Caught in the act of greatness
As always, when you get a bunch of writers together, conversation caromed speedily, often hard to follow as conversations split off--both equally interesting--then recombined again. We talked a bit about "cutting edge" and who might be considered "cutting edge" currently writing in the genre now, and something someone said led to my asking, "How do you define the difference between innovative and self-indulgent?"
Among the responses was a reference to nihilistic_kid's post on greatness. Thence the question: Can one set out to become great--and succeed?
Here is a quick tumble of thoughts, after not quite six hours of sleep. First, the riff by nihilistic_kid. I find myself in agreement with one line: The goal of the practice is to negate the negation -- to eliminate the use of other people's imaginations instead of your own. You must negate and negate and negate until there is nothing left but you, your right hand, and that woodchipper. I agree that one has to be able to strip away the accepted reactions to actions, attitudes, etc, that become invisible within one's own time. But. I think, anyway, that disassociative "woodchipping" is not enough. There is much stripping of the trappings of civilization out there in various types of work that leaving the reader looking at the smoking ruins. And then what? Then (I think) comes the real work: rebuilding.
I think greatness comes with the insight that not only penetrates past the accepted norms of one's time (so easy to spot fifty years later, a century, two centuries, more, exemplified in Shakespeare and Austen, for example), but builds a new world. And in the act of rebuilding convincing new ways of human interaction, effects change.
It doesn't have to be a grand world. It can be a new world in which everything is the same except the ways that families interact, as in in Hilary McKay's latest books. In which children interact, via the Muppets, and how effective they were in modeling new behaviors through the seventies. In which young people find a new way to communicate in the difficult process of "dating"/spending leisure time/developing a relationship [insert your example here].
Positing moral and cultural improvement through fiction (the most blatant form being allegory) can be such a seductive goal that the fictive part shipwrecks. I think of the writers who, on finding themselves propelled to fame, set out to write their Rilly Great Work. Anthony Hope's The King's Mirror--turgid and unreadable, whereas The Prisoner of Zenda is still read and loved. Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham had such a stunning impact on his time (though he wrote it at twenty-four) he not only had a strong effect on one strand of literature, he changed male fashions for the next century. But his Meaningful stuff? Snore. Fanny Burney. Evelina, written when she was young, is still a wonderful read--but each succeeding novel became more bombastic and diffuse as she tried harder and harder for "greatness." Even Georgette Heyer, who according to the hagiography by Joan Aiken, intended her medieval book about King John to be great--but what little there is of it is too dry to rate even as turgid.
I suspect that the conscious focus on 'greatness' can skew toward the hortatory--the author interposes him or herself squarely between the reader and the world of the text. The really great work, as Nabokov says, It is the present and the future (your book) that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving into the universe surrounding you.*
This world fades away, leaving one in that world via the pleasurable shock of truth, to borrow another of his phrases. One sees past the predictable, the expected behaviors of characters to another set of interactions which ring true. But first there must be that pleasurable shock of artistic truth--which I think answers the question about what is innovative and what self-indulgent: if we don't find the work convincing, then all its high-minded exhortations will probably sound more like rodomontade than wisdom. And of course not all fictions are going to ring true for all readers, no matter how earnest and dedicated the writer. But the subject is those whose vision reaches not just a vast audience now, it grips succeeding generations.
So is that greatness, then, the ability to snap the reader from this world into that with the pleasurable shock of truth? Talk about trying to catch and hold lightning!
*Lectures on Literature p 378, Harvest edition 1982
Among the responses was a reference to nihilistic_kid's post on greatness. Thence the question: Can one set out to become great--and succeed?
Here is a quick tumble of thoughts, after not quite six hours of sleep. First, the riff by nihilistic_kid. I find myself in agreement with one line: The goal of the practice is to negate the negation -- to eliminate the use of other people's imaginations instead of your own. You must negate and negate and negate until there is nothing left but you, your right hand, and that woodchipper. I agree that one has to be able to strip away the accepted reactions to actions, attitudes, etc, that become invisible within one's own time. But. I think, anyway, that disassociative "woodchipping" is not enough. There is much stripping of the trappings of civilization out there in various types of work that leaving the reader looking at the smoking ruins. And then what? Then (I think) comes the real work: rebuilding.
I think greatness comes with the insight that not only penetrates past the accepted norms of one's time (so easy to spot fifty years later, a century, two centuries, more, exemplified in Shakespeare and Austen, for example), but builds a new world. And in the act of rebuilding convincing new ways of human interaction, effects change.
It doesn't have to be a grand world. It can be a new world in which everything is the same except the ways that families interact, as in in Hilary McKay's latest books. In which children interact, via the Muppets, and how effective they were in modeling new behaviors through the seventies. In which young people find a new way to communicate in the difficult process of "dating"/spending leisure time/developing a relationship [insert your example here].
Positing moral and cultural improvement through fiction (the most blatant form being allegory) can be such a seductive goal that the fictive part shipwrecks. I think of the writers who, on finding themselves propelled to fame, set out to write their Rilly Great Work. Anthony Hope's The King's Mirror--turgid and unreadable, whereas The Prisoner of Zenda is still read and loved. Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham had such a stunning impact on his time (though he wrote it at twenty-four) he not only had a strong effect on one strand of literature, he changed male fashions for the next century. But his Meaningful stuff? Snore. Fanny Burney. Evelina, written when she was young, is still a wonderful read--but each succeeding novel became more bombastic and diffuse as she tried harder and harder for "greatness." Even Georgette Heyer, who according to the hagiography by Joan Aiken, intended her medieval book about King John to be great--but what little there is of it is too dry to rate even as turgid.
I suspect that the conscious focus on 'greatness' can skew toward the hortatory--the author interposes him or herself squarely between the reader and the world of the text. The really great work, as Nabokov says, It is the present and the future (your book) that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving into the universe surrounding you.*
This world fades away, leaving one in that world via the pleasurable shock of truth, to borrow another of his phrases. One sees past the predictable, the expected behaviors of characters to another set of interactions which ring true. But first there must be that pleasurable shock of artistic truth--which I think answers the question about what is innovative and what self-indulgent: if we don't find the work convincing, then all its high-minded exhortations will probably sound more like rodomontade than wisdom. And of course not all fictions are going to ring true for all readers, no matter how earnest and dedicated the writer. But the subject is those whose vision reaches not just a vast audience now, it grips succeeding generations.
So is that greatness, then, the ability to snap the reader from this world into that with the pleasurable shock of truth? Talk about trying to catch and hold lightning!
*Lectures on Literature p 378, Harvest edition 1982