There is no way I am not talking about this here. I don’t know how to start, actually. I feel like if I had the book in front of me I’d have some context, maybe. I don’t know. I’m going to take the “book & feelings” approach. It’s been 19 days since I finished the book, but whatever:
First, the shape of the book, its size, the paper, the texture; from a material design perspective, this book is ideal. I’m not kidding. This is probably ultimately my favorite size of a book for fiction. There is something ridiculously pleasant about it. This is purely subjective of course. If I ever write a novel this is the size I want it to be. I think its width to height ratio is similar to that of a half-sheet of Legal paper, which is a good ratio. Not square, but not as rectangular (well it is of course literally rectangular but you get the idea) as a normal paperback. It is a good ratio. The book has French flaps too, or whatever they’re actually called. It’s nice.
But a book can look nice and be shitty, we all know this. This book is not shitty.
Blake Butler understands that doing things like describing a location in immense detail or telling us the entire life-story of a character is totally fucking useless, futile. It’s just artifice piled upon more artifice. The only thing that matters in a narrative are the events that happen within the narrative. A character defined exclusively by words can literally not have depth as the page is two-dimensional. With stupid shit like that out of the way, there is nothing but the event of fiction: there is a family and they move into a house (but maybe they’ve always lived in the house) and things happen to them & the house.
It would be reductive, perhaps, to make the statement, “nothing makes sense.” This is because within the diegesis established by the book, “everything makes sense.” WHAT IS NOT TO UNDERSTAND.
The book takes place almost exclusively within the house, though there are times when characters move into other houses or the times when the father is driving to or from work or stopped at a red light or getting food at a restaurant on his drive home from work and there are maybe ten pages where the son is at school. The house is what’s important.
There is an insistence on shapes & physicality; wait, there are materials and the materials are important is what I mean. There are materials and the materials are important. The son receives a package and it sits in his room and haunts him without being dead, and there’s a man that talks to him through a screen and there are all these fucking wonderfully terrifying and abject events, there are just things happening. This is all. If realism actually meant realism it would be limited to talking about things happening or not happening because in life that is all that happens.
And I like to feel.
But there is hair everywhere sometimes. Ants crawl over the boys body and bury into his skin. Most notably is the fact that there are signifiers of the 21st century and they do not feel out of place or “weird” or disjunctive. The son watches a film on television and realizes that something is wrong in the film. This feelings that Blake holds in this segment, it is the feeling that makes me like art. It is abstracted in description: “Their faces are blurred,” but within the momentum of the words that are defining what these pages hold, this is all that’s needed to establish the terror [INSIDE THE BOOK THERE IS TERROR].
I don’t know how to review books I think I don’t understand what the point is. I am more concerned with things surrounding the book. Like my experience with the book. This is very much “new criticism” of me or not I don’t know what that means T.S. Eliott is a fake-British asshole, but I like that poem The Hollow Men or Man or whatever because it was one of the first times poetry made me feel.
Inside of Blake Butler’s book there is a terrible mystery where a boy receives secret instructions and he follows the instructions incorrectly but thankfully because of the way the diegesis work the way he follows the directions is successful, he ends up in the terrible black form growing in the neighbor’s lawn.
There is so much that happens.
One of the amazing things that this book does is that it brings in the mythology that Real Life Heather O’Rourke can inflect. It works in the way creepy pasta works, which is to say really effectively (and I say this in a positive manner, as creepy pastas are more exciting to me than 90% of contemporary literature and I’m not really kidding). Oh right anyway I didn’t know this but Heather O’Rourke said some totally creepy shit surrounding the three Poltergeist movies and the way they were cursed. I think Heather O’Rourke haunts the book, in fact, now that I think about it I’m fairly sure that she does. She is the son’s new friend. This is critical analysis.
I think this book is a book that is an event in itself, even though arguably it contains nothing but happenings, not in the M. Night Shyamalan way but rather in an “Allan Kaprow + narrative” kind of way. The book is space.
