Manet, Olympia 1863
Cezanne was dissatisfied with the empty formalism of impressionism. If painting could leave behind the search for traditional mimesis, and it could leave behind its traditional aristocratic subjects, then why should it not enter life itself? Present life itself in paint? Modernist artists still struggling to find the proper subject matter and themes Revolutions of subject parallel revolutions of form. Cezanne
Picasso 1907 Variations on abstraction initiate the final split from the mimetic history of painting. With both form and content overthrown, the painting is paint first, then composition, and… perhaps nothing else.
Kandinsky Contrasting Sounds 1924
Pollock Moon-Woman
Pollock creates yet another kind of break in the continuity of artistic practice: his actual methods of painting utterly transform the craft. Not to mention that he was never skilled at representation. What makes an artist good? Worthy of attention? Can artists invent their own methods to master? What should artists learn? Pollock Number 8 1949
The atomic law of clinamen, according to Lucretius:...From De rerum natura, as quoted in Imagining Language Basic bodies take a certain structure, And have defined positions, and exchange Their blows in certain ways. The same bodies, With only a slight change in their structure, Are capable of forming wood or fire. Like letters in the words for these same things, Ignus and lignum: with slight transpositions, They can be nominated ‘flames,’ or ‘beams’ “…Atoms, then, are to bodies what letters are to words: heterogeneous, deviant, and combinatory.”
The nineteenth century, from Hegel to Darwin, saw the triumph of historical continuity and biological continuity as they healed all the fractures of dialectical antitheses and genetic mutations. Postmodernism is the locus of a crisis language… (Realism has become a State Fiction, a part of the machinery, of the political state. It is through the machinery of realism that the state explains to its citizens the relationship between themselves and nature, economics, politics, and their own sexuality… postmodernism…[opposes] any totalizing fiction of life, that which, in Calvino’s words, seeks “to confirm and consecrate the established order of things.”) - Curtis White
(thanks to World Games)REALISM Presumes: ——A positively determinable world external to the work of fiction and which it’s the fundamental responsibility of fiction to represent ——That the world is a complete, integrated system governed by a coherent scheme of rules (“natural laws”) ——Mimesis is the right procedure, therefore, for fiction, being the material description of an empirically verifiable world ——That fiction should pursue a resemblance to facts and the presentation of the probable, according to our experience and our normative procedures of history and science. ——That because subjectivity is the greatest barrier to our perception of truth, the ‘teller’ of a fiction should appear and behave as objectively as possible.
. . . the realistfiction should generate a complete and unbroken illusion of a world that we can ‘be in’ and should, in the end, present “a truth that may be unambiguously paraphrased.” All of these are essential to the presumed didactic function of literature. These, generally, are assumptions, values of the same order as the “rules” referred to in the OULIPO packet, that is, unconscious constraints. The results of these rules, these values that seem utterly natural and unassailable, are many, for an unconscious rule cannot easily be broken, and gives rise to further rules, explicit values and assertions about the function and material of literature. “Under” realism, meaning exists in the world; its expression in language is coincidental with the author’s ability to master certain techniques. Anti-realism, understandably, claims the opposite.
READERLY QUESTIONS: Why do we read? What do we expect? What are we looking for? How do we “read”?
DefiningGENRE reduction Expectation/anticipation pleasure Symbols/meaning words
Yesterday on Route Seven A car Traveling at sixty miles per hour rammed a sycamore Its four occupants were Killed.
Realism, and even modernism in its traditional mode had as its assumptions linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and middle class moral values… But many of these factors held within them the seeds of the end of modernism, its exhaustion. For instance,
if writers were interested in and emphasized in their work an examination of the nature of consciousness, and, following Freud, the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the logic of literature, which is also the logic of escaping literature and language, also the law of perfecting and distorting and merging genres… The logic f literature leads them to... ...not only exhaust the existing narrative techniques for representing thought, but to invent, for instance stream of consciousness, and then work to exhaust and transform this technique
These transitions are limit experiences for writers; they have exhausted something, or they feel that something is exhausted. As John Barth claims of Borges (in reference particularly to Pierre Menard),“His artistic victory…is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new ...work” At a limit, it seems possible to distinguish between “naïve” novels and deliberate or “meta” novels: novels that exhibit and respond to the limits of the existing conventions.
"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.” --Borges
The Death of the Author “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law.” Roland Barthes
The goal of literature, according to Barthes, should be "to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.
The decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading. calvino
Perhaps the most striking feature of modern literature is the appearance of a new monolithic, comprehensive mode of writing, in which the distinctions among genres, which have been completely abandoned, give way to what are admittedly “books,” but books for which, we might say, no method of reading has yet been worked out.” Philippe Sollers
The author’s experienced context The Imagined “Author” Reader’s context Reader’s memory Reader Reading The TEXT The Author The Narrator The Author’s Historical and Literary Context
Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society.
Syllables Sounds Words Phrases Sentences Description Dialogue Images Motifs Symbols Allusions Inertextuality Metaphor Allegory Tension Conflict Narrative/or Pattern Structure Plot Character Theme Creating a form, a literary object that readers can perform, a work that, in the right place on the hypothetical bookshelf, causes sparks.
