A Philosophical Guide to Make-Believe

Kendall Walton's theory of fiction—Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (1993)—visualized in a video by Nils-Hennes Stear (h/t Link Here) :

Random Quotes from the Last 8 Books I Read. WTF'ingF?

"She was either next to me on a plane or turning a page of her magazine every time I turned one of mine, or else she had come forward from way back to be a handful anew, because people repeat on you or otherwise go unplundered. I will think of her as Aisler for any priggish intentions I might still manage here.

Aisler had spousy eyes, and arms exemplary in their plunges, and she brought her bare knees together until they were buttocky and practical. I hemmed and hawed inside of her for some weeks after but never got the hang of her requirements. A woman that swaggering of heart will not bask in deferred venereal folderol." Gary Lutz, "Partial List of People to Bleach" from the collection of the same name.

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"Excitable

A woman was depressed and distraught for days after losing her pen.

Then she became so excited about an ad for a shoe sale that she drove three hours to a shoe store in Chicago.

Phlegmatic

A man spotted a fire in a dormitory one evening, and walked away to look for an extinguisher in another building. He found the extinguisher, and walked back to the fire with it." Lydia Davis, "Two Types" [in its entirety] in her story collection Varieties of Disturbance.

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"The barge, magnificent barge, a jewel cresting upon the high seas those thirty to forty years when the weather was still a true marvel, when one could see stars at noon, when the rare clouds were so fine and gauze-like and so much more transparent to moons, when rains were frank and without whining drizzle and cleared without lingering—such was the bright and empty space we sailed across seemingly to no end, and where my simple chores could have gone on for days and days without me minding—there could never be too many decks to sweep and wash, too many sails to mend, too many windows to clean amid that everlasting radiance." Stanley Crawford, Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, Ch. IX, p. 75

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"In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supporters remain." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, "Trading Cities 4", p. 76

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"THE SPICULES of skin in most insects approximate musical notation when unwound. Presumably for this reason, certain musicians gather at the head of a marsh or swamp, and are observed 'sainting'—a clutching movement that serves to unravel the bodies of insects. Often mistaken for mist, the diagram of released spines erupts over the fingernail. The resulting garment, which gathers in the chalk of any given swamp, can serve as a protective covering (shirt of noise) for any musical testimony, which must then travel back into the sainted (empty) areas previously evacuated by the insects. Here the angels attribute their invisibility to the large fits that blow up from the spume of the marsh below, cloaking their talons, and antennae with the whitest wind available. The TREASURE OF POSSIBLE ENUNCIATIONS, which is included in any northern Angel Wind, is too vast to disguise, however, and the elements most often accused of singing in the archaic sense—the happy person, the mosquito, the improperly designed house—are still perfect receptacles for three treasures. Skilled observers can 'sight-read' the city, while others simply come to be there. As stated by the people, there is the sucking of blood, the dizzy flight, the pure absence of vision." Ben Marcus, "Outline for a City," in his alleged story collection The Age of Wire and String. p 134.

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"The lights went out. The radio died. Moldenke went to the lookout. Both suns were up, and clouded over. It was dark enough to be close to noons, although he didn't have a clockpiece anywhere. The second double Sunday in an artificial month.

He opened his refrigerator and found a cockroach at the lettuce. Something scratched in the eggs.

The juice was off. He would call the Power Co-op." David Ohle, Motorman, p. 13

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"A different winter and a different kind of winter, the air peated with dark and me swimming through it, I saw, or thought I saw, the car's red lights receding: good-bye, good-bye. By then Mother's nose had been broken, so that whenever she spoke, she sounded stuffed up. "Good-bye, good-riddance," she was saying to Walter when we were caught up in our Florida." Christine Schutt, Florida, p. 8.

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"—noise background.

My getting out or what?!

Eleven hours and Thirty-Three minutes since meridian said the clock perched high atop a ledge on the wall and positioned to look down on us all meaning we were well into hour seven of this particular battle between Good and Evil and, oh yeah, that was Good taking a terrific beating with the poultry-shaped ref looking intently at its eyes and asking if it wanted to continue. We were what passed for Good there: the three of us and anyone we stood beside when we rose to speak for the mute in that decaying room (100 Centre Street's AR-3); and in that place, at that moment, Evil had us surrounded." Sergio de la Paya, A Naked Singularity, p. 2.

Ars Brevis

I pulled down a book the other day. Well, 'pulled down' is not entirely accurate. I picked up a book off the floor the other day. It wasn't just lying around randomly on the floor, though. It was in a row of books lined up relatively neatly in front of one of my bookshelves.

See, I worked my way partially through college and a large part of graduate school shelving books in the libraries at the respective schools I attended, so, out of habit more than anything else, my books are by and large and for the most part organized in my own sort of system: novels in one place, alphabetical by author; short stories on another shelf, by author; poetry, likewise; philosophy, etcetera; psych, religion, …well, you get the idea.

The book I picked up was a book of short stories and it was on the floor with some other collections of short stories, as I said alpha by author, in front of a shelf full of mostly novels (read novels, that is, unreads are on other shelves in other parts of the room). My shelved short story section is in a glassed-in bookcase down in the family room and is, at present and has been for some time, too full for additions, so I have several places like tables and out-of-the-way sections of the floor where I keep my otherwise reasonably well-organized collections until such time as I can either obtain more shelving (i.e., room for shelves) or, heaven forfend, get rid of some other books from other shelves to make room for them.

I was in the mood to read some short stories I hadn't read in some time, or, better yet, some I'd neglected to read. Best yet, some really short ones. And I had seen something that day, or the day before, about Lydia Davis winning a prize recently—the Man Booker International, if memory serves—and I knew she wrote mostly really short pieces. So I went directly to the line-up on the floor where I was something like 95 to 97% certain I would find one or two of my two or three collections of her works. And viola!

Funny story. On the back was this bar code. That in itself is not funny, I realize that, but bear with me. The bar code itself looked rather ancient: it was sort of clunky and the lines were larger and thicker than you see them nowadays. I hadn't seen one quite like it in some time and it drew my attention. Not least because it had a bright yellow strip across the top. Turns out I'd bought the book at BORDERS. For $13.00. That's what was printed on the bar code sticker on the back of the book.

The title page informs it is, was, a First Edition (paperback) published in 2007. I'm going to assume that's when I bought it. Of course, the funny part is BORDERS, the store, the company, the entity, no longer exists. It used to be a nationwide chain of big brick-and-mortar retail bookstores. It later developed an on-line presence, but never quite made it business-wise and went out of business quite some time ago.

So here's this book with an antique-seeming bar code sticker on the back indicating it was purchased from a now-defunct book-as-commodity retailer sitting in a pile—well, not really a pile, but you know what I'm saying—on my floor. Unread. Having survived the downfall of this massive corporate giant. Funny, huh?

Turning the book over there are two things on the front cover that instantly jump out at you. One is a round, silver and black sticker that says 'NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST'. The other is a rather life-like picture, if you can call it that, or image of a common housefly.

The cover itself is barely legible. It is a sort of cream color. And the lettering on the cover has a very similar coloring, though it is of a somewhat shinier texture so that when the light hits it just right you can read 'LYDIA DAVIS/ VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE/ STORIES' in block letters. But in most lights you can't really read the words on the cover as they blend into the background. The fly, however, or rather the illustration of the fly which is crawling on the lower serif of the 'I' in Davis's last name has an almost three-dimensional aspect including translucent-looking wings and fuzzy shadow. On first glance, it looks like a real fly and something within almost makes you want to swat at it. Cool stuff.

