What is it breaks my long silence? A blog is more difficult to keep up than one might assume. Unless one just journals on-line, one must discover topics of adequate interest and relevance. My tendency is to the philosophical and speculative, but this I sense puts people off as too cerebral and not personal enough. So.
But the philosophical sometimes (hopefully often) intersects with the personal, that is, if the philosophical is more than mere mind games. For instance, I have recently gotten involved with a poetry group and with a start-up literary review. In both cases I’ve been asked to review poems and stories by various people, some friends, some strangers, and to comment on them. This has required me to more adequately articulate my aesthetic principles and to try to expand my tastes to accommodate modern productions. I can’t say I’ve gotten as far with the latter as with the former. I’ve confused some people by saying that we are still, popularly, in an essentially romantic age of literature. What I mean is that we still view most poetry as being the expression of personal experience in broken lines – perhaps with some rhythm or rhyme, but probably not. Novels we expect to be about individuals learning about life and having some kind of revelation, or at least learning to “follow their hearts.” Trust me: that’s romantic. There are good and bad aspects to this. The bad is that it frequently expresses itself as effusion of emotion without any discipline and craft, or, in other words, and ironically, as cliché. The good is that it values intimacy and relationship, however understood.
Reading some of the stories people write, I have discovered that many of them aren’t actually stories. That is, a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, which many of these lack. Even your ‘po-mo’ films like Pulp Fiction and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for all their temporal tricks, still fall together into a narrative whole. This is the second thing I look for: a thematic and narrative whole, and a pleasurable one at that. The best way to get that often involves writing pleasurable parts, but in such a way as they essentially interrelate. Someone put it once that, if there’s a gun in the beginning, it had better go off by the end. The Victorians were pretty good at this, especially Dickens, who tried his durndlest to bring everything and everyone all together in a stunning ending – which, frankly, can be a little too much, even granted his theatrical style. But Dickens is a good example of someone who makes the trip as enjoyable as the destination. His technique is the use of a strong, ironic narratorial voice and the creation of exaggerated characters.
But some of the stuff I’ve seen lately doesn’t hardly have characters. Rather we get disembodied, unnamed voices reflecting in highly allegorized language on largely emotional experience, with little reference to one’s being-in-the-world. A friend and I were once comparing stories, and we discovered that, while she gave her characters bodies, they often lacked names, whereas my characters were often named in the first line or first words. Huh.
If a story is art, and if art has any truth, it must locate its truth in a way essential to its nature. Stories are words describing people doing things (basically). Their truth then must be a part of the people and their actions. The words are the medium, and usually the story suffers if the words try too much to speak the story’s “moral” explicitly. The story’s moral exists in the story, not in the words – just as a painting’s exists in the picture.
That’s why I don’t like a lot of modern novelry; it wears an agenda on its sleeve – or in its conclusion (see John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth). I have an agenda, too, but that’s why I have a blog (which so far has argued for the slightness of any agenda). When I write a story I hope it first engages the reader’s imagination and then her intellect and moral self. But then, I believe I’m more than a mere self, and more than a merely political self, with which provocatively ambiguous observation I will conclude my moralizing.
