Having hurtled through "Gravity's Rainbow" earlier in the summer, I decided to continue my roll of large-scale fiction and tackle another tome that's been on my list for half a decade, Infinite Jest, a task made easier by knowing that countless others are also slogging through David Foster Wallace's masterpiece. I am currently at the halfway point, some 550 pages in, and since that's beyond the Infinite Summer reading schedule I won't say anything specific about the novel's plot and instead focus on its extreme length. One might wonder, in an age of increasingly brief and fast communications, when narratives over 140 characters are considered too long for our casual attentions, why anyone would read, let alone write, a novel as thick and dense as a dictionary, despite the quote that "the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge [has] become the highest credential for male writers." Besides smarmy erudition, what purpose could such massive stories serve?
Personally I have always been partial to these sprawling and epic books, perhaps due to reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as a child, followed by an unabridged copy of "Les Misérables" in middle school, and have recently come to feel that what Tomes (as I distinguish them as a literary form) do is allow an author to create and represent a fully realized world or reality, far beyond the ability of lesser fictions. Certainly the novel as a form was originally invented (at the end of the 19th Century) in order to represent reality as it is, ie: Realism, though it never quite did this. Even contemporary realist novels fall into the same problems of being able to present only selected facets of reality (and hence are more artificial than realist), relying on current cultural assumptions to convey what there isn't room to say about how worlds work, and preferring to deploy the quotidian and inconsequential as the most available sign of "real life," while completely neglecting to address other, larger, and just as necessary (if not more so) aspects of human existence, as if reality only happened in small towns, bars, or foreign countries. Some examples: historical/global change (Pynchon and Neal Stephenson's more tome-like works), a person's lifetime (Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest," Ellison's "The Invisible Man," Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"), Familial generations (Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"), the fantastic/mythic ("Lord of the Rings" and other fantasy series, serving as an escape (in Tolkien's sense) from being too close to events so that we can see them on a larger perspective), or the worlds hidden and horrendous that lurk just behind the ones in which we live (Delaney's "Dhalgren," Bolaño's "2666). As Roberto Bolaño suggested, though I can't find the source, the quest and the apocalypse are the two most prominent themes in American literature, and I would argue in stories in general since long before stories were written down. And it seems preposterous that one could even think to tackle these themes, much less represent a real world, in anything less than 800 or so pages. The novel on the other hand can only capture a subset, most predominately the individual (person or location). Short stories best communicate a series of events or Poe's unified effect, and flash fictions the immediacy of an event. The tome meanwhile can convey all these at once, while at the same time placing the character in a local, national, and global milieu to which they have to respond, in a world that is not just fully articulated but is itself changing alongside (and at best reflective of) the character/s. What the shorter forms dangerously lack is the ability to remind us that we live in such a total world, with all a worlds' problems, peoples, beliefs, circumstances, etc, beyond the immediacy of our easily distractable and entertainment-starved attentions. One could argue that the briefer our narratives become the less they are able to represent to us humanity and its deepest struggles on that necessary ultimate level, leaving us to forget the past beyond our last twitter or status update. If the written word has a future it is in striving to keep representing reality as it really and vastly is: all-encompassing.