So, my thinking went (and goes), what is the meaning of that fly on the cover? Why is it there? I say the fly because, unlike the NBA sticker—which itself will pull off and in fact has a slight rip at about 11:30 of the clock where it looks like I probably at one time thought about pulling it off and even attempted but abandoned same—the fly is integral to the cover design.

Well, I thought, flies are often symbols of ephemerality. They, if I remember correctly, only live for a day or two, then die. And Lydia Davis writes really short stories. That doesn't mean to imply her stories are short-lived or ephemeral works of art. It's the shortness thing I'm attempting to highlight and equate. Here for example is one of her short stories in its entirety:

"Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging."

That's it. I read that and I'm like WTF? What does that even mean? The title of the story is: "Idea for a Short Documentary Film." But still, pretty damn short.

I'm not sure quite how that qualifies as a "story", [especially given my serial posts here at WoW re: Ur-story—for which click "Serial Posts" at right]. But, at least according to a couple of pretty serious prize-giving organizations, to wit: the NBA and Booker, it certainly qualifies as something. So, there it is. Short, short stories = Fly image on cover.

But then I realized you know what? her book of ephemera (certainly my copy of it) has outlived a massive U.S. corporate entity which sought to commoditize it and monopolize the entire U.S. and potentially worldwide bookselling markets unread, for the most part, in a stack (not really, it was more of a line as I said) on my bedroom floor before I could even get a chance to shelve it properly (this latter having more to do with issues relating to my own hoarding and procrastinatory tendencies and lack of shelf space than anything else, but that's hardly relevant here). So, yeah, the fly on the cover took on another, albeit private, meaning to me the neglectful owner of the book (or at least a copy of the book). A meaning that has more than a trace of irony, no? The fly became the emblem of the book itself, or even BOOK ITSELF. Emblematic rather than symbolic. But wait. It was the Borders corporation that was ephemeral and the book which endured. Davis's book (or at least my copy of Davis's book) outlasted it. So shouldn't the fly, in my own little private symbology, instead be emblematic of the commoditization and corporatism of late capitalist America? My head was spinning from the contradictory realizations.

But then—sorry, I know that's the second straight paragraph I've started with that little narratival throat-clearing tick, but this thing is rapidly winding down so you'll just have to deal with it—I thought once more about the title of the collection: "Varieties of Disturbance". And I realized that, of course, yeah, the simplest explanation was probably the best: houseflies are annoyances. Disturbing little things buzzing around our heads, landing on us and itching, that sort of thing. So, that's probably all it meant, the fly, that is: this is a collection of stories about a variety of things that disturbs or annoys Lydia Davis—like, say, tearing into various forms of corporate packaging and making ironic, post-modern films about having the creators of same being forced to deal with their own annoyance-producing items. Not that whole meta- thing about the fly representing the stories themselves (or books or even artworks, for that matter) that have as their aim to somehow existentially disturb us. That would probably be reading too much into it.

I mean, after all, we're not supposed to judge books by their covers. Am I right? And I was comforted by that thought.

Realisms and Beauty

Here’s a philosophical problem that continually plagues me as a writer:

Is the primary aesthetic goal of a work of art, specifically in this case literary works of art such as the short story or novel, (a) to accurately portray a feeling or (b) to make the audience feel?

Let’s expand and define:

The portrayal of the private, emotional life of a fictional character is certainly an, if not the principle, aim of literary fiction. The writer plunks an invented character into some situation and explores that character’s experience—inner and outer. The character becomes a sort of virtual field (or virtual mind) to whom and upon and within which this experience occurs, analagous, say, to the two-dimensional action space of a painting.

Accuracy of the portrayal of this inner experience, what we might call its 'psychological realism,' is a quality often and widely (though certainly not universally) admired (as, of course, is how well-realized a world the writer depicts and how compelling a situation s/he creates: what we might call its 'narrative realism'). How truly human does this character seem? How well does the writer present the fullness of this character's interior life and his/her emotional engagement with the given situation?

But is this all? No.

In the classic formulation, this imitation of life serves to bring about an experience of catharsis in the audience. This is the purpose of tragedy: "There but for the grace of the gods (or fate or serendipity or overcoming my own flaws or whatever) go I."

Aristotle identifies the emotions tragedy produces in its audience. In summary strokes, tragedy is the depiction of the downfall of a noble hero due either to some flaw (hamartia) in his nature (e.g., pride) or, certainly in the older tragedians, to the actions of the gods. Feelings of disappointment, guilt, anger, resentment, shame, etc. are the sorts of feelings that might be depicted in the tragic hero, and the lifelikeness of their depiction is part of the art of the writer.

But, for Aristotle, these are not the same sorts of feelings the tragic work produces in its audience. The purpose/aim of a tragic work of art is to arouse the emotions of fear and pity in the audience. As the audience, we fear for the tragic hero. Though he does not recognize it, we know he is heading for a fall. And we pity him because we see aspects of ourselves in him. Once we come to this realization, we are able to overcome the same sort of hubris that might very well bring us low.

But, and this is the point, the depicted emotions are not the same as the emotions aroused in the audience. The audience's emotions are reactive, responsive to those of the tragic hero (and, of course, his plight). Sympathetic, if you will.

This helps frame the issue for me: Does the accuracy and, let's say, poignancy of the depiction of the nobility of the hero and his/her situation, the nature of his/her flaw, and the violence of his/her downfall determine the nature and quality of the audience's reaction? Is there a direct causal relation between the verisimilitude of the psychological and narrative realism and the nature and quality of the sympathetic emotions evoked from the audience? The closer our identification with the hero the more profound our catharsis?

Again: As the writer is my primary concern the perfection of my depiction of the narrative, and more specifically the psychological, realism or should I focus principally on how I want the audience to feel upon reading the narrative?

Some might say there isn't any real difference. Just write well and let the audience respond how it will.

I want readers to identify with my characters. I want them to feel sympathy for my characters' predicaments and plights. I am less concerned with whether they like a particular character than that they find her interesting/intriguing. I want them to experience a character's complexity—emotional and otherwise. To this end, my aim is akin to that of realism, both narrative and psychological.

(Aside: Thesis: I go beyond mere realism(-s) if I am able to depict a unique situation or a portray a new, or even fuller, emotional consciousness. But that's a point for another day.)

But this begs the main question. It is not just through literal, realistic depictions of situations or inner states of consciousness or even physical reactions that writers reach and, indeed, affect the emotions of their readers. Rather, it is primarily through techniques of persuasion.

As the writer, I want to show you how the overarching power of love can fulfill a life's course and make you feel the sadness of a missed chance at true love. (Love in the Time of Cholera). I want to show you how a selfish, adulterous act can be unwittingly cruel to an underserving character and can, in fact, destroy your own life—so don't do it! (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina). I want to show you how religious belief can have a positive/negative impact on your life and, in fact, on society in general and persuade you to convert your lifestyle. (Brothers Karamazov, Origin of the Brunists) I want to portray the presence of evil in the world in all its multifaceted, larger-than-life-and-death enormity and terror and leave you in awe of its abject beauty and power. (Blood Meridian, Omensetter's Luck) I want to show you the power that unseen conspiratorial forces exercise over our daily affairs and make you feel that perhaps it's reasonable to be afraid, very afraid—paranoid even. (Gravity's Rainbow, and A-game Pynchon) I want to show you how certain political/social/economic situations are manifestly unjust and ultimately untenable and move you to want to change them. (Disgrace, and anything from early Coetzee) I want to show you that fascism is a bad thing so you'll recognize its symptoms in yourself and be repulsed by its very presence. (Animal Farm, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Auto-da-Fe)

Affecting catharsis. Scaring. Shaming. Educating. Moralizing. Sermonizing. Proselytizing. Propagandizing. These goals are not different in kind, merely in degree.

