Theory of Suburban Literature
While reading Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature edited by Peter Childs, I wandered into an essay on the desire for the emergence of an Irish literary genius. Eventually the essay dove into the troubles experienced by those who refined an Irish perspective from which to create a traditional mold. One was a trouble had by Douglas Hyde translating Gaelic folk songs: they make these crazy leaps from subject to subject mid-song, and exhibit none of the traditional, cut-and-dry structure exhibited by coherent narratives. He figured that this is because Gaels have such vivid imaginations that they find spelling everything out to be extraordinarily dull. So, in order to truly represent the Irish to themselves, you have to be confusing enough to let their imaginations run wild yet set up mild framework which will send imaginations, such as you understand them to work, where you want them to go. If you apply this to Joyce, then he truly isn't intended to be comprehended. He's meant to be used as a vessel by which you can come to your own understanding of what it means to be Irish. The puzzle Ulysses presents mirrors the puzzle Joyce wrangled when hammering out his own identity. Cool.
Since I'm writing a novel on a DC suburban experience, I think it will be worthwhile to break down what a novel about any DC suburban experience should address, so I will therefore have the context to eliminate what mine should. Of course applying theory to art can cause you to end up with something which follows a set of rules which only a tiny group of people will notice. When that happens, as with Ulysses, you end up needing some sort of skeleton key to understand all the little references. I don't want to do that. Rather than slap people around with heavy-handed metaphors and sly references to official Big Things, I want to grab onto the feelings and mindset that accompany the experience I'm writing about, and somehow deliver that experience through the fictive dream. But for the purposes of understanding what?
So here are some themes which I think you can't write about growing up near DC without. In the long form, anyway. In the short the rules hardly apply.
Suburban isolation. Suburbanites attempt to alleviate the staggering loneliness inflicted by a lifestyle where people travel in boxes (cars) past boxes (houses) to boxes (offices) without hardly saying a thing to one another by coming up with boxes (clubs and community centers) that give them an excuse to be around one another which they then under-utilize or over-utilize without any sense of mindfulness. And outside of formulaic interaction, these people's repressed social impulses create psychological demons which push them into strangeness.
Those who become conscious of the limitations imposed by the life-in-boxes approach sometimes willfully abandon this lifestyle in extreme ways (expatriating, joining religions: cult or otherwise, and going off to live in the wilderness are some examples). Others opt-in to a box which puts them in a sort-of limbo between suburban style living and their idealistic concept of what pedestrian European city life is like. As far as I can see, the last example can be pretty gratifying, but I don't want to focus too much on how people depart from the suburban lifestyle so much as how they allow it to convince them to cyclically (psychically?) soil themselves. Drugs and alcoholism figure heavily into that.
Rudeness. Because of the aforementioned isolation, outside of formulaic interaction these people are often horribly rude and selfish. People in traffic are a great example of this.
The new guy next to me smells so strongly of cigarettes that I'm kinda gagging. Journal entry overrrr.
Since I'm writing a novel on a DC suburban experience, I think it will be worthwhile to break down what a novel about any DC suburban experience should address, so I will therefore have the context to eliminate what mine should. Of course applying theory to art can cause you to end up with something which follows a set of rules which only a tiny group of people will notice. When that happens, as with Ulysses, you end up needing some sort of skeleton key to understand all the little references. I don't want to do that. Rather than slap people around with heavy-handed metaphors and sly references to official Big Things, I want to grab onto the feelings and mindset that accompany the experience I'm writing about, and somehow deliver that experience through the fictive dream. But for the purposes of understanding what?
So here are some themes which I think you can't write about growing up near DC without. In the long form, anyway. In the short the rules hardly apply.
Suburban isolation. Suburbanites attempt to alleviate the staggering loneliness inflicted by a lifestyle where people travel in boxes (cars) past boxes (houses) to boxes (offices) without hardly saying a thing to one another by coming up with boxes (clubs and community centers) that give them an excuse to be around one another which they then under-utilize or over-utilize without any sense of mindfulness. And outside of formulaic interaction, these people's repressed social impulses create psychological demons which push them into strangeness.
Those who become conscious of the limitations imposed by the life-in-boxes approach sometimes willfully abandon this lifestyle in extreme ways (expatriating, joining religions: cult or otherwise, and going off to live in the wilderness are some examples). Others opt-in to a box which puts them in a sort-of limbo between suburban style living and their idealistic concept of what pedestrian European city life is like. As far as I can see, the last example can be pretty gratifying, but I don't want to focus too much on how people depart from the suburban lifestyle so much as how they allow it to convince them to cyclically (psychically?) soil themselves. Drugs and alcoholism figure heavily into that.
Rudeness. Because of the aforementioned isolation, outside of formulaic interaction these people are often horribly rude and selfish. People in traffic are a great example of this.
The new guy next to me smells so strongly of cigarettes that I'm kinda gagging. Journal entry overrrr.