i am having to do a lot of things for teaching, which is why i have not posted, responded to emails, or finished any stories this week. i'm teaching an online class which is sort of making me dead with all the preparation and getting everything linked and stuff. this comes at a good time then: here is a sort of response/further-development of the minimalism post i made. i like this because i think it clears up a lot about what i was saying about 'avant-garde' and then also helps to better explain the difference between 'representational' writing and realism. this comes from Greg Napp, editor of the very cool online site 971 Menu. coming up i'm going to make a post about the online literary places i visit with maybe like a short critique or review and 971 is included. here's Greg's post:
Representational work knows it's representational. Realistic work doesn't, or won't admit it. It goes to all sorts of lengths to hide the fact. Many devices are developed in order to get around or between the realistic rules.
Representational work realizes that it doesn't make a shit whether the organ is made of cats or pipes. In fact, it's funny if the thing represented (organ) is made of something like cats.
Realistic work can only make cat-organs if someone is insane or dreaming,or, oddly enough, a wizard or prophet.
(sidebar: this is why i can't get into serious discussions about mainstream science fiction or fantasy--people try to argue that it's representational when it's clearly just fantasy realism--your zombie movies..hmm, i can only imagine fairly low-grade discussions about most of those, but I'm no aficionado--sorry we never got to talk about them more (which doesn't mean I want to do so, except over beers)--as I said,
sidebar).
Both your representational and your avant-garde minimalism are their own meaning. The Barth essay, which largely characterizes minimalism by its economy of expression, seems to overlook the fact that realistic work tends to look for meaning outside of itself (or to provide meaning to the world outside of itself). Unfortunately, what it generally finds (and provides), no matter how many tropes it dispenses with, is more tropes, more myths, and so the search seems a bit funny, in a tragic way.
What you're calling representational(-ism) is its own meaning--or its meaning arises out of the play between the signifier and the signified.
The upshot is this:
Realism uses signifiers as if they were scientific instruments, treating them as though they were intrinsically linked by concrete rules to their signifieds, at least within the context of the individual work, in order to manipulate signs (meanings).
Representational-ism admits (or ignores--you can see that realism can never ignore it, only deny it) the fact of its representational nature, after the author's having internalized the notion that there is no intrinsic (and certainly not 1:1) link between word and object/concept, by deploying its signifiers in such a way as to create an emptied sign.
In Southern Gothic, we can talk about what a house represents, what a kitchen represents, but this, oddly enough, makes it a realistic story, and not a representational one in the sense I think you mean. You mean it re-presents the house, or presents it again, I take it. The realistic work treats the signifier "house") as if it were the signified (building in which I live), and the realistically-circumscribed author sees the world as signified by the work or sees the work as signified by the world, depending on the direction he's thinking at the moment--this is where we get life imitating art imitating life, because the practice creates a sign that is essentially a feedback loop--the sign 'house'/the building I live in becomes a form feeding on itself.
In a representational postmodern piece, "house" can signify anything and anything can signify house. The chickens had had their long houses clipped, so they couldn't make it over the fence. I drank my house dry.
The link is broken, the connections ground away. The house sign, comprised of the signifier "house" and the concept of the place in which I live, is now empty--it is a form without content other than its formfulness, form-ness or its formation/formulation whatever. When you read it, it crackles at you, because you're getting not a conduit from some reaction in the author's mind (best case--worst case, some long-ago reaction borrowed by this author and served to you cold), you're getting THE reaction (chemical-like). This is your avant-garde, it seems to me.
What you've here labeled representational(-ism), I think, takes this emptied sign and feeds it back into the realism machine. This is where the minimalism comes in. It seems more complex than a simple matter of economy. The minimalist, it seems to me at the moment, intentionally avoids feeding the loop. Economy helps, but there's no reason work can't be verbose, even downright discursive, and still work outside the signs. I think the quality of the economy is more telling than the quantity.
Example:
She turned suddenly, sensing the man behind her.