The definition of mastery & the elimination of genius. W h a t i s q u a l i t y ? W h a t i s v a l i d w or k ? These questions feel very different when we are in the process of writing. And writing is not really the process of seeking validity. While the metaphor of the hypothetical bookshelf may allow you to put your work in context and to perceive your reader as a literary being as much as the author is a being made only of words on the page, it’s poor consolation in the writing process.
We still want to know what good writing is. But let’s go back briefly one step: why should writing be good? “Good,” after all, is subjective. My own rationalization for why writing should be “good” includes a trust in the medium of language and even in some of the existing conventions of language to help us to write at and explore the limits of our knowledge, our senses — the limits, you might say, of our condition. It must include, then, — an understanding of the conventions that make literature what it is, —an approach that is essentially experimental, not because it’s wacky, but because it proceeds by trial and error.
To be good at writing also means that the very act and process of writing, revising, crafting, applying techniques, and so on is a process of intellectual, emotional, and imaginative exploration and growth. To be GOOD is to be changing, to be becoming something else—why wouldn’t a writer strive for this transformation if it is what he expects his reader to achieve? And clearly, all of this reasoning does not merely parallel writing to reading: writing is reading: as a writer you are foremost a reader. Reading what you have written is far more challenging than getting it on the page. Good writers are also good readers. They are aware of how language works and how it affects them. They are aware of their process of writing and how it might work for others.
Advice for writers comes in three forms: 1 The writing is compared with and judged by its relationship to conventions: How well does the work achieve what it appears to be repeating from other works? If it seems to be a mystery, does it have the qualities of a “good” mystery as we know from reading other things? Questions of this type will point to the plot structure, the quality and kind of character development, the presence and appropriateness of themes; generally, such questions utilize the terms that we are familiar with to “check” the writing for what are commonly considered flaws or possibilities, or, of course, successes. A flaw can be a failed deviation from the norm, or it can be a failed attempt at reproducing the norm.
2 The writing is described in terms of the reader’s experience of it. The reader’s experience cannot be said to have any absolute perspective on the work except in so far as it can be carefully discussed between reader and writer. In the first kind of advice, reader and writer have an external text in common (the “good” mystery). But when the reader’s experience is at the fore, the writer and reader can only share the writer’s work. The writer can see their work but dimly; the reader instinctively sees it as flawed and partial. Here, the challenge is the reader’s: to accurately sense and describe their experience of reading. This approach produces fewer questions and more descriptions on the part of the reader. The implicit question, of course, is “Did you mean [this]…?” It’s up to the author to pose more specific questions, to see if his technique has been effective (or even noticed), if his themes are emerging clearly, and so on… formulating these questions requires that the writer know what he intends or where there might be problems. It’s a bit unfair to ask your reader: “did it make sense?” Likewise, it’s unfair to pretend that whatever the reader “gets” is what you intended, or represents the polysemic nature of your work. A writer should be able to—or willing to try to—answer all of the reader’s questions.
3 This last one is the most difficult because it can be mistaken for an invitation to counsel the writer. There is no doubt that writing can tell us a lot about someone. But what it can tell us is no more accurate than what the shape of one’s skull tells us. But this last form of advice understands the journey that every writer is taking in their work, the process of discovery, change, and introspection. It is, then, the advice that encourages and guides this process, but it must be done through the writing on the page, not confused with psychological and emotional counseling, and it must be distinct from the reader’s experience and issues of criteria. The best question to ask the writer, and sometimes the only one, in this mode is: “Why are you doing this?” The answer, of course, should not be, “because I have to.”
Unquenchable in all of this, and in the spirit of The Turbulent Mirror, it is difficult to desire anything but wholeness, even in chaos, even though it be partial wholeness, a broken whole...
The workshop “method” & learning to write Cormac McCarthy: “Teaching writing is a scam.” Kay Boyle: “All creative writing programs ought to be abolished by law.” Tom Grimes:“Let’s leave behind, for the moment, the historical vicissitudes of literary theory and return to the original question. Can creativity be learned, let alone taught?” Eve Shelnutt: “I have never been interested in the question that has plagued MFA programs since their inception, namely can creative writing be taught?”
Some of your ducks and shoot them now. You are the author. You are not the narrator. Even if the narrator is you, you are not the narrator. Narrators can have a variety of relationships to the story they relate: First Person Central First Person Peripheral Third Person Limited Third Person Shifting Omniscient Objective or Effaced Stream of Consciousness Meta-author
The beginning of every short story is ridiculous at first. There seems to be no hope that this newborn thing, still incomplete and tender in every joint, will be able to keep alive in the complicated organization of the world, which, like every complicated organization, strives to close itself off. However, one should not forget that the story, if it has any justification to exist, bears its complete organization within itself even before it has been fully formed; for this reason despair over the beginning of a story is unwarranted; in a like case parents should have to despair of their suckling infant, for they had no intention of bringing this pathetic and ridiculous being into the world. -Franz Kafka.