And how do I achieve these types of ends? Rhetoric, affective language, figurative language—the tools of aesthetics. Blatant or subtle manipulations. The realisms of discursive language—psychological and narrative—are, on this view, subsidiary concerns.

Granted, situational poignancy and its accurate depiction can take us partially there, can move us—but only to a certain extent. It takes persuasive power to amplify its effect and make it stick. And these same techniques can either "beautify" or "ruin" the work. That is to say, the techniques of beautification can quite easily be used for purposes other than aesthetic.

Therein lies the dilemma. And the delicate balancing act of/for the writer/artist.

I know this post has been longish and a bit rambling, and I apologize. Yet it has helped me clarify the problem I began with: As a writer, should I be more concerned about trying to keep my characters' actions (and emotions) true to (that character's) experience as I've envisaged it or should I constantly be keeping in mind how I hope to move my audience by my depiction? Should I be more concerned about the realism of the piece or its aesthetics? Which is more important, the verisimilitude or the message? The depiction or the rhetoric?

There is a difference, an important one. Please feel free to weigh in.There are reasoned approaches and well-thought-out positions in both directions on this issue. I'd like to hear from you.

I don't think I'm any closer to a resolution of this issue as a writer, but I do think I have a better handle on what a resolution must entail. Of course, it might turn out that my formulation of the problem is faulty and there's no real issue here. If so, how might that look? Or maybe there's something other than emotionality at stake?

Being v. Becoming, Part 7: Flux and Fictional Narrative

Matter, Life, Consciousness, Emotion, Knowledge, Society, Civilization, Art, the Universe, Reality: For A.N. Whitehead, these are all Processes. Call them Adventures of Becoming. Flux is at their foundation(-s). This is the premise of his Process Philosophy.

Relatedness (or Interdependence) and Interiority (or what he calls Feeling) are its key mechanisms. From quantum entanglement to Minkowski world lines to emotion to linguistic communication, Process Philosophy holds explanatory power. (It isn't just some naive Romantic poetic notion.)

To understand these processes of Becoming—these Adventures—requires more than propositional logic (as, say, Gödel demonstrated w/r/t mathematics).

How do we tell the story of the history of the universe? How do we tell the story of life emerging from cold, dark matter? How do we tell the story of the emergence of consciousness and even self-consciousness and empathy? How do we tell the story of the rise of agricultural? Science? Civilization? Creativity? How do we tell the story of how mass emerges from, say, the Higgs Boson? How do we tell the story of Jack falling in (or out) of love with Jill? How do tell the story of Wally finding meaning in the death of his father? How do we tell the story of an injustice done to Billy? How do we tell the story of Becky's rise and fall?

Each of the narratives we seek to tell takes time to develop. Or, to put it generally, Processes take Time. Time is the ground of Process.

Moreover, each process takes time to recount. Stories take time to be told. Time is also the ground of narrative.

Now we're getting closer to the point of this, admittedly, abstruse series of posts. Or at least one of the points.

Process is the condition of narrative, and narrative is itself a process. Narrative has a certain mimetic power which is not propositional. Rather, it enacts process at the same time as it recounts it. Narrative has the power to represent Reality truthfully.

Truth, however, as A. N. Whitehead points out, is a limited concept, much more so than Beauty:

"...Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental notion than Truth. ... Beauty is the internal conformation of the various items of experience with each other, for the production of maximum effectiveness. Beauty thus concerns the inter-relations of the various components of Reality, and also the inter-relations of the various components of Appearance, and also the relations of Appearance to Reality. Thus any part of experience can be beautiful. ... But Truth has a narrower meaning in two ways. First, Truth, in any important sense, merely concerns the relations of Appearance and Reality. But in the second place the notion of 'conformation' in the case of Truth is narrower than that in the case of Beauty. For the truth-relation requires that the two relata have some factor in common. ... 

"[Yet]...the general importance of Truth for the promotion of Beauty is overwhelming. ...[T]he truth-relation remains the simple, direct mode of realizing Harmony. ... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation. The Truth that for such extremity of Beauty is wanted is that truth-relation whereby appearance summons up new resources of feeling from the depths of Reality. It is a Truth of feeling, and not a Truth of verbalization. The relata in Reality must lie below the stale presupposition of verbal thought. The Truth of supreme Beauty lies beyond th dictionary meanings of words." Adventures of Ideas, p. 265-67

Fictional narrative allows us to go (Gö-del?) outside the propositional facts of our lives and create models of meaning. It is an Adventure.

Fiction writing is modelling. Fiction writers create models of selves in the process of becoming. Ideally, these model selves are at hinge points in their fictive lives. Crises. The character is affected by this crisis and must either change or, importantly, decide not to change in some meaningful way as a result.

These models are pictures of the process of becoming as embodied in a realized fictional character. Such change will be a result of both external (social) as well as internal (emotional) factors. This is where the fiction writer's artistry is important.

If we accept the premise that Being just is Becoming, i.e., that the process of growth/change/decay/resistance is the foundational quality of selfhood in human beings, then fiction (at least humanistic fiction) is ideally suited to present us with a model—call it a case study—of this process in all its over-determined detail.

Fictional narratives can create instructive models of the process of becoming, most often and usefully in individual characters at specific, critical points in time. Consistent with Whitehead's systematic (prehension—>concrescence) analysis, such a model must, at a minimum, contain, i.e., depict/portray:

• (a) an existing subject, 
• (b) some specific interaction with an Other (character, nature, society), 
• (c) the subject's perceptions of same (conscious or unconscious), 
• (d) the subject's emotional state, 
• (e) the impact on the subject (externally and internally), 
• (f) the subject's emotional coloring/filtering of the significance of the interaction, 
• (g) the subject's judgment to accept certain aspects of the interaction and reject others (to the extent such are in the subject's control) into the subject's self-identifying trajectory, 
• (h) the change in the subject wrought by the interaction, and
• (i) the effect (external and emotional) of this change on the subject and all his/her future interactions.

This is a Process schema for fictional narrative.

How does this tie in to our Ur-story framework (see Pages in the right column and remember to read from the last post to the first)? That was a look at what I was calling the "Substance" of literature—the coming to consciousness of mortality and the ways to deal, or not, with this fundamental situation. This is, of course, a look at the formal Process.

(to be cont'd)

Being v. Becoming, Pt. 1

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

As best as we can discern, change is the fundamental force of all existence.

Nothing that exists stands still. Nothing remains the same.

Becoming is the form this fundamental force of change takes in living beings.

Living beings are conceived, assembled molecularly, born; they grow, mature, deteriorate, die, and decompose.

Human beings have created the notion of Selfhood to account for the experience of individuality, of bodily separateness, over the conscious, temporal course of this process.

Selfhood is constructed, named, bequeathed an Identity.

Identity is a function of memory. Identity subsumes the on-going accretion of experience into itself.

Identity implies the unreality of Becoming and, thus, Change.

Identity privileges/presupposes stasis, unity, continuity over both space and time and over Change and Becoming.

The notion of the Self is an illusion, masked/projected by the construct Identity.

It makes no sense to speak of an Authentic Self.

No Self can be called Authentic because Selfhood itself is an illusion. A 'fiction', if you will.

Change/Becoming is not an (Aristotelian) accident/attribute that happens to the (Aristotelian) substance/being.

Change just is.

Becoming is the norm, the fundament of experience. Beings participate/are immersed in the process of Change. Beings Become.