I don’t know. I found myself not being able to read less than a hundred pages of this at a time, and I killed the last 200 pages in a single sitting. What’s amazing, and, ultimately, important to note here, I think, is that this sort of enrapture is not due to a central-conflict theory– this doesn’t work like Lost, in the sense that we are watching (reading) with the express purpose of discovering what happens to a character we are invested in. The momentum does not work this way. In fact there is really no narrative thread that carries through the entire book. The son’s package is something that is introduced & not resolved until 100 pages later, but it’s not something that you are constantly wondering about. It’s not presented as a mystery-to-be-solved.
The pleasure in this book, and the momentum, comes from the autonomous events that occur. Each chapter within each section could possibly be shuffled and the work would still work as a whole. BUT: don’t get me wrong, what this results in is not a disparate collection of short fragments that are related only thematically. Rather, there is an inherent logic in the way the narrative is working. Everything together adds up to a larger whole, a zone of affect, that carries the book. The order perhaps doesn’t matter (or maybe it does–obviously I read the book in the order it’s presented on the pages), but the inclusion of everything does.
What if a house was breathing, I think is a question that Blake probably had at some point. This book specifically doesn’t answer that, rather, it investigates it. Butler’s book seems to work via the medium of contingency. The facts, of course, are entirely diegetic, redefined outside of our flesh world and posited into the text, and this is why it works.
This book is amazing, is what I’m saying.
I’m sure “There is no Year” is a great book, but I’m curious about a couple of the things you say. You write that:
“doing things like describing a location in immense detail or telling us the entire life-story of a character is totally fucking useless, futile. It’s just artifice piled upon more artifice.”
Is the implication somehow that Butler manages to somehow avoid artifice by dispensing with this technique? I understand that describing location is not part of his project, and I understand that the effect it has on his book is one you enjoy. But why privilege this artistic effect as superior to what is simply a different project, that of location/landscape description? Some great fiction is almost ALL location description, and that’s a different project. Neither tactic strikes me as containing inherently less “artifice,” than the other.
Not sure that bringing back robert was the best decision. Not my fave episode…
The guy should win a Pulitzer for his tweets alone. Haven’t read the book yet.
Yeah, his tweets are epic. He deserves a sitcom for his tweets. Would watch.
nah man you got me all wrong– Robbe-Grillet is one of my favorite authors o.a.t. and obviously half the stories in Snapshots are, simply, pure location description, and I’m cool with that. i draw the distinction here because blake’s book seems to be less concerned with the construction of [artificial] representation and more interested in probing The Event.
also, i really don’t understand the point of somebody doing this always:
“But why privilege this artistic effect as superior to what is simply a different project, [another project]? Some great fiction is almost ALL [this other thing], and that’s a different project.”
The idea is that I’m privileging it because I enjoy it more, of course. There is no reason for me to even attempt objectivity when I’m talking about something I dig. That’s not part of my project. If there were some rubric that every ‘review’ (clearly I establish I wouldn’t even call what I have posted above a ‘review’) had to follow to appease everyone, that shit would be boring as hell. I’m more interested in probing work in ways that approach “things” in new ways, other ways, ways particular to what I’m interested in. I’ll make no bones about that.
are you doing some weird conceptual project with my posts? it’s cool, i don’t mind, i’m just curious.
Funny, just this morning I was thinking about how to write about this book on this site. Because I can’t put it down. Because the way he writes speaks to my bones.
I’m going to take the “book & feelings” approach. First, the shape of the book, its size, the paper, the texture; from a material design perspective, this book is ideal. This book is not shitty.
Like my experience with the book. The book is space.
Butler’s book seems to work via the medium of contingency. This book is amazing, is what I’m saying.
