| If I am at a loss
for words in the great song,
If it dies out, may it not die out there for me.
- Mwindo Epic
Africa
• •
wholeness, harmony,
radiance
James Joyce via
St Thomas Aquinas via Stephen Dedalus
• •
Narrativity is not
a method to achieve story telling; story telling is a method to accomplish
narrativity.
A novel is small
A fiction is large
A narrativity is all encompassing, but open
Art, not story, is the point of it all
The narrative’s language absorbs the phenomenal world it describes.
That world, whether real or imagined, no longer exists. Only the world
of this language now matters, makes a difference, exists.
The origin [even etymologically] of the narrative is fact; without servitude
to verisimilitude, narrativity establishes fact. Once something has successfully
become narrative it has successfully become fact.
• •
Narrative is a product
of the imagination in an active relationship with the world, is an art
performed in language, but which arises before thought, is read by the
reader in language but affects the reader past thought, is an art of the
whole and wholly incomplete person.
Narrative accomplishes its work through the method of language, not in
language but within the language, the language act and the concomitant
silence act which takes place in the listener/reader (oral tradition/written
tradition). This silence act cannot occur without support: language supports
it.
The writer must carefully and with all her/his resources: craft, intelligence,
intuition, abandon, emotion, aesthetic, reason and irrationality create
a method for the narrative at hand. Only an effective, new, invented narrative
will accomplish the act of fiction, the fiction act, a result greater
than the sum of its parts, one of which is the reading act.
Narrativity maintains an electrical charge with the phenomenal world.
It is the way in which an author tells a story which never gets told.
Narrative = form. Form = purpose. Or beauty. Or meaning, or significance,
or presence/absence. ("One loves only form" Charles Olson.)
This form can be a premeditated framework or a spontaneous evolution of
the writing act. But either way, it must evolve. As in Action Painting,
so in Action Writing [and really, what good painting is not some form
of Action Painting.]
The work must evoke the enterprise of its process toward form.
Form is macro and micro. The word is form, the letter is form.
• •
Mimesis: Narrative
is mimetic. Life unravels. There is no omniscient narrator. Life is not
about something, it is something. This is the greatest level of mimesis
which narrativity, through its various artifices, achieves. Not imitating
life, it is life. Not about something, it is something. The narrativity
of the fiction understands that it must charter the narrative of this
greater purpose: a mimesis of being and doing.
The more experimental the narrative, the more mimetic it might become.
A multivocal point of view is more mimetic than a single or stable point
of view. Neologism is more mimetic than the dictionary.
• •
"...the age old
struggle between a secret and an utterance."
Roland Barthes
• •
plot
That narrative structure which the novel requires in order to immerse
itself into place, for every novel is primarily about place, is place,
whether that place is hyperrealistic (Joyce), Surrealistic (Breton), or
Anti-Realistic (Robbe-Grillet). [Nonetheless: "All novelists believe
they are realists." Robbe-Grillet]
character
Those people in the novel who think, feel, see, hear. They are the novel’s
first readers.
In the ancient recitations of the oral tradition, the audience, by its
responses, might change the storyteller’s version of the story.
Likewise, the characters in a literate novel can act to change the form
and/or the content and/or the shape, direction, meaning of the novel.
theme
Because the contemporary culture in which the novel is written insists
on a share of the novel (as it insists on a share of the soul of every
one of its citizens), it takes the novel’s theme for its own. This
does not prohibit universal themes — those themes from all times
— for culture itself spans all time.
The theme often thinks of itself as Òwhat the novel is about.Ó
This is erroneous in at least two ways:
- A novel is not
about anything. It is something.
- Insofar as we might
want to say that the novel is about something, it is always about place.
setting
Every novelist desires to set her/his novel nowhere. They choose a setting
which agrees to the least egregious compromise they can make with nowhere.
Everywhere would come the closest, while any certain, highly specific
here might be the meticulous replacement any novelist might make for everywhere.
The ideology of setting is that nowhere does not exist.
point of view
- point of view sustains
narrative.
- any given point
of view lasts only as long as the narrative it sustains.
- in Homer the point
of view is that of Greece; in Sappho the point of view is that of Sappho;
in Gertrude Stein the point of view is that of language; for the eye,
the point of view is pure perception.
- no point of view
is meant to be absolute, reliable, fixed, be it in Homer, Sappho, Stein.
- point of view
suggests to the reader where they may begin looking for the narrative.
- setting, place
can always serve as the point of view.
• •
The One and Only
Rule of Experimental Literature:
you must attack
some of the traditional elements of literature — plot, linear
time, traditional realism, character, et alia.
The One &
Only Corollary to the One and Only Rule of Experimental Literature:
you cannot destroy
any of those elements you challenge. You can so change them by your
attack that you transform them, that you make them new; but they themselves
are the constants of the energy of narrative.
The Epilogue
to the One and Only Rule of Experimental Literature:
you will not annihilate
any element of literature which you attack. Yet only if you question
and attack those elements will you have a chance to create something
living. The process of creating form yields relevance.
to create literary
form gives freedom to the narrative; then the narrative itself can breathe,
work, create, discover, wander.
despite some formalists’
contention that content is limited to a few possible stories, content
changes with each narrative because the author changes with each narrative
[especially given the broadest definitions of ‘author’].
Since content and form continuously create each other, the more inventive
the form, the newer the content. Every new content requires new form,
every new form creates new content.
• •
" ...and every
word I write, I say to myself ‘It’s a lie, it’s a lie."
Samuel Beckett.
Beckett understood
the enchantment of writing. Not the simple larcenous or rebellious or
charming freedom to tell a lie; the freedom of narrative to attempt truth.
• •
Make me laugh. Oh,
make me laugh. I want to laugh and laugh and laugh. I want to laugh. Every
kind of laughter, make me laugh. I need to laugh. I love to laugh. Narrativity’s
goal is to make the dissipated reader laugh.
• •
Literary theory authorizes
a lie.
• •
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