Your Self is not the same now as it was when you began reading this. For one thing, you have gained the experience of reading this. Thus, you are a different Self now than you were a few moments ago. Though it doesn't feel that way.

Being/Selfhood/Identity is an ultimately futile resistance to the reality of Change/Becoming. A negation of Reality. All things, as the man said, must pass.

This resistance of the Self to the omnipresence of Change/Becoming creates a sort of friction that feels substantive. Feeling is stubborn, reactionary (or, better, reactive), and Self-centric, but is crucial to the Selfhood/Identity illusion. (See this serial post, Thyrophobia, remembering to read from the last post to the first.)

Working Title: Toys in the Attic

For those of you still interested in peering under the hood of this putatively creative mind, we offer this latest installment of the series of posts about which of the novels-in-progress to complete.

In our review of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, we referred you to a series of brilliant novels we found intriguing and compelling for their depiction of evil protagonists in the tradition of Crime and Punishment: Vladimir Nabokov's classic and controversial Lolita (1955), John Fowles's The Collector (1963), Evan S. Connell's The Diary of a Rapist (1966), John Banville's Booker-nominated The Book of Evidence (1989), and James Lasdun's The Horned Man (2002). All are told in first person—though The Collector has a middle section told from a POV other than the protagonist. We've long wanted to write a novel along these lines. Sex, misogyny, torture, murder, rape, madness, sociopathy, depravity: all fine subjects for the fictional mind.

Needless to say, this promises to be a somewhat darker novel than the other three I've outlined. I haven't conceptualized it quite as thoroughly as the others—that is to say, I have considerably more work to do on it to bring it to fruition. The premise has the protagonist sitting in a quiet, hidden corner in the attic of his home. He has just learned he's dying and has only a very short time to live. He's going through a box of memorabilia. His immediate dilemma is whether and how to tell his wife of twenty or so years that he's dying or simply to disappear one day and not return. The memorabilia, it turns out, are from past 'relationships' or 'affairs' he's had through the years; thus, much of the book will be told from the POV of his memories. However, as each so-called affair is revealed through whatever token he pulls out of his box, it becomes clearer to the reader that these were no ordinary relationships. His evilness starts coming through as he reviews what he considers to be his life's work—really, the only thing he's ever been truly successful at.

Story questions, naturally, involve his motives for his actions (if there are any, or they prove merely to be outcroppings of his character) and his reasons for staying with his wife and not adding her to his list of victims—these must be thematically and causally connected. The plot, as noted, will follow his decision how to deal with his imminent dying: will he have an 'epiphany' and come to grips with who he really is and punish himself? will he kill his wife? will he slink off into obscurity? will he find a way to perpetuate himself and his deeds such that his evil lives on after him? what will he do with his tokens, i.e., the evidence of his deeds?

The protagonist will not be immediately likable, but he will be complex and intriguing. That has to be his hook. The sociopath, particularly the borderline personality, is inherently seductive. I don't conceive of him as being deformed physically—that seems too obvious, too done already. Yet, there has to be some interesting flaw that we keep coming back to. The wife, too, though a lesser character in terms of presence, will need to be filled out—even if she's mainly off-screen/stage, so to speak. She's got to play a prominent role in his thoughts, and her character must be, therefore, larger than life—I'm thinking Kohler's wife in Wm. Gass's The Tunnel, here. Each relationship will represent a deeper stage in his depravity, though the figures won't be so much symbolic as emblematic; one way I've been toying with is to have each 'victim' represent a missed opportunity for the protagonist along the course of his life, one which if he'd taken would have made his life less miserable (at least he believes).

Unlike the other three, I have yet to write a word on this novel. Nor have I outlined it. If I chose it, I would have a lot of work to do. The work would be fun, but hard; the psychic delving would be intense and isolating, calling perhaps for greater strength and stamina than the others. The other projects in this series have their elements of darkness, but this one would be a deeply dark canvas: entirely chiaroscuro, perhaps. There is less room for the sort of humor I was able to bring to EULOGY. One limitation: this novel demands to be written in first person POV and not free indirect style. EULOGY was an intense first person POV and took place over the space of one hundred hours of what amounted to solitude. I had hoped to try out my chops with the third person in writing this next book; and the other three books in this series certainly allow for that. First person POV is more like 'method acting' writing; free indirect style is somewhat less demanding, giving the writer some breathing space to be himself. If I choose this book, I will have to completely submerge myself in the character of this monster.

Other issues. Query: Could I make it a worthy contribution to the tradition of novels I mentioned above or would it be entirely derivative? Query: Could I make it more than a mediocre piece of psychological realism? Query: Is the subject matter simply too touchy for the current market—I mean, after all, doesn't the public want to see things from the POV of the good guy and to see the bad man get his comeuppance at the end?

As I mentioned, this is the type of novel I've long wanted to pursue. So, what's a boy to do?

Working Title: Jonesey

This is the next in the series of posts on novels in development. Today's story: Jonesey.

Jonesey, a simple, sheltered young man who finds himself alone in the world after the death of his mother, must summon the courage and wit to defy the conniving fraud claiming to be his father who suddenly reappears and tries to involve Jonesey in a criminal enterprise. Only the odd, ghostly young woman whom Jonesey meets on his daily walks seems to offer him any hope of escaping the tyranny of the stranger.

The inspiration for this novel owes something to John Hawkes's gripping The Lime Twig as well as Melville's essentialBilly Budd. The plot follows Jonesey as he is drawn deeper and deeper into the scheme of the stranger who claims to be his father. At first, he doesn't really understand what he is getting involved in; only as things get hairier does he recognize that what he's doing might be wrong. The story, beyond the awakening of an authentic moral sensibility in Jonesey (before he has merely done what his mother told him to do), deals with Jonesey's abject aloneness in the indifferent world of an industrial city much like you might find in North Jersey and the absence of true sources of aid and comfort. He can find companionship only with an evil con-man and his compatriots. Is relatedness worth the price? Or, is goodness itself enough?

Jonesey is a compelling character, easy to sympathize with because of the death of his mother and his 'specialness'. He has been sheltered and protected from the 'realities' of life by his devoted mother, and now he is all alone and vulnerable. (Of course, this ties in nicely with our Ur-story thread herein; and that's a good thing we think.) Her death, though unexpected and sudden, leaves Jonesey with a house and a small trust fund to see him through, so long as he is frugal and follows her thorough instructions. The man who claims to be his father is evil—human, but evil. It becomes apparent he has designs on Jonesey's paltry inheritance and the house where he claims he once lived (when Jonesey was a mere baby). It's also clear he has grand schemes in which he can use Jonesey because of Jonesey's innocence and naivete; though it is not hard to imagine what will become of Jonesey once the man no longer has use for him. The character of Jonesey, I think, will be hard to write—a delicate balance between competence and mental deficiency, innocence and knowledge (in the mythical sense). The character of the father will be fun to write: a writer's dream (much like the Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

I have drafted only the first chapter of the book, but I like it. I find it compelling on many levels. I have a vague sense of where the book's going, though I haven't conceptualized the specific schemes and crimes in which the father seeks to involve Jonesey. That will involve research, planning, and imagination. Likewise, I don't have a full outline or a sense of all the scenes and chapters yet. It will be an adventure, unfolding as it goes along (not, in itself, necessarily a bad thing). And I still have a quandary about the girl: I won't go into it here, but it involves her very nature, its mystery, and how much to involve her in the goings-on. I love the setting. I love the darkness of the father-figure. I love the chance, with the girl, to toy with reality and realism. I also love the theme of the naif abroad—which is, indeed, the theme of my first story which will be published soon. One other thing Jonesey has going for it: it picks up on the theme with which I ended EULOGY, a young man confronting his own essential aloneness in the world after the death of his mother.

