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(this is a followup to "Talking to myself" parts one and two)So one of the concepts that Marcus developed at length in his Harper's article was "literary ambition." He took a moment to acknowledge that the bare words could mean more than one thing: for example, one might think that a person of literary ambition might be one who wants to win a lot of prize, or make a lot of money, or be famous, or some combination of those. But the ambition he was talking about was different. It was the ambition to do something fine, to go someplace new with ones writing, to write something nobody else would or could or would think of, and have it work, and be good.
Marcus made a few side comments that it wasn't necessary, necessarily, to call all literary conventions into question while doing this, or to write "difficult" books, or books where narrative is slighted. But he was very certain that the possibility of doing these things had to be open if a person was going to write with literary ambition. And that the product will almost never look like an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection (apparently, it's an important point that Franzen's latest was a Winfrey selection and that Franzen publicly worried about what that might do to his reputation as an artistic writer and she withdrew the selection and he apologized publicly about a thousand times. Every step in this story means something, most of which eludes me -- not all, I'm not an idiot): that is, it won't have those qualities that Oprah Winfrey selects for, the upliftingness, the particular relationship to social, cultural and emotional issues. Which I think means that in Marcus's universe, Barbara Kingsolver does not have literary ambition. You can tell I disagree because I used the "Marcus's universe" construction.
But it's not the point, anyway. Marcus names a lot of names (not Kingsolver's). DeLillo is one of his guys who he names for being literarily ambitious and wonderful. DeLillo is one of the writers he names that I've read and I have an opinion about. It's not a trustworthy opinion because DeLillo has written a pile of books as big as your average elementary school and I've read, I think, two of them, and I can't be sure I've read the really representational ones. But here's my untrustworthy opinion. DeLillo doesn't make a good posterboy for fiction that breaks conventions. His story telling is pretty straightforward. It's not plotty, but there is a plot, and events unfold in a fairly realistic way, even when the story verrs off into the fantastic. (hmm. No, this is not magic realism -- the fantasy elements have a different relationship, somehow, and the tradition he's coming out of is more surrealism, by way of Lenny Bruce, I think, though dog knows someone who is really well-read will know better than I do)
Personally, I liked this about DeLillo: he was so emotional. Almost as much as Dickens, though he seems to get props from the people in his corner for not being sentimental. I remember a passage where a man is contemplating his children, who are almost none of them his in any legal or traditional sense -- they come to him as side benefits from transient marriages, and their biological parentage is so removed that it's confusing to contemplate -- and he just gets hit with how much he loves them: and no, it's not a pervy passage, it's regular, plain, dumb parental love. (I'm on to something about dumb love, which you can see somewhere in a responce to something Anna Feruglio Dal Dan said in some thread about something else in rasfc, I don't remember which, but I'm also working up a piece about it with respect to some other stuff and anyway, there's more about it coming someday) I loved that piece.
But I didn't become a fan of DeLillo, and I don't know why, and it doesn't matter. Just -- for once, when Marcus mentions a name, I know something about what he's talking about and it doesn't seem to me to fit the description. Though that's a point that Marcus makes too, at other points when it's convenient for him.
Anyway, I'm going to say that I support the concept of literary ambition, though I don't think that the things Marcus comes around to saying in the article which make it look as if literary ambition is dependent on these experimentalisms are really where it's at. For one thing, besides my own experience with DeLillo, Marcus does come round to quoting one or two of the authors that apparently Franzen has mentioned as being the bastards who are ruining literature for the rest of us and the passages are completely normal writing. So whatever it is, it's not experimentnalisms on the sentence or paragraph level that are definitive of what Franzen's attacking and MArcus is supporting. Well, so sometimes it is. You've got your James Joyce in there. They both agree that James Joyuce is one of the people they're talking about. Except that he's not a contemporary American writer winning literary prizes and not being read by Oprah Winfrey. A point that Marcus brings up.
Anyway, the issue of "difficulty" (Franzen's word) or "literary ambition has to be located (that's a literary analytical word, I think, which has more meaning than I quite get, but it seems to me that it works just fine when used in the regular way) in the overall structure of the book. Like -- does the book have a narrative arc at all? Does it have normal causality? Do chapters follow one another in chronological order, or in chronological order withb exceptions clearly marked with transition grammar of some recognizable sort? Does the book have the, what do you call it? structure with the plot points and climax and deneouement? Does the book use story past or one of the well-known variations? What about the point of view -- is it using any of the usual and definable point of view strategies?
I have heard people complain about deviations from these things, that the deviations are irritating, difficult, gimmicky and obstructive. Sometimes. I have also seen books which seem to me to live right smack in the middle of the mainstream which are told in second person, or backwards chronolgy, or future tense, or something. And when it gets to the genres where I write and read, all bets are off.
