Clockwork Texts

I have to admit that I often feel like some what of an impostor writing literary critiques. Not that I couldn't tell you what is going on in a given story, but as a writer I am often more interested in unveiling an author's techniques, so that I can learn to use them (or not) in my own work. I am currently working on a critique of the use of mythic narrative forms in Beckett's "The Calmative," which while interesting in what it has to say about the literary use of mythical themes, is less fascinating then what seems to have been Beckett's implicit literary goal: to point out all of the conventional expectations about how narrative works, and then roundly demolish any chance that his stories will follow these conventions. Throughout the height of his prose career in the '50s, spanning from this story across his "trilogy," Beckett routinely looks at the typical narrative devices, plot, setting, characters, action, narrative voice, and then strips them away, so that by the "Texts for Nothing" there is literally no recognizable place where these elements can exist in the text. Certainly I could try and write a paper on this authorial move, but I find myself almost fascinated by the way these works have laid literary devices bare, so that I can hardly read any piece of writing without saying, oh here's where the author is using x expected device... It is like suddenly stumbling into the backstage of writing, the pulleys and costume changes of storytelling, and I almost want to hoard these techniques like they are some occult secret. The other day I was talking with my fiction teacher about the early authorial move of apprenticing yourself to a few authors, writing your own versions of their work in order to collect a "bag of tricks" that can be later dipped into in your own writing. While I haven't ever exactly written someone else's story I am always on the look out for these mechanical underpinnings of fiction.



More recently I was reading Borges for class and in the introduction found an interesting passage which described Borges' perspective on the elements of fantastic literature, something near and dear to me in my detestation (or at least boredom) with stories of the realistically everyday. While the fantastic in art is often categorized as an emotional reaction to the super- or un-natural, where unlike magical realism where the fantastic is accepted as bieng a part of everyday life, fantastic literature maintains a sate of anxiety or wonder in the face of the more than real. An, oh god is this really happening feeling that seems to be all but avoided in modern literature. Borges on the other hand takes an entirely different look at what makes literature fantastic, suggesting four specific mechanisms: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by the dream, the voyage in time, and the double. Personally these elements are much more familiar to me from doing most of my writing from my dreams. The almost meta level symbolism in which every event, setting, object, character etc. stands for the consciousness of the protagonist, the chaotic moment when what seems like an everyday world falls apart (whether into thwartedness, false resolves, or unexplained yet emotionally vexing illogical incidents), and the reflection of scenes and symbols as if they were harmonics of themselves. Of Borges' mechanics the one most ambiguous seems to be the voyage in time, which can not just reflect the ordinary meaning of a temporal plot, but seems to suggest a larger adventure, or, a stepping outside of one's day and age within the story. Of course, one again, I could use these elements as a sort of map or template to deconstruct the writing of others, but instead they will go into my trick bag, so that someone someday may be shocked to find them in my own work.