Working Title: Auto-da-fe

Next up: Auto-da-fe (with apologies to Elias Canetti)

When Cameron Stancil, a naive but ambitious pastor of a suburban evangelical megachurch, decides to get his congregation involved in a national political race, he has to find the courage to defy his security consultant—who entices Cam to get involved in politics and then seduces his wife—and the powerful political interests he represents in order to save his marriage, his prodigal son, his church, and even his own soul.

Though it has the outward form of a thriller, the plot here is less formulaic than that of The Lobby. It involves Cam's own personal struggle. Cam Stancil has built his megachurch from nothing. His beautiful second wife is sexually frustrated because Cam is so dedicated to growing his church. His son, a Christian rock musician who leads the worship services and is the heir apparent to the family business, is just out of college and is beginning to have doubts about his faith and his own sexuality. Carlsen, whose firm provides security for the church, is also a political operative for 'the governor' who persuades Cam to enlist his church in the current presidential campaign. Things get out of hand: Cam's son walks away from the church, his family, and his music; Cam's wife allows herself to be seduced by Carlsen; Carlsen becomes increasingly involved in the management and message of Cam's church—much to Cam's chagrin. As Cam senses his family, his church, and his life slipping out of his control, he realizes he must do something to reclaim them—and that something might very well have to be radical and even violent. Of course, the underlying plot borrows somewhat from Canetti's brilliant mid-twentieth century masterpiece.

The most sympathetic character is Cam's son, Kendall, who is just coming of age emotionally and spiritually. (As it stands, his own dilemma is threatening to take over the book. The authorial question is how long of a lead to give him.) Though it is his ultimately his story, Cam is less sympathetic, less likable. Evangelicals won't like the characterization because Cam is somewhat craven and corrupt; secularists won't like it because Cam isn't a one-dimensional stereotypical hypocrite. He is a complex American type: his entrepreneurialism and religion converge, conflicting with his familial role. His politics, too. His wife, Addie, has an interesting story as well: she is much younger than Cam—in fact, she is closer in age to Kendall than Cam. Because of this, she brings an element of sexual tension to the mix that repulses Kendall and ignites something in Carlsen. Carlsen, of course, is the serpent in this Eden, the straw that stirs the drink.

I've drafted approximately eighty or so pages of this book. My outline, however, is not nearly as complete as for The Lobby. In fact, a number of decisions (both plot-wise and character-wise) still need to be made and some need to be re-thought. Completing this book will be more of an exercise than, say, The Lobby because character depths need to be plumbed; but, by the same token, this sort of exploration is what the writing process is all about. The only question is the degree of conscious control I, as the author, should exercise over the creative process in shaping its direction. Also, I believe this book will require more re-writing, revision, and editing than The Lobby, simply due to its greater complexities. There is a certain amount of artistry this book allows for that The Lobby, hobbled by its genre constraints, doesn't. The message, to the extent there is one, also needs to be more subtle so that the final product does not seem either didactic or partisan in its views concerning the intermingling of church and state. Themes need to be hammered out and actualized in the action. Relationships clarified. Destinies determined. I do, however, believe I have the proper bang-up ending, the goal toward which all this struggle aims. And that is extremely important. I also feel it has some timeliness, relevance, and probably some commercial viability (though less than The Lobby).

So: do I keep at it, chuck it, or pick another of the candidates and hold off for now?

Working Title: The Lobby

The first novel I would like to vet (see previous post on this topic here) is a political thriller and, for that reason, probably has the most commercial potential—and that in itself weighs heavily in favor of committing to its writing (for obvious reasons to anyone who is attempting to publish a first novel). It will likely be the easiest of the four to write as well, because I have done a fairly detailed outline.

Working title: The Lobby.

When Rick Frazier, freshly-minted, go-it-alone biotech mogul investigating the death of his estranged brother in a freakish wild fire, stumbles upon what appears to be a terrorist plot to destroy an American city, he must team up with a beautiful business journalist to uncover and confront the perpetrators, a powerful cabal of businessmen and politicians and their mercenary security unit.

As you can see, the plot of this potential novel follows a generic political thriller form: "The basic plot is an ordinary man pulling an innocent thread which leads to a mess of corruption." Rick's personal story confronts his own grief at the sudden death of his estranged brother—an ex-hippie-type, down at the heels, ne'er do well—to whom he is trying to reconnect by purchasing a large tract of wilderness where they camped as boys. He is motivated as well by his guilt at having abandoned his brother and the rest of his family and past associates in the first place on his way to a hugely successful entrepreneurial career. Rick is an American success story (in the Horatio Alger, up-from-the-bootstraps mode). He is a likable geeky sort who has made a phenomenal fortune at an early age. He is intense and focused, smart and outdoorsy though hardly athletic. He is somewhat shy and his social skills are only average. As the novel opens, he is pursuing several deals at once: 1) to cash out of his proprietary business; 2) to join an important social club for entrepreneurs; and 3) to purchase a tract of wilderness where he hopes to build a compound for himself and his brother and recapture some of the happiness of their youth. At the end of his search for an explanation of his brother's killing he uncovers a powerful conspiracy that, because of Rick's own wealth and status, may actually draw him in and corrupt him.

I believe if I set my mind to it I could knock a draft of this book out in a couple or three months. It is so different from EULOGY, my first novel (unpublished), I have half a mind to do it and market it under a nom de plume much like John Banville has done with his two recent genre pieces. The problem is I'm afraid I'll get bored or lose interest. EULOGY wound up being an intense exploration, both stylistically and psychologically. I allowed myself to slip the bonds of realism and explore some serious philosophical and even religious themes, as well as the nature of love. Even revisions proved to be arduous because of the absolute honesty they demanded. THE LOBBY, I'm afraid, won't allow me such leeway. It feels more mercenary, less artistic.

Mein Kleine Geistkampf

I don't usually post about my own personal struggles on this blog but I thought some of my readers might find this particular issue of some interest. As I've mentioned before, I write fiction. My first story will be published later this year or early next—more on that later. Others are circulating. My first novel, EULOGY, is currently under submission at an agency and a publisher, and I have high hopes for it. The work, now, is to come up with another novel so that as soon as EULOGY comes out I'll have another in the pipeline.

Here, then, is my struggle: I have no less than four novels underway. Each is at a point from where I can take it to completion. The trick is to decide which will be most worthwhile to pursue. To which to commit my energies. Over the course of the next few posts I hope to lay out the arguments for each project: including a brief logline, or synopsis, and cursory outline and character sketches; current status; foreseeable roadblocks to completion; etc.

It may turn out that all these projects are hopeless and should be abandoned. It may turn out that all of them have potential and should be developed without delay. It may turn out that one is obviously superior to the others and should be knocked out forthwith. It may turn out that, say, two of them should be cranked out simultaneously—for whatever reason—and the others chucked. Whatevs.

I hope to make this an entertaining discussion, drawing on the lessons of our careful reading of James Wood's How Fiction Works and our investigation of what we've been calling the Ur-story. We shall be turning to sources of inspiration and to critical quotes from writers on writing, exploring along the way the creative process and the nature of fiction among other things.

Come along for the ride!

Ur-Story

The inevitable sense of loss that accompanies death: let's accept this as our jumping off point, our Ur-story. All of religion is one elaborate fiction that attempts to explain it, however unsatisfactorily, as a fundamental flaw in our being and our circumstance that some distant god is trying either to correct or somehow redeem or, barring that, at least put a hopeful spin on it which we will come to understand someday if we keep the faith, baby. James Wood complains that Bart Ehrman and, for that matter, the Bible fail to put a happy face on it for him to comprehend. Sorry, Jim.