I don’t think I was asking for some clinically detached, objective style thingy. It’s just that you wrote that location description was “fucking futile” and pure artifice, but then went on to praise a different method of artifice you liked better, without acknowledging it’s just a different artifice that you like better. I almost thought you were trying to argue that somehow Butler transcends artifice with his methods, which clearly you aren’t. My bad.
But really, I think the objection here is against standard, contemporary literary fiction and its tropes. Because right, you mention Robbe-Grillet. And your insight into why Butler’s book works is so good, I just think it’s rhetorically lazy in that one paragraph to be like “this thing I don’t like that Butler isn’t doing is stupid.”
that about sums it up
i will also admit that i only fight laziness with bombast and hyperbole
Cool. It’s all always artificial though. Or nothing is, ever. I have a hard time with people saying some writing is and some writing isn’t. It’s either all always or nothing ever, but which one I can’t decide.
i enjoyed reading this, mike. i like your passion
i like to fluctuate between the two
i can’t even finish the pale king right now cuz i keep turning TINY pages. it’s a mother love letter.
Pierre Menard 5% summarized without automatism, got same result!
Pierre Menard 5% summarized without automatism, got same result!
I was planning on reading this book, because I’d read the sample chapter and the premise seemed intriguing. I’ve been waiting on the Kindle edition. But this review completely turned me off because apparently this is another one of THESE books:
“Blake Butler understands that doing things like describing a location in immense detail or telling us the entire life-story of a character is totally fucking useless, futile. It’s just artifice piled upon more artifice.”
So let’s just fucking give up. Nobody can communicate anything with words anyway, right? Why not say they’re all meaningless and put them in “quotes” so we can fill in the blank with our own ideas, we’re going to anyway. Noooo fucking point. Who needs place descriptions at all, I mean, places are just areas and it’s all relative and who the fuck cares. Take a book and cut it up and make your own story. We don’t even need authors anymore, your random words are just as good! Sure, why not!?
In other words, since nobody can ever LITERALLY INHABIT or LITERALLY MEET/KNOW a character/place, even ATTEMPTING it is is pointless. Can’t have EVERYTHING so let’s just blow shit up and have NOTHING and maybe the pretty explosions will offer meaning and if they don’t “hey you just didn’t get it” or “I was being post-post-post..” or “well I was just kidding”.
God I’m fucking sick of this sentiment, and it’s why it’s hard for me to stomach a lot of the work proffered on this site (and DC’s). Look, anybody can tear things down (look at me right now!) and anybody can play with the absurd or be ironic or say things that they winkingly half-take-back just in case you don’t completely agree or understand 100%. IMO it takes a lot more balls to take a fucking stand and say, “this character is THIS PERSON and existed RIGHT HERE” than to play with cookie cutters. I’m not talking about spoonfeeding the reader, but I AM talking about some fucking personal authorial responsibility and effort.
This is why for all its faults I admired FREEDOM (and THE CORRECTIONS even moreso), because it’s a novel about people whom he tried his damndest to get right, who he tried to convey behaving like actual people with actual problems in a tangible setting. What the FUCK is wrong with that? I’m not saying there’s not a place for experimental literature, far from it, but the idea that somehow now there’s NO POINT AT ALL in trying to write anything with characters and setting is as ridiculous as me saying that every single novel needs to be ultra-realistic would be.
You can all pretend you are at the cusp of some new movement, but you’re not. It’s not new to put ideas out there while always keeping one hand behind your back: “Oh well you didn’t GET it” or “I was being IRONIC” or “it wasn’t MEANT to be pleasurable to read/ring true at all etcetcetc”. Or should I say, “to “describe” your “ideas” as [actual fucking concepts]” or however the fuck is now fashionable. Or to remove every single emotion from the text (“I did this. I did that. I ate that. I went here.”) because you’re so fucking scared that a reader might have a different emotion or that–gasp!–you might be too weak a writer to convey the actual power of the emotion.
And here’s the thing–we ALL (yes even DFUCKINGW) are too weak to convey the ACTUAL, LITERAL POWER of the emotion or the person or whatever, yes. There is always a barrier between consciousnesses, that’s just how it is. Yes, I know.