So how does Infinite Jest work as a tome? It clearly encompasses a lot, but this far in I don't think it encompasses enough. The world represented is on one hand a futuristic satire of the West, where the Americas are one country, years are subsidized by corporations, and everyone is still as hung up on pleasure as they were last century. But at the same time the actual action (if there is any) is set in a tennis academy and halfway house in Boston that already feel outdated, presumably late 1990's era, leaving the represented world feeling somewhat contradictory and slapdash, as if these disparate ideas were thrown together to satisfy DFW's theme of Entertainment rather than because they formed a cohesive, realistic whole, like most other tomes I've read manage. Secondly, though the novel takes place over a period of ten years, most of the action takes place in a period of several months, the last of which is told first, so that the reader is not given that epic sense of broad-scale changes taking place over large swathes of time (we only get these events in flashbacks), but instead a flattening of event-ness, where the action focuses solely on the minutiae of everyday life, so that it reads that nothing of narrative importance is happening at all (except for in what up to this point seems a series of subplots). Third, due to this focus on the quotidian unjuxtaposed with the epic or kairotic, told from the POV of multiple quotidian characters, I am hard pressed to believe that any of these narratives add up to something. Though supposedly they do. Though I have a sinking suspicion I already figured out what in the first hundred pages. Lastly, and most relevant to Infinite Jest's infinite length is the banal, unmusical, longwindednes of its language. DFW broke the primary rule of engaging storytelling and chose to tell descriptions instead of show events occurring, which is frightfully slow to plow through in search of the moving bits. Whole pages are spent describing the structural integrity of a roof for instance, or sentences will repeat information just given a sentence before, as if DFW thought the reader too stupid or distracted to remember what he just said, most of this description seeming to serve no other purpose than to showcase the erudition of the author and/or the hyper-intelligent main protagonist (though all the other characters speak this way too). Not even to mention the colloquial use of the word "like," which is not nearly as funny or enduring as Pynchon's use of "that," for instance. And then there are the endnotes, almost a hundred pages worth, which I respect for their contribution to Ergodic literature, though in this case these notes are often even more irrelevant details, could have just been included in the text, sound faux-academic like some of the more ghastly footnotes in Danielewski's "House of Leaves," or can't even be left unread/add another perspective like the extra chapters in Cortazar's "Hopscotch," because IJ's endnotes contain actual information about what's going on in the story, often more useful information than is ever presented in the main body of the text, which just comes off as unadoringly postmodern. In fact, it seems that the first half of the book is DFW's attempt at creating this world (with how this world was created being the payoff?), while he never seems capable of just letting the created world do its thing, as if he was afraid that if he stopped tinkering the whole thing would fall apart.
One thing Infinite Jest does well is that all its diverse characters/ruminations do in fact relate to the main theme of Entertainment (though admittedly a Western upper/middle class view of entertainment). This is particularly poignant in the Marathe/ Steeply dialogues, which are my favorite sections so far and could have been a much more streamlined philosophical document or cultural critique. I could care less about privileged tennis prodigies, and only find the AA digressions interesting due to knowing people in the program (though these bits are deeply informed, they are told in an ironic/hopeless manner almost counter to the kind of spiritual prescience and egolessness necessary it seems to really tackle the issue of addiction without mocking it, which leaves me thinking its no wonder DFW erased his own map last year if this was his worldview, or a worldview he was motivated enough to write over a thousand pages on). Nevertheless, I am still curious to see what happens, to see how and if it all ties together, and hope that my perspectives on the tome's style and discontinuities are proven wrong. If not then at least I will have the satisfaction, as an ardent reader, of having gotten through it, a satisfaction like that of mountain climbers who have reached the summit of a particularly challenging peak. As a tome, at least Infinite Jest is a challenging peak, and not just another narrative molehill.
Showing posts with label Cortazar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cortazar. Show all posts
4.30.2008
Library of Unique Experiences
As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.
For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.
Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.
Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.
Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.
Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.
Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.
Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.
Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.
John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.
J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.
Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."
Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.
Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.
Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.
Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.
Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.
Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.
Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.
Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.
Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.
For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.
Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.
Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.
Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.
Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.
Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.
Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.
Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.
John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.
J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.
Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."
Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.
Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.
Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.
Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.
Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.
Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.
Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.
Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.
Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.
4.15.2008
Synchronicity of the Fantastic
As I noted before, I've been doing a lot of research recently on the aesthetics and techniques of using the fantastic in literature, and as often happens when I'm doing a lot of research on the right subject that I need to be studying for my life, there is a moment when synchronicity takes over and it seems as if the universe is just throwing the right texts at me.
In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.
There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.
And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.
In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.
There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.
And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.
8.11.2007
open endings
I have been reading for a long time, pouring through stories at an unprecedented rate since I cold put sentences together, even being precocious enough to read the unabridged version of "Les Miserables" by 7th grade. But up till now, literature has always moved in one direction, from the front cover to the back, and I wrongfully assumed this was the only way to tell a story.