Because I write in the genre I do, I have as models a number of writers for whom the relationship to narrative convention and traditional structure is much less defined. You don't have to pick a team at the outset and decide whether you're a Traditional Norteño or an Experimentalist Sureño, and from then on be doomed to wear your red narrative conventions or your blue literary ambitions or risk being capped by your own guys. Each story you write you may -- if you wish -- decide to turn some convention on its head or you may have ignored it altogether becuase of some other story telling issue. Which I want to take on in another installment.
Marcus made a few side comments that it wasn't necessary, necessarily, to call all literary conventions into question while doing this, or to write "difficult" books, or books where narrative is slighted. But he was very certain that the possibility of doing these things had to be open if a person was going to write with literary ambition. And that the product will almost never look like an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection (apparently, it's an important point that Franzen's latest was a Winfrey selection and that Franzen publicly worried about what that might do to his reputation as an artistic writer and she withdrew the selection and he apologized publicly about a thousand times. Every step in this story means something, most of which eludes me -- not all, I'm not an idiot): that is, it won't have those qualities that Oprah Winfrey selects for, the upliftingness, the particular relationship to social, cultural and emotional issues. Which I think means that in Marcus's universe, Barbara Kingsolver does not have literary ambition. You can tell I disagree because I used the "Marcus's universe" construction.
But it's not the point, anyway. Marcus names a lot of names (not Kingsolver's). DeLillo is one of his guys who he names for being literarily ambitious and wonderful. DeLillo is one of the writers he names that I've read and I have an opinion about. It's not a trustworthy opinion because DeLillo has written a pile of books as big as your average elementary school and I've read, I think, two of them, and I can't be sure I've read the really representational ones. But here's my untrustworthy opinion. DeLillo doesn't make a good posterboy for fiction that breaks conventions. His story telling is pretty straightforward. It's not plotty, but there is a plot, and events unfold in a fairly realistic way, even when the story verrs off into the fantastic. (hmm. No, this is not magic realism -- the fantasy elements have a different relationship, somehow, and the tradition he's coming out of is more surrealism, by way of Lenny Bruce, I think, though dog knows someone who is really well-read will know better than I do)
Personally, I liked this about DeLillo: he was so emotional. Almost as much as Dickens, though he seems to get props from the people in his corner for not being sentimental. I remember a passage where a man is contemplating his children, who are almost none of them his in any legal or traditional sense -- they come to him as side benefits from transient marriages, and their biological parentage is so removed that it's confusing to contemplate -- and he just gets hit with how much he loves them: and no, it's not a pervy passage, it's regular, plain, dumb parental love. (I'm on to something about dumb love, which you can see somewhere in a responce to something Anna Feruglio Dal Dan said in some thread about something else in rasfc, I don't remember which, but I'm also working up a piece about it with respect to some other stuff and anyway, there's more about it coming someday) I loved that piece.
But I didn't become a fan of DeLillo, and I don't know why, and it doesn't matter. Just -- for once, when Marcus mentions a name, I know something about what he's talking about and it doesn't seem to me to fit the description. Though that's a point that Marcus makes too, at other points when it's convenient for him.
Anyway, I'm going to say that I support the concept of literary ambition, though I don't think that the things Marcus comes around to saying in the article which make it look as if literary ambition is dependent on these experimentalisms are really where it's at. For one thing, besides my own experience with DeLillo, Marcus does come round to quoting one or two of the authors that apparently Franzen has mentioned as being the bastards who are ruining literature for the rest of us and the passages are completely normal writing. So whatever it is, it's not experimentnalisms on the sentence or paragraph level that are definitive of what Franzen's attacking and MArcus is supporting. Well, so sometimes it is. You've got your James Joyce in there. They both agree that James Joyuce is one of the people they're talking about. Except that he's not a contemporary American writer winning literary prizes and not being read by Oprah Winfrey. A point that Marcus brings up.
Anyway, the issue of "difficulty" (Franzen's word) or "literary ambition has to be located (that's a literary analytical word, I think, which has more meaning than I quite get, but it seems to me that it works just fine when used in the regular way) in the overall structure of the book. Like -- does the book have a narrative arc at all? Does it have normal causality? Do chapters follow one another in chronological order, or in chronological order withb exceptions clearly marked with transition grammar of some recognizable sort? Does the book have the, what do you call it? structure with the plot points and climax and deneouement? Does the book use story past or one of the well-known variations? What about the point of view -- is it using any of the usual and definable point of view strategies?
I have heard people complain about deviations from these things, that the deviations are irritating, difficult, gimmicky and obstructive. Sometimes. I have also seen books which seem to me to live right smack in the middle of the mainstream which are told in second person, or backwards chronolgy, or future tense, or something. And when it gets to the genres where I write and read, all bets are off.
Because I write in the genre I do, I have as models a number of writers for whom the relationship to narrative convention and traditional structure is much less defined. You don't have to pick a team at the outset and decide whether you're a Traditional Norteño or an Experimentalist Sureño, and from then on be doomed to wear your red narrative conventions or your blue literary ambitions or risk being capped by your own guys. Each story you write you may -- if you wish -- decide to turn some convention on its head or you may have ignored it altogether becuase of some other story telling issue. Which I want to take on in another installment.