But that’s the fucking POINT of language. It’s to try to press up against that barrier, not to surrender and say “the barrier is so big that, well, here’s a “story” about “people” in a “place” or maybe it’s not, LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME BUY MY SHIT” and then pretend you’re so fucking clever for surrendering.
Nobody is going to remember (for long) or admire (at all) someone who approaches life’s emptiness and says “Oh it’s so empty, I better just lie down and not give a fuck and let the world press itself around me” …. it’s the people who ACT who we admire, who we aspire to be.
So why the fuck would we want to do any differently in our literature? Why resort to words with fill in the blank meanings, characters with no personalities, settings that aren’t settings… Why give up, and if you ARE going to give up, why the fuck are we pretending that giving up is somehow superior to trying?
The Baroness de Bacourt (at whose unforgettable vendredis.
I have said that Menard’s visible work can be easily enumerated. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation. There are no traces of such a work in Menard’s library. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and, consequently, less interesting—than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach theQuixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. “The Quixote ,” clarifies Menard, “interests me deeply, but it does not seem— how shall I say it?—inevitable. The Quixote is a contingent book; the Quixote is unnecessary. In spite of these three obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. Menard eludes them with complete naturalness.
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
i really wish this site’s moderators would read comments like this and go: damn. let’s give this guy/gal a guest post or two.
(meant as a reply to postitbreakup)
This is a damn fine comment. Is a “mainstream” writer at the top of her/his game (say: Philip Roth making Sabbath’s Theater) somehow inferior to your edgier-than-thou sophomore writing a novel in which, say, every word gets its own page (and in the present-continuous)? I think the literary bad-to-good-to-great hierarchy is stretched on a framework of discriminations that have little to do with how cool one is.
Maybe you ought to read the book first? You’re extrapolating a lot from a post about the book, don’t you think?
my guess would be: because there are plenty of other sites in which similar sentiments can be shared, it’s call “THE WORLD OF THE HEGEMONY” (wish i could make sparkly text & scrolling marquees in htmlgiant comments)
i didn’t read your whole comment, but based on the first five paragraphs you’re probably right, you shouldn’t read the book.
Deciding on whether to read a book by this review is odd. Reviewing Blake’s book on Blake’s site is odd. Thinking your very comment is not in the form/context/way/manner of a Franzen novel and is therefore easy and inaccessible is odd. Thinking books can be THESE books is odd—are you seriously trying to group together all authors who write in ways outside a coherent and plausible world view? That’s odd. And impossibly so. Oddly. It isn’t giving up to bring and break things anew. It is the opposite of giving up to write a book in such a way. Your comment is saying in words no one can communicate in words and this is odd. Oddly, I also like Corrections but not the way you dance. I am rambling like you are rambling so appropriating form and I am not going to make C.C. Lewis references like Franzen does (very clever, though not realistic to make C.S. Lewis reference, Jon-Jon) but now I forgot to say FUCKING! This is all FUCKING odd! I might just go to a literary realism site and tell them realism isn’t more real that Scorch Atlas (Oddly, I will only comment on books I have FUCKING READ) and that really Scorch Atlas is MORE real than a fucking FAMILY Christmas because Scorch Atlas penetrates deeply into the inquiry of things and Scorch Atlas isn’t defined by naturalistic swathings of clever C.S. Lewis allusions and Scorch Atlas uses mud and water in psychological shards that many realists cannot do even if they paint a very fine Christmas with the FUCKING family, oddly. Talking about a Blake Butler book on a Blake Butler site if FUCKING odd. You could like both, sir. Cognitive distance is a day away. Bananas and peanut butter, etc. Oddly, you could sit down and have your realism and also praise the imagination—or you could just change the channel to