The thousand-faced hero's quest, central to all mythology (per Joseph Campbell) and pre-modern literature, is, if we read the Gilgamesh aright, likewise a reaction to our grief in the face of this loss. Helen (lately of Troy). (Nearly) Penelope. Oedipus's patrimony and, indeed, his identity; his eyes. We could go on. In the classic formulation, the emotions relevant to this Ur-story were pity and fear: we pity the Loser and fear we ourselves might soon become one. So, the thinking went, the fictional protrayals of this Ur-story should follow certain formal, dramatic rules which would work to elicit these very emotions in us, viscerally introducing us to the appropriate coping mechanisms native to our nature. Tragedy as therapy. A sentimental education.

These two strategies, the religious (hope for something better) and the literary (grapple with them and thus get a grip on those bad feelings) did the trick for a number of centuries. Oh, there have been any number of intellectual attempts to justify or, better yet, explain the problem to the denser of us. But that all feels like mental masturbation, nothing really productive comes out all those gymnastic efforts.

Then along came the modern world—more people, more information, seemingly more evil—and a potentially "new" solution: laughter. James Joyce once told his friend Eugene Jolas that he "was interested in a comic version of Leibniz's essay on theodicy." You can judge for yourself whether his Finnegans Wake succeeded at this; Ulysses is pretty funny. Umberto Eco, in The Name of the Rose, implies there was a vast conspiracy by the early Christian fathers to squelch any hint of the comedic in the works of Aristotle (the patron secular saint of patristics), because if the people learned to laugh at the inevitability of loss they would no longer honor the churchly hierarchy. That's not to say there was no comedy prior to the 20th Century. Au contraire: M. Voltaire takes a pretty sure, satiric shot across Freiherr Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" Theodicy bow in Candide. It's just that comedy, to the 'serious'-minded among us, simply wasn't considered serious enough, especially for such a monumental problem. Besides, Voltaire was French.


[to be continued]

Ur-Story

What, if anything, can we identify as the Ur-story of Western Civilization?

Certainly, the Ur-story of the Western religious tradition is one of the inevitabiity of loss. Look no further than the Genesis myth: Jahweh puts in a tough six-day work week, and ends up quite self-satisfied with his work product: a perfect, functioning world inhabited by at least one interesting creature. All of which reflect his divine ability, however vain. As we all know, Jahweh ultimately loses control of his doppelganger and, in His grief and anger, condemns his entire creation—at one point nearly destroying the whole thing in a cataclysmic flood. With the loss of His creation, Jahweh realizes He must do something. So, He creates a nation of favorites to try and conquer it for Him by proxy, but that doesn't really work out because the chosen ones are as forgetful and rebellious as Satan and Adam and always squabbling amongst themselves. Still, he has to try to redeem it somehow. So, He comes up with a better idea: He'll send a princely Messiah to try to reclaim it. (This either has or hasn't happened depending on what flavor of religion you prefer.) And this works! At least in theory—though it's yet to be put into practice. So, along the way He is constantly sending little prophetic reminders that He's still trying to get the kinks worked out.

That's about as naked as it gets, though, in Gass's terms, this grand story of loss is still slathered in fiction. The characters of Jahweh and Satan and Adam and Moses and Jesus and all the various prophets, for example. The (circular) plot of creation and damnation and redemption.

This story of loss is repeated in the Eden story: Adam and Eve get a swell place to live—no toil, no strife, etc. Not even child-birth labor pains. But they think they're so smart and go out to picnic with a lesser creature and get their asses evicted. Loss. Irreparable. Irretrievable. Sadness and grief and suffering that clouds over the smaller gains and joys that come and, just as quickly, go. Later, one of their boys kills another, so they have to send him off. Again, loss and loss. It can happen in so many ways, but it always happens.

We tell ourselves stories to try and understand this sense of loss that permeates our existence. This sense of loss that is replicated in the Ur-story. We create fictions to populate these stories with identifiable protagonists and antagonists and discrete, digestible outcomes and comprehensible emotional responses to this predicament.

Scholars tell us that the story of Job is the oldest of the Biblical stories, predating the Jahwist Genesis texts. The story is one of a good and prosperous man who loses everything. Loss is inevitable, a fact of life. In fact, it is the central fact of life. The fiction is that Jahweh allows Satan, or "the adversary", to take everything away from Job to test Job's faith. In the end, after all his suffering and loss, because of his virtuous character, everything is restored to Job. Apparently, the story of Job is older even than its telling in the scriptures. And it certainly feels like an ancient way of "justify[-ing] the ways of God to man," a real Ur-story. Suffering and loss is not always punishment. Sometimes it's just Jahweh's way of playing with us. Still, in the end, He'll come through and make us whole. This, in Gassian terms, is the fiction surrounding the story, but it's instructive and gives us something to cling to.

[to be continued]

Ur-Story

Speaking of doleful countenances... I took a brief retreat to the North Carolina mountains earlier this week, and read a frustratingly opaque essay by William H. Gass—my favorite knight-errant critic: "The Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications" in his Tests of Time (a book I've referred to before). I often turn to Gass for inspiration or for a spur to further reflection. The clarity of his style is legendary. This essay, however, left me scratching my head—as I was banging it against the wall.

His opening was tantalizing, proposing a distinction I have sought to articulate in my blogland commentary correspondences with the prodigious Nigel Beale [hope you're self-googling] and in my exegesis of James Wood's eloquent, though oddly self-limited, How Fiction Works:

"Stories are things that get told. They can exist outside of any particular medium or any particular method of narration. ...

To begin with, stories break up the natural continuum of life into events. Next, stories arrange these segments in a temporal sequence, in order to suggest that whatever ahappens earlier is responsible for what happens later. ...In stories, all events tend to be given the same weight or value... .

The linear movement always has an aim...and when the story has a happy ending, aim and outcome are the same. ...

In stories, there are agents and actions; there are patterns; there is direction; most of all, there is meaning. Even when the consequences are tragic, there is a point; there is a message, a moral, a teaching. And that is a consolation. It is consoling to believe that our lives have a shape, a purpose and direction; that the white hats and black hats have appropriate heads beneath them, and are borne about by bodies with the right souls inside; that there are historical entities, called events, which we can understand, periods which have cohesion and personalities all their own, causes we can espouse or oppose, forces we can employ, and so on.

Stories have to have a certain size. An arrow, to boast of flight, must fly awhile.

But should we believe in the story's simple determinism, in its naive teleology, its easy judgments, its facile divisions of time, its Chutes and Ladders structure? especially when stories are morally devious. There opening events are always an excuse, for the real aim of every story is a justification. ...

Stories invent a world which isn't there. Stories are abstract and indifferent to detail. A Story asks for the complicity of its readers, who share its ups and downs and tacitly approve the widkedness it wishes to justify. Histories do mostly the same thing: write up the past in a way that will authorize some present misbehavior. Stories try to keep us naive and trusting. Yes, indeed, they console us. They console us by shielding us from the truth. ...

Fictions, on the other hand, pull flashbacks and other tricks, fill their pages and the stories they pretend to tell with data: descriptions, expositions, conversations, digressions, momologues. There are characters with fictitious psychologies and fabricated pasts. ...

It might be plausible to suppose, as Hilary Putnam does, that if we turn the crank on a certain character, he will project his world on the tabula rasa of our reading, as if the world were an inference and th inference were useful to us in our own... . The data of any fiction, without the style and structure of that fiction, cannot guarantee any kind of real consequences. As soon as a so-called truth is removed from a literary text, as it must be if it is to be of further use, it loses its predictive power. ...