VS
She turned. The man was there.
The economy here is not in words, but something else. The first one, in its melodramatic fashion, plays into any number of tropes and is scarred. The second less so--it gives the feedback loop a pass, for the most part, short-circuits it, even. I'm not saying the second one is all that great, but it would stand a far better chance of surviving a CW workshop.
So that's my take on what you're calling representational minimalism VS realism. (I've no quibbles with your terminology--just making sure throughout to keep what you said in front of me (don't want to get confused with a more general definition of representation).)
I'm pretty sure I've left some loose ends, but I'm tired and don't feel like rereading for the fifth time. I'm also sure that I'm overlooking any number of things. I've also gotten some things wrong, no doubt. Best case, I just resaid things already better said. Straighten me out, won't you?
4 comments:
here are things i thought about when re-reading this post that i think i want to talk about more:
1. dreams in fiction. i think they are really bad and lame. some of the time, they are like metaphoric 'keys' to the story and other times they are really surreal and seem to have nothing to do with the story, but sort of do. either way, i don't really like dreams in fiction. i think the only way i could like a dream is if it was told in one, at the most two sentences.
2. zombie movies - most zombie flicks or re-animated corpse flicks are fun, but don't have much depth, unless there's a sort of political message, as in Romero's best stuff. but there is this one zombie movie from France (thank you France) that is the realization of an intellectual zombie flick. it is called They Came Back. in the movie, it is not all gory and gross, it's just dead people coming back and trying to interact with the living. very unsettling. i think sam knows this movie.
3. "I drank my house dry." This is about the best sentence I've read in some time. I'm getting a little more serious into the significant stuff here. That sentence is terrific. i wish i could write sentences like that in every story i write. this, i think, is what the avant-garde folks are going for. that crackle you talk about, the disconnect between the signified and signifier. the thing i really like is how this sentence allows one to create. there are so many ways to take the sentence, so many literal ways, but on some level, they all have the same kind of emotional feel. this is what astonishes me about the 'avant-garde' folk. they can write these crazily strange and interesting sentences, which i can then interpret in many literal ways, but emotionally, the sentence seems to convey one central (if mysterious) emotion.
i had to go copy a thing and come back. here:
"Example:
She turned suddenly, sensing the man behind her.
VS
She turned. The man was there."
this example i think relates to my number three on my first comment. the second thing you wrote "She turned. The man was there." is clearly the better and clearly the more minimalist. i don't think it's minimalist because of the amount of words, but rather the way the words present the action. i take this to be minimalist and representational because rather than telling us what's 'really' happening or 'realistically' happening, the words show us a strange action (or, one would hope for a strange action in an actual story) and allows us to create the meaning of it, in much the same way the "i drank my house dry" sentence does. though there are severe differences, the idea is roughly the same in both, i think.
1. dreams: I heard Steve say two or three times that Kafka's "A Country Doctor" was the way to do dreams. After reading this post, I finally got myself around to checking it out, and, lo and behold, that is the way to do dreams. I suppose it's very symbolic, and with the right historical info would be a cinch to teach in a lit class, but that doesn't get in the way of the story much.
The trick, i think, is that the whole thing is a dream, and there's no going to sleep or waking--there's only the dream, so the reader doesn't have to navigate the space between some 'real' version of events/character and the dream version, which is the space where, I think, you (and I) get turned off.
I had it in an old Kafka selected stories, but i think it's probably available online. It's about eight pages long.
thoughts on 2. and/or 3. later, after I have some
that kafka story is cool. anything where the whole thing is a dream or the whole thing employs dream logic, that is fine and good i think. i should have said i don't like dreams in 'realistic-type' fiction. or, i like dreams in 'realistic-type' fiction but only when they don't make sense or are what dreams are really like: they're about work or something equally banal, but funny.
yes though. i think 'dream-logic' fiction is actually getting sort of big, where the entire book or story reads like a dream.
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