agree

agree

i hope i didn’t sound like i was overly advocating explicit “heart-telling” or anything but i do feel like if one only writes with the concern of language, one is also almost implicitly bound to fail.

heart and aesthetic in concert.

i like the quote from evenson you brought in.

i was about to write some stuff talking about the “conscious use of language to express heart and mystery” or something but then i thought about it more and felt less sure about it, because there certainly are a lot of accidentally amazing, true things that get said, and those mysterious, accidental things are large part of what makes something meaningful

hmm

This is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about too, Blake. I feel heart might be the single most essential thing necessary for me to really enjoy something. It might sound a little dogmatic or even cheesy, but I feel like if there’s no heart, there’s no reason for the story to be told, for it to exist, save shallow authorial narcissism (which is worse than complex authorial narcissism, which could still be capable of a certain amount of heart — there are examples I could name here, but they would probably detract from the focus of my argument).

In any case. Heart, for me, is tied to a sense of urgency. By which I mean a kind of desperation and need to communicate and make things understood that becomes evident through the writing. This urgency and need to communicate can be made either explicitly (something like “I needed her and I needed to tell you this story about needing her”) or implicitly (paragraphs upon paragraphs detailing how much someone hates and obsesses over a group of people at a dinner party). Though different in scope and subject matter, both of these examples, I think, evince a certain amount of heart, of urgency and need to communicate. Whether they are successful or not, I feel depends on how the writer uses language and frame to articulate that urgency and need.

For me, language and frame are the vehicles by which heart is made either evident or ineffectual, ecstatic or embarrassing.

For example, if a story’s written poorly, if the sentences are clumsily and haphazardly constructed, if the metaphors are trite and unoriginal, the story fails, regardless of how much heart the writer thinks may be in there. That original sense of urgency is not recreated in the reader. In other words, a certain weight must be supported by the writer’s language, else the bridge of the story as a whole will collapse. (In this totally tossed off metaphor, the story’s “heart” would be like maybe a flag or something perched at the top of bridge, or better yet, the river of cars and trucks and bikes attempting to traverse the bridge. To continue with this metaphor, one side of the bridge would be the author and the other side of the bridge would be the reader.)

A side-note: what I mean by “frame” is whether the story is interesting and unique and non-condescending in its organizational structure. George Saunders, in his essay about Donald Barthelme’s “The School”, talks about this in a way that is, I think, very illuminating. Basically, Saunders says that one of the reasons Barthelme is successful with the story is that “he never condescends to the reader” — he never treats him like a dumb beast, ceaselessly amused by the swinging of a weight on a string. Good framing doesn’t try to “pull one over” the reader by saying “you’ll like this, you’re an idiot.”

In any case, my main point is that heart is a kind of urgency and that urgency is only successfully recreated in the reader through the writing — the language and frame. Yet I think there’s an order to it, that the heart has to come before the writing, has to be the initial impetus. Seems like a possibly traditionalist and uncool way to think about it, but there it is.

And I agree about works that are clear, e.g. Infinite Jest. I think IJ is so obviously full of compassion and direct, full-force storytelling and language that it’s not sneaky at all. Subtle, and brilliantly structured, but not sneaky; a sort of feeling that most probably imagine/feel when they discuss ‘heart’. ‘Traditional heart.’

I have subsumed very little work that travels the other way, the Evenson stealth mode… although I think that EVER does that perfectly. I think The Stranger is a perfect mix of traditional heart and subversive heart. And Light Boxes.