We do tell ourselves stories in order to live. That is just another one of our problems, and one wonders will we ever grow up. But we do not tell ourselves fictions. Fictions are too complicated; often they are nearly as long as life itself. And the good ones are frequently just as puzzling..." (pp. 3-8)

The gist is this: There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. In the story, action is everything. Fiction gives the action context.

Gass concludes as follows in a section with the Foucaultian entitled 'Reality Has A History':

"narrative forms have always enjoyed a privileged position, as if they were the best mirrors of reality; indeed, the notion of the mirror (though it inverts) is beguilingly isomorphic. But the mind never did march, only its linear logic did; human character neither was built in a day nor let out its contents like a tap to a vat. Correlation replaced necessity, probabiilty certainty; entities were full of elements made of entities, yet entities were exclamations of relation. Death was a destination, not a consummation, and life, though full of purposes, had none, and though everything in life was a sign, life managed, itself, to be meaningless.

Story was a comfort, but if it was thought to be right for the realization of the world, except in the narrowest of cases, it was the comfort of a lie.

Fiction is story's polar opposite, though that does not mean they do not need one another, live in the same sphere, or have no common qualities. Both are cold most of the year." (pp. 26-27)

Gass tells us that "human society is full of narratives, which we set up and follow." The narratives change to meet our circumstances and need, but the story remains the same. But can we unearth the Ur-story around which our multiform narratives flit and flicker like flies on shit? This was the question I meditated on during my long drive down the mountain.

[to be continued]

The Politics of Fiction

I know I've been nattering on in my most recent themed posts on the issues of crowds and politics.  I'm pretty sure I've annoyed those of my readers who are apolitical or angered those of unlike mind or simply bored those of you for whom American politics are irrelevant.  I assure you there are literary reasons behind these feuilletons other than as draft-fodder for future non-fiction essays.  To wit:  one of the two novels I currently have in process has explicit political themes; it's a bit of a thriller, truth be told—though, in conception, it is no less "literary" or "artistic" than the one I've finished or the other one I'm working on.  Thus, these last entries rate in my mind as research.

I'll leave you with a quote from Lydia Millet in the latest Bookforum:

"The most crucial artistry of fiction is the existential question, whose critique of power is found in its linguistic play or symbols or evocations of feeling. And an obvious but key distinction between the literary and the middlebrow, between books that are art and those that simply are not, is not politics per se, which can play a part in either, but the quality of being beyond easy description. If a novel loses little through being synopsized in a page, it is not art but narrative. Narrative can be a skeleton for literature but clearly is not literature itself; that distinction belongs only to fiction that is comparable to other art forms, to poetry, to painting, to music, and cannot be represented by anything other than itself. Language is a landscape whose beauty rises from the unconscious, while narrative is a superficial structure we impose on it consciously—not an end in itself, but a tool.

The problem is that fiction is written about in this country, in places as prominent as the New York Times, in a way that mistakes narrative for art. There’s nothing wrong with pulp fiction or genre fiction, and there’s nothing wrong with middlebrow fiction: What’s wrong is that (increasingly, to my mind) opinion-making critics elevate the mundane and the middlebrow to the literary. One dominant reviewing trend, for example, mistakes banal stories about assimilation or interpersonal drama—and often those sagas that marry the two —for literature merely because they may expose insular readers to unfamiliar cultural or ethnic touchstones. Works that are little more than cross-cultural soap operas pass as literary achievements because, in a sense, they also pass for political statements: The politically correct, in other words, is clothed as the political, and apparently, that’s the closest many readers care to come to transcendence.

True literature is almost always truly political—political in a deep sense, political in a way that is felt, that reverberates through the being. It should not be enough that a writer has an identity that is deemed marginal, or writes about identities that are. What needs to matter most is the extraordinariness of the artist’s relationship to language."

Lydia Millet is the author of six novels, most recently How the Dead Dream (Soft Skull Press, 2008).

"more things in heaven and earth..."

Martha Nussbaum provides the following recipe in the latest The New Republic:

To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare's plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what? "Stages of Thought"

This brings us back to the theme of our previous post. Let's expand a bit, shall we? There are two perspectives we wish to examine: 1) how philosophy views literature and 2) how literature views philosophy. For now, we'll limit ourselves primarily to fiction.

1) From the philosopher's point of view, fiction is often useful. Philosophers are always looking for pithy aphorisms or apt metaphors to bring home their points and fiction writers and poets, because of their facility with language and image, often provide good illustrations. Fiction provides salient illustrations of abstruse points—but in an intuitive sort of way. Literary authors are seldom witting philosophers. There is an imperious view as well: fiction is something that can be used, for example, to confirm the philosopher's own philosophy or repudiate an opponent's argument. Through fiction, the philosopher can often demonstrate the power of his/her ideas. (The problem here, of course, is that fictional worlds stand in for real worlds and true experience.) And, finally, philosophy tries to make sense of things and the fictional work of art is one of the things the philosopher must ultimately make sense of. Philosophy asks such questions as what counts as knowledge? what does it mean to be? what does it mean to mean? how can we clarify things? what legitimate conclusions can we draw from a given set of premises? what, ultimately, underpins thought, reason, logic? is language thought? what is good, true, beautiful, right, just, etc? A philosopher might find a literary author touching around the edges of these questions but, in the end, must dismiss the effort as unsystematic or non-serious. Philosophy is about the life of the mind. A work of fiction is only useful so long as it is, in fact, useful to the philosopher.

2) From the literary point of view, philosophy is usually clumsy and poorly written. Boring. Abstract. Distant. Disengaged from reality. If a given novel or story is deemed to be merely the instantiation or embodiment of a philosophical doctrine then it is probably not a fully-realized work. It is hack work; its characters merely counters on a larger gameboard, its themes prefabricated, its "message" inauthentic. It is true that works of literature sometimes try to philosophize—e.g., the seven ages of man—but it is usually soft philosophy, not something widely respected or taken seriously among the pros. How can you falsify such a 'philosophy'? Certainly, writers can turn to philosophers to get an understanding of the nature of fiction or literature. What is its true function? its proper province? How best to understand or criticize literature? Fiction gives us insight into the life of the senses and the emotions, as well as the life of the mind, but as embodied in recognizably human characters. And what the writer of fiction does best is to humanize the philosopher and, importantly, and bring his/her philosophy down to earth. Who are these egg-heads and nerds, these geniuses and visionaries who provide us with these magnificent systems of insight? They are not gods, after all.

Drawing on our previous post, if art (in this case fiction) is the transfiguration of the commonplace (or, in Novalis's famous expression "renders the familiar strange and the strange familiar"), philosophy is the subsumation of the same.

Facets: Ways of looking at fiction

[D]iscursive language, say in novel writing, is artistically identified as description, which is what enables fiction to be convincing: we acquiesce in the fiction that we are being given facts. So that the difference between factual and fictive description is not that the former is true and the latter false—for something may after all be meant as factual and be false without thereby being elevated to the status of fiction, and fictional prose may in literal fact be true—but in the fact that the former is artistically identified as description and the latter literally identified as that. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace p. 127

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...the drive is curiosity and the aim enlightenment. Use of symbols beyond immediate need is for the sake of understanding, not practice; what compels is the urge to konw, what delights is discovery, and communication is secondary to the apprehension and formulation of what is to be communicated....Symbolization, then, is to be judged fundamentally by how well it serves the cognitive purpose: by the delicacy of its discriminations and the aptness of its allusions; by the way it works in grasping, exploring, and informing the world; by how it analyzes, sorts, orders, and organizes; by how it participates in the making, manipulation, retention, and transformation of knowledge....Not only do we discover the world through our symbols but we understand and reappraise our symbols progressively in the light of our growing experience. ...