somewhere not odd. Like a urinal as art, whoa. It isn’t giving up to question the over-reliance on reason in the form/context/way/manner of ONE way, on this SITE, or to turn a thing away/upside other/ or down. I mean FUCK, man. This is our lives. This is a big FUCK YOU to meaningless. This is matters! This matters. What the hell are you looking at? Blake Butler’s words are about as a random as a goddamn storm cloud, which is perfectly random and is in no, no, no way random and will strike you downly and you make what you want out of that cloud and I’ll make what I want and we can still have a beer and watch it rain on our fucking heads, both drenched now, oddly. Who’s kidding? I’m not kidding. I have kids to throw and words to feed. Is Kafka kidding? Is Kafka fucking kidding now? Tear things down my ass. So realism is taking a stand? Christmas dinners, and make sure you get the names of all the cookies right. Odd little cookies. Tangible cookies. Some new movement? NEW movement? What is wrong with your TV? What is we or why didn’t try to make things so tangible, uh, comfortable, uh, valuable, uh, art is valuable and I am an artist. I AM THE ARTIST. Nice try. Mud-head maker of vowels and such, vowel-movementer, not to mention subjectivity springing from the one, from Blake, not from the movement, you frightened, odd, focus on external the smell of turkey in the oven ART. Odd smell of turkey. Table full of turkey and Daniil Kharms comes along and farts all over. Now all is ruined. You have misread the smell, sir, the smell is the image and the image is you and me and us. Oddly. Any differently in our literature? Any differently? I am choking on a turkey LEG now. Splintered bones of heat thought in my throat. Did you just write what’s the point? Are you giving up now? Are you thinking things over and giving up? Don’t do that. Odd. Are you coming to this site, where you know what leg is shaking and leaping about like Abe Smith on red soda, and just giving up? Going all realism, all dressed in the exterior, all clothes make the man, all pessimistic and real, all Trojan Warrior horse (stuck in the MUD, dude), all conventions like Christmas dinners and such. Oddly, who knows? But don’t come over here and give up. Read the book first. My commenting here is odd.
I’m not “against irony”, and I straight up said in my post that it would be “ridiculous” for me to say every work needs to be ultra-realistic. You can check if you don’t believe me.
The only thing I came out against is this trend, which is not all experimental literature but is a lot of the experimental literature gushed over on this site, which eschews an attempt at having three-dimensional characters or actual settings in favor of moving lifeless action figures around the page, often with a punctuation/formatting gimmick.
My favorite story is “The Metamorphosis.” I wish I had used that as an example instead of a polarizing Franzen example but he was on my mind. “The Metamorphosis” is not “realistic” but it has the features I was talking about: actual characters in an actual setting, and no ridiculous affectations.
I want Harper Perennial to keep publishing a variety of books, too. I liked Scott Heim’s book for them a lot. It also was not “realistic” but, …. again …. it had actual characters, and it had the feeling of grasping for a truth, vs. the defeatist attitude I’m against that says “hey we can’t literally communicate an experience so let’s communicate nothing much at all, a bunch of abstraction…”
If you want to use your gay metaphor, it’s not me going to a gay bar and saying I’m the only heterosexual, it’s like me going to an exclusive, pretentious gay club and saying “sexuality is a continuum, but we can agree the point of all this is love and intimacy with other people, actual relationships, yes?” and being told that, “no, it’s about what you wear and your STYLE more than your SUBSTANCE and we are all isolated so what’s the point in trying to connect with one another, better instead to see who’s the coolest and flashiest and trendiest this week and fellate them instead”.
i’m sorry you lost me when you equated non-traditional formatting and punctuation with “gimmicks”
And you equated me with the “hegemony” and a heterosexist (I’m a gay man) but I kept trying, anyway. I guess you’re saying it wasn’t worth it.
If a book had non-traditional formatting and punctuation in service of characters, then that’s great. If it is nothing BUT non-traditional formatting/punctuation, that’s what I don’t like.