In the past several months I've discovered a near infinitude of story telling mechanisms, stumbling through several cases of what is called 'ergodic literature,' that is, texts that require a non-trivial effort to traverse the text, more than just the movement of eyes and pages from left to right, the reader performing the bare minimum necessary to interpret what they are reading. Several entries ago I mentioned Milorad Pavich's "Dictionary of the Khazars," a novel told through encyclopedia entries that one can read in any order, assembling the sense of a narrative for themselves. More recently I have fallen into what is perhaps the most important work of this type, Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch," the story of several expatriate intellectuals living in Paris, debating semantics until several disturbing events drive them apart. Beyond a beautiful sense of language and rhythm, Cortazar sets up fifty-six main chapters, which can be interspersed with over a hundred more following various cues in the text, and drastically changing the meaning of the work on a second reading. "Hopscotch" has been hailed by some as the originator of hypertext fiction, though it was written in the late 60s, and requires that one actually has to search through the book for the next chapter. After this I picked up Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves," which while not quite as impressive literaturely as "Hopscotch" was endlessly more ergodically fascinating. The 'story' is really a critical text about a film called the Navidson Record, which may or may not exist, written and annotated by a blind man and found by a young punk who adds his own twisted footnotes and storylines to the already winding text. The core narrative itself is about a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside, passages leading to evolving corridors, stairwells, labyrinths, and the text itself reflects the characters movements across tunnels and abysses. I couldn't put the book down, felt myself almost being consumed by it as quickly as I was consuming it, and when I finally finished it I was struck by the realization that the way I approach literature will never be the same.
For years now, I have been trying to sort through my dreams in order to write a novel out of them, and continually come upon the problem of how to organize them, how to present material so that it maintains it essentially dream-like quality. But all of this stood within what I thought were the bounds of conventional literature. Now however it is like I stepped through a door into a terrifyingly large space, full of possibility of what it means to tell a story. It reminds me of being a child, and climbing up to the top of a lighthouse, the closed stairwell spiraling with the familiarity of the Everyday, but on reaching the top you are confronted with the sky, vast, inviting, a sense of space suddenly reoriented from safety to terror, clutching the railing at the edge of the known while still wanting, desperately, to learn how to fly. I think about my work now, already at such an early state, and am struck by the sheer possibility of where it could go, how it could be conceived. Not quite the writer's fear of the blank page, but a fear of what could be put on it. Mallarme, in his poem "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," itself a masterwork of non-linearality, with the words spilling in literal waves over the pages, describes this feeling of facing the page as being "cast into the constant neutrality of the abyss." Anything is possible, but then the pen falls and something happens, but between those two just what is open to anything, fluctuations of mood and light and desire.
Not that it is necessary to tell stories in such roundabout ways, narrative abounds with ways of breaking that sense of constant time and meaning; flashbacks, delay. Both Pavich and Danielewski's latest ergodic works recieved horrible reviews (but as they are about respectively the tarot and the history of revolution, both themes that intrigue me, I will probably read them anyway, at least to seee how not to tell this kind of story). But there is still sometyhing fascinating about having to flip through a text, back and forth as cues take you. It is much more like how the mind works, not in some linear train of thought, but full of connections, associations, symbols that relate to each other in countless different ways, always suggesting much more than just what is on the neurons around them. Dreams may appear to be narrative in scope, but this is only a 'secondary revision,' the collecting of the images themselves being the key to their understanding, always pointing to each other and to something deeper, hidden beneath the linearality of events. Awhile back I had a dream in which I was teaching a school of witches a game about how history is created. I placed a chair in the middle of the room, then arranged progressively wider arcs of chairs around this center. One person in the front tells a story about an object on the chair, which like an endless game of telephone gets passed back through larger groups of people, each time getting further and further removed from the 'truth' of the event, everyone of course having their own idea of what truth is, until their are countless stories surrounding any one object or event. Somehow, this seems more true to me than any one history ascribed by one person (usually the victors), as we all have our own perspectives and an ability to decide what that means to us. Of course, I may have read too many choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a child.
In the past several months I've discovered a near infinitude of story telling mechanisms, stumbling through several cases of what is called 'ergodic literature,' that is, texts that require a non-trivial effort to traverse the text, more than just the movement of eyes and pages from left to right, the reader performing the bare minimum necessary to interpret what they are reading. Several entries ago I mentioned Milorad Pavich's "Dictionary of the Khazars," a novel told through encyclopedia entries that one can read in any order, assembling the sense of a narrative for themselves. More recently I have fallen into what is perhaps the most important work of this type, Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch," the story of several expatriate intellectuals living in Paris, debating semantics until several disturbing events drive them apart. Beyond a beautiful sense of language and rhythm, Cortazar sets up fifty-six main chapters, which can be interspersed with over a hundred more following various cues in the text, and drastically changing the meaning of the work on a second reading. "Hopscotch" has been hailed by some as the originator of hypertext fiction, though it was written in the late 60s, and requires that one actually has to search through the book for the next chapter. After this I picked up Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves," which while not quite as impressive literaturely as "Hopscotch" was endlessly more ergodically fascinating. The 'story' is really a critical text about a film called the Navidson Record, which may or may not exist, written and annotated by a blind man and found by a young punk who adds his own twisted footnotes and storylines to the already winding text. The core narrative itself is about a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside, passages leading to evolving corridors, stairwells, labyrinths, and the text itself reflects the characters movements across tunnels and abysses. I couldn't put the book down, felt myself almost being consumed by it as quickly as I was consuming it, and when I finally finished it I was struck by the realization that the way I approach literature will never be the same.