The difference between art and science is not that between feeling and fact, intuition and inference, delight and deliberation, synthesis and analysis, sensation and cerebration, concreteness and abstraction, passion and action, mediacy and immediacy, or truth and beauty, but rather a difference in domination of certain specific characteristics of symbols. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art pp. 258, 260, 264

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The language of fiction functions in two ways, therefore. In one, used appropriately, the sentences of a fiction "body forth" a particular imaginary world—producing Jehoshaphat [from Lagerkvist's, The Dwarf], who is referred to, as well as the dwarf, who makes reference to him; in another, the "voice" of the dwarf, collapsed into the "voice" of the fiction (since the story is told in the first person), is imagined to refer to Jehoshaphat. Hence, the referring use of language occurs in fiction only insofar as the world of the fiction is already assumed to exist; but it is then, precisely, that the distinction between fiction and reality is no longer critical. Joseph Margolis, Art & Philosophy

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How then to posit the value of a text? How establish a basic typology of texts? The primary evaluation of all texts can come neither from science, for science does not evaluate, nor from ideology, for the ideological value of a text (moral, aesthetic, political, alethiological) is a value of representation, not of production (ideology "reflects," it does not do work). Our evaluation can be linked only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing....the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Roland Barthes, S/Z pp. 3-4

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[T]he philosophical analysis of fiction has scarcely taken its first steps, Philosophers continue to interpret novels as if they were philosophies themselves, platforms to speak from, middens from which may be scratched important messages for mankind; they have predictably looked for content, not form; they have regarded fictions as ways of viewing reality and not as additions to it. There are many ways of refusing experience. This is one of them.

So little is known of the power of the gods in the worlds of fiction, or of the form of cause, or of the nature of soul, or of the influence of evil, or of the essence of good. No distinction is presently made between laws and rules of inference and conventions of embodiment, or their kinds. The role of chance or of assumption, the recreative power of the skillful reader, the mastery of the sense of internal life, the forms of space and time: how much is known of these? ... No search is made for first principles, none for rules, and infact all capacity for thought in the face of fiction is so regularly abandoned as to reduce it to another form of passive and mechanical amusement. The novelist has, by this ineptitude, been driven out of healthy contact with his audience, and the supreme values of fiction sentimentalized. William Gass, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," in Fiction and the Figures of Life, pp. 25-26

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In the novel, the voice that speaks the first sentence, then the second, and so onward—call it the voice of the narrator—has, to begin with, no authority at all. Authority must be earned; on the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority. J.M. Coetzee, "On Authority in Fiction," Diary of a Bad Year p. 149

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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver...There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer....

It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass. Vladimir Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers," in Lectures on Literature pp. 5-6.

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"Thinking, analyzing, inventing (he also wrote me) are not anomalous acts; they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional performance of that function, to hoard ancient and alien thoughts, to recall with incredulous stupor that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our laziness or our barbarity. Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case." Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

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Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part.

Wittgensteinian Wednesday

281. ...It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.

282. "But in a fairy tale the pot too can see and hear!" (Certainly; but it can also talk.)

"But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."—It is not as simple as that. Is it false or nonsensical to say that a pot talks? Have we a clear picture of the circumstances in which we should say of a pot that it talked? (Even a nonsense-poem is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child.)

We do indeed say of an inanimate thing that it is in pain: when playing with dolls for example.

But this use of the concept of pain is a secondary one. Imagine a case in which people ascribed pain only to inanimate things; pitied only dolls. ...

283. What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?

Is it that my education has led me to it by drawing my attention to feelings in myself, and now I transfer the idea to objects outside myself? That I recognize that there is something there (in me) which I can call "pain" without getting into conflict with the way other people use this word?—I do not transfer my idea to stones, plants, etc.

Couldn't I imagine having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted? Well, how do I know, if I shut my eyes, whether I have not turned into a stone? And if that has happened, in what sense will the stone have the pains? In what sense will they be ascribable to the stone? And why need the pain have a bearer at all here?!

And can one say of the stone that it has a soul and that is what has the pain? What has a soul, or pain, to do with a stone?

Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains.

For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like of a soul which some body has. And how can a body have a soul?

284. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!—And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. ...

297. Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture pot? ...

300. It is—we would like to say—not merely the picture of the behaviour that plays a part in the language-game with the words "he is in pain", but also the picture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behaviour, but also that of the pain. ...

301. An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it. ...

309. What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Perception, Emotion, Consciousness

[Insert Emotion Here]

We have, then, the following levels and types of emotions:

1. Emotions toward characters: (a) sharing the emotion of a character by identification, (b) reacting to the emotion of a character.

2. Emotions toward the 'implied author,' the sense of life embodied in the text as a whole: (a) sharing that sense of life and its emotions through empathy, (b) reacting to it, either sympathetically or criticially. These emotions operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

3. Emotions toward one's own possibilities. These, too, are multiple and operate at multiple levels of specificity and generality.

All of these emotional responses (with the exception of those that involve a rejection of the work) are built into the work itself, into its literary structures. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions p. 242.

The creation of a fictional character is not simple. As noted in our previous post, it involves inhabiting and portraying the consciousness of a fictive being through the use of empathy and imagination. But the portrayal of simple perception is insufficient: human consciousness has an emotional content drawing from, among other things, memory, aspiration, and attitudes. The written depiction of perception must also bring this emotional content into play—whether through metaphor or simile or other form of figurative language or outright assertion. Fictional characters must be portrayed as inhabiting their bodies (as perceptual mechanisms) and as having a passably human range of emotional responses to their world (which Nussbaum does not address).

Failure to bring perceptual content into play—a flaw we've noted in the analyses of both James Wood and Jill Lepore—renders fiction a mechanical thing, an intellectual exercise; no different in form than history. Distant. Imprecise.

Failure, at the next level, to imbue perception with emotional content is a prescription for sterile fiction.

Fiction: The Art of Consciousness

A contribution to the ongoing blogland discussion concerning the nature of fiction appears in this week's The New Yorker here. Jill Lepore uses fiction and memoir (faked and real) as the sounding board for understanding "what makes a book a history?"

Lepore, I believe, misunderstands fiction. She says: "Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people." As she acknowledges, this view is a bit outdated because much current history is precisely the study of private life. But, her equation is at the level of story: history and fiction tell stories about people, great and small. This is a shallow view of fiction. Sure, history can tell stories about events—how they happened, why they happened, what their consequences were, etc. And fiction can tell similar stories, the only difference being that the fictional stories are putatively made up.

However, as a historian, the writer cannot enter into the consciousness of his subject. The historian cannot say how richly succulent the juice from the veal loin Henry IV ate the night he learned of Richard II's death tasted as it dribbled down his chin. The historian cannot say how delicious Cleopatra's wet sex smelled to Marc Antony as their boat sailed down the gentle Nile on a warm summer evening. The historian cannot say how the point of the ice axe felt as it entered Trotsky's head. Nor can the historian say what Shakespeare's voice sounded like as he intoned his lines on the stage of the Globe theater. And, lastly, the historian cannot tell us what Marie Antoinette last saw in the vulgar crowd as the guillotine lopped her head into the waiting basket. The historian can tell us that these things happened and give us some background facts, but she cannot imagine us into the consciousness of historical persons, great or small. That is the sole province of the writer of fiction, the artist of consciousness.