I want my stories to be about people and emotions and meaning, first and foremost, and everything else is secondary. That is all I’m saying.
Why does Franzen come up so often when people talk about Blake Butler? Even the review in Bookforum of There is no Year starts with a Franzen quote in the very first sentence. But it’s not a very helpful or well-done review, because it wants the book to be something it’s not. Which is why this site can be so weird sometimes. Plenty of people pick up, like, a Pierre Guyotat book one minute and then some realist fiction the next. Yes, there should be a wider audience for experimental fiction. But it’s not some crazy war between the two of them. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
That’s cool, all I’m saying, and the entire point of my review, perhaps, is that I don’t want my stories to be about people and emotions. I’m ok when those things are they, but I want them to be secondary to affect and experience. Since we clearly just explicitly have opposing tastes, what is even going on here? You are not going to convince me that characters are the only important part of literature, in a similar way that I am not going to convince you of the opposite.
wait, who are you responding to here?
I don’t even know. I just responded under the world of hegemony comment because I thought it was funny (though I don’t really agree).
You’re right that we’re not going to convince each other of anything–this is an internet comment argument after all–but there’s an air of “We have opposing opinions, so you shouldn’t bother articulating yours, at least not on this site” to your replies.
Do you (all of you HTMLGiant writers) want a bunch of groupies, or do you want people to be engaged with what you’re saying?
What better way is there for you to hone your own opinions than to defend them against their opposite? Isn’t that what discussion is all about, and isn’t this site about… discussion?
i thought it was funny too, lol. more hyperbole on my part, more to make a point that be a ‘fact’ of course. but it’s okay, because in contemporary society it has been proven that we can just say things and then when people fact-check them and find out they are wrong we can just say that it wasn’t intended to be a fact.
i don’t like franzen mostly because he’s a douche-bag, but yeah, i also don’t see how he has anything to do with franzen, other than being perhaps the anti-christ to franzen’s capitalist-christ.
The problem is it doesn’t strike me that you’re actually engaging with my opinions, while this comment indicates you seem to be expecting me to engage with yours simply because… I don’t know, you want me to? I guess I could be wrong, but as far as I know that’s not actually how discussion “works.” That’s more of a derailing tactic.
“but it’s okay, because in contemporary society it has been proven that we can just say things and then when people fact-check them and find out they are wrong we can just say that it wasn’t intended to be a fact.”
Who/what are you responding to here?
Also, I already said that Franzen was on my mind (probably because at the top right it says “most popular posts–Franzen on Wallace” so every time I click on this site I see Franzen) and that you could discount that example and I offered Kafka instead, so…
If you know a better way to engage with someone’s opinions than to quote their opinion and then offer a counterpoint, let me know. I’m pretty sure that what you mean by engaging here is just “agreeing”. I guess I should have posted nothing more than “cool you have passion”.
bro you quoted a single sentence from my commentary wherein I comment on the futility of artifice & then used it as a launching point to talk about how you’re tired of irony and things without characters.
i’m responding to that republican politician who stated that “90% of what planned parenthood does is abortions” and then when he was called out on that being a blatant lie his office responded with a memo that stated the statement “was not intended to be taken as a fact”
Well, my post was already incredibly long, but if you want me to keep going past a single sentence, you who told me twice (TWICE) in these comments that you stopped reading my replies as soon as you hit some phrase you didn’t like:
You start your review talking about how the book looks/feels, which is pretty worthless to people who read for substance (or listen to audio books or read ebooks). I think it’s great when books are well designed, but that’s an awfully shallow thing to focus on in a review. But it certainly fits with the mindset of “affect and experience” over character.
Then there’s the section that I quoted.
You go on to describe how the book is full of contradictions (nothing makes sense/everything makes sense, the map leads him the wrong way/leads him the right way) and how there’s “really no narrative thread” and all of that is emblematic of the kind of literature I have been describing my problems with.