For years now, I have been trying to sort through my dreams in order to write a novel out of them, and continually come upon the problem of how to organize them, how to present material so that it maintains it essentially dream-like quality. But all of this stood within what I thought were the bounds of conventional literature. Now however it is like I stepped through a door into a terrifyingly large space, full of possibility of what it means to tell a story. It reminds me of being a child, and climbing up to the top of a lighthouse, the closed stairwell spiraling with the familiarity of the Everyday, but on reaching the top you are confronted with the sky, vast, inviting, a sense of space suddenly reoriented from safety to terror, clutching the railing at the edge of the known while still wanting, desperately, to learn how to fly. I think about my work now, already at such an early state, and am struck by the sheer possibility of where it could go, how it could be conceived. Not quite the writer's fear of the blank page, but a fear of what could be put on it. Mallarme, in his poem "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," itself a masterwork of non-linearality, with the words spilling in literal waves over the pages, describes this feeling of facing the page as being "cast into the constant neutrality of the abyss." Anything is possible, but then the pen falls and something happens, but between those two just what is open to anything, fluctuations of mood and light and desire.
Not that it is necessary to tell stories in such roundabout ways, narrative abounds with ways of breaking that sense of constant time and meaning; flashbacks, delay. Both Pavich and Danielewski's latest ergodic works recieved horrible reviews (but as they are about respectively the tarot and the history of revolution, both themes that intrigue me, I will probably read them anyway, at least to seee how not to tell this kind of story). But there is still sometyhing fascinating about having to flip through a text, back and forth as cues take you. It is much more like how the mind works, not in some linear train of thought, but full of connections, associations, symbols that relate to each other in countless different ways, always suggesting much more than just what is on the neurons around them. Dreams may appear to be narrative in scope, but this is only a 'secondary revision,' the collecting of the images themselves being the key to their understanding, always pointing to each other and to something deeper, hidden beneath the linearality of events. Awhile back I had a dream in which I was teaching a school of witches a game about how history is created. I placed a chair in the middle of the room, then arranged progressively wider arcs of chairs around this center. One person in the front tells a story about an object on the chair, which like an endless game of telephone gets passed back through larger groups of people, each time getting further and further removed from the 'truth' of the event, everyone of course having their own idea of what truth is, until their are countless stories surrounding any one object or event. Somehow, this seems more true to me than any one history ascribed by one person (usually the victors), as we all have our own perspectives and an ability to decide what that means to us. Of course, I may have read too many choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a child.
8.02.2007
Letters on the Night
Another night and no sleep, the black winged heat beating the skull into reticulated and endless queries. That trembling line between ritual and addiction, this humanity of angels, or the angelization of certain people at times to aid our desperate prayed for needing.
Reading Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Intriguing. After many fancy flips between the odd literated chapters, I suddenly realized I was reading, not just the ideas or narrative, but the flow of language as its own content. A thread of meter and assonance I had not picked out before, not completely in Cortazar's court, as I've been reversiting a faerie-tale I haven't wrote on in ages (Itelf a gnarled romp of synchronated cryptomorphoses). Honing gist to the mill of microphonal pages, I wanted to dream tonight, and write them out before work. Instead I get letters and rhyme schemes and for the third time should just go to bed.
Reading Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Intriguing. After many fancy flips between the odd literated chapters, I suddenly realized I was reading, not just the ideas or narrative, but the flow of language as its own content. A thread of meter and assonance I had not picked out before, not completely in Cortazar's court, as I've been reversiting a faerie-tale I haven't wrote on in ages (Itelf a gnarled romp of synchronated cryptomorphoses). Honing gist to the mill of microphonal pages, I wanted to dream tonight, and write them out before work. Instead I get letters and rhyme schemes and for the third time should just go to bed.
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