You say “I don’t know how to review books I think I don’t understand what the point is. I am more concerned with things surrounding the book. Like my experience with the book.” and that is the mindset I’m against.
Did this help? Do I count as “engaging” now? Somehow I doubt you’ll say yes.
How dare I bring up Franzen on a literature website when there are Republicans to discuss. Clearly Franzen is the non-sequitur here…
(but yeah the republican persecution of planned parenthood is fucking appalling)
Oh so you deleted your post telling me “bro you only quoted one sentence”. OK. Great.
Agh postitbreakup, no, that would be your internet crapping out. But thanks for playing.
I’m to the point of being super angry and paranoid so, I’m out. I think I’ve said all I can say and the whole “diminishing returns” thing has long since kicked in.
sure, but i’m wondering how i can respond to these things you seem to take issue with. i mean, if they were points that could be said to be “unclear” then i could clarify them I suppose, but what you’ve quoted is transparent, no?
blake’s book would not work as an audiobook. i come out of a an entire school of thought where the material aspects of a book (the fact that there are pages, the fact that the pages have a front and back side, the way turning a book affects what is on the page). i want books to be considered as a whole. if a book exists as nothing but a story there is no reason to limit it to the realm of the book, and it’s not a book then, it’s a story. stories do not have to be books, but i am interested in books that make use of the fact that they are books and not just stories. this is a totally different thing. you saying that it’s “shallow” to focus on issues of materiality is immediately dismissing this idea, and it also immediately privileges certain historically canonized ideas about literature, indicating a refusal to examine the book as an object that can surpass storytelling and turn into experience.
while i say there is no narrative thread, I believe I do make clear that there are plenty of intertextually related narrative threads. the book is heterogeneous in its approach, there is no ‘grand narrative’ that runs through it. you lay praise to Franzen in your initial comment for “tr[ying] to convey [the act of] behaving like actual people with actual problems in a tangible setting”– well, that strikes me as a lust for what can traditionally be claimed “realism,” right? even since robbe-grillet wrote his for a new novel in the 60s, people have been aware that there is little in common between ‘reality’ and ‘realism’ as it exists as a literary institution. lyotard also pointed out long ago that there is no longer any grand-narrative that seems to be controlling the arc of humanity itself, which seems to be a major point of the entire post-modernist project following modernity’s awakening in regards to the fractured nature of reality. I do specifically say “If realism actually meant realism it would be limited to talking about things happening or not happening because in life that is all that happens.”
i also don’t understand how it makes sense to be against the ‘experience’ of the book. are you implying, with that sentiment, that a book’s only use-value is… escapism? detached learning experience? or are we looking, ultimately, for simple empathy (the experience of empathy is still an experience, no?)? i have written, often, on this site, about why i deny privileging the experience of empathy as a novel’s primary use-value, already.
you & your posts have played absolutely no part in anything i’ve said thus far to AlfredoSauce, what are you doing
u should read the book. there is much emotion and setting and peoples. maybe i’m a fuck, but i think it’s an accessible crawl space–dark, like an armpit, but still a part, still a place in a house, still a room. you can go inside. it’s not the kitchen or the family room, but it’s still a place to satisfy something.
nah i agree, it’s totally accessible and it’s totally wonderful and there is definitely emotion & setting and there are definite characters, but i was just talking about how awesome it is that blake doesn’t feel the necessity to cop to the idea that ‘characters need depth as elaborated via back stories and insides’
aw and look i finally responded to your entire comment
there were parts of scorch atlas that I really liked and that I couldn’t believe had been written in a first book, and then there were parts where I thought no this isn’t doing anything, and not like oh I don’t get it which I feel a lot of the time and am willing to admit, but like no this really isn’t anything at all, and now I wish I knew those parts and had the book in front of me so I could ask you about them, because it’s something I’ve been meaning to ask, because I’m sort of unsure about reading this new one if the old one was sort of hit and miss for me, because I’m afraid of a trend that is undeniably present in all artforms that I’ll call “faking” wherein people pretend to be saying something but are really not saying anything and I’m not saying that’s what happened in scorch atlas but only that I can’t deny that that’s how I felt some of the time.
Well, you called me part of the “hegemony” in this sub-thread, and then AlfredoSauce replied … to a comment you made about me… with a statement about bringing up Franzen… which was something I did… so…
i’m with u. i don’t know if it’s more awesome that he doesn’t feel the necessity or if it’s just, like, natural. like there isn’t an intention to ‘avoid’ something; he just writes these blurred faces and, for me, they turn out to be persons more real to me than any franzen freaks (just keeping with the franzen theme here).
The replies to replies to replies to replies were wreaking havoc on my browser, causing comments to disappear, making me disproportionately frustrated. So I’m doing this in a new thread.
“blake’s book would not work as an audiobook. i come out of a an entire school of thought where the material aspects of a book (the fact that there are pages, the fact that the pages have a front and back side, the way turning a book affects what is on the page). i want books to be considered as a whole. if a book exists as nothing but a story there is no reason to limit it to the realm of the book, and it’s not a book then, it’s a story. stories do not have to be books, but i am interested in books that make use of the fact that they are books and not just stories. this is a totally different thing. you saying that it’s “shallow” to focus on issues of materiality is immediately dismissing this idea, and it also immediately privileges certain historically canonized ideas about literature, indicating a refusal to examine the book as an object that can surpass storytelling and turn into experience.”
This is interesting (although incredibly depressing to someone like me who values words way more than their delivery system) and I would be perfectly willing to consider the idea of the “book” as an art form on its own, separate from story. But I’m interested in story and so everything I’ve said pertains to story. Just like everything you’ve said pertains to book. That’s fine, although it sure would have been helpful to know at the beginning. And saying that you have “written, often, on this site” about it isn’t an answer, because I don’t go back and read every single thing by a poster any more than you would go back and seek out all of my comments in every other thread.
When I read a review, I am expecting a “story” review (to use your word, although to me story review sounds too narrow, like a “plot review” when I have made it clear that what I care about most is characters). In this case, that expectation was mistaken. OK.
“while i say there is no narrative thread, I believe I do make clear that there are plenty of intertextually related narrative threads. the book is heterogeneous in its approach, there is no ‘grand narrative’ that runs through it.”
OK, so, “there is no narrative thread” while there are “plenty of … narrative threads” … i.e. there’s no “grand narrative thread.” Alright? I don’t even know what distinction you’re trying to make there.
I never said anything disparaging books/stories for being episodic, I only said I wanted them to have characters/substance.
“you lay praise to Franzen in your initial comment for “tr[ying] to convey [the act of] behaving like actual people with actual problems in a tangible setting”– well, that strikes me as a lust for what can traditionally be claimed “realism,” right?”
Yes, but I was trying to get at “Franzen writes about humans/the human condition” moreso than the emphasis you’re placing on the “actual problems in a tangible setting”. To clarify, I gave the example of “The Metamorphosis” which does not depict a literal problem, but still features the kinds of well-rounded characters and ideas I’m talking about. You are picking at the Franzen thing too much, which is why I was on the defensive about it below. Once again, he was just on my mind, I don’t hold him as the paragon of literature, and he’s in the top-right corner of this site as a constant reminder. He’s just one contemporary example.
Along with “The Metamorphosis”, I also loved the novel THE SOUND AND THE FURY–nontraditional form, but it was, again, in service to CHARACTER.
“even since robbe-grillet wrote his for a new novel in the 60s, people have been aware that there is little in common between ‘reality’ and ‘realism’ as it exists as a literary institution. lyotard also pointed out long ago that there is no longer any grand-narrative that seems to be controlling the arc of humanity itself, which seems to be a major point of the entire post-modernist project following modernity’s awakening in regards to the fractured nature of reality.”
This is what I tried to say in my very original post, although it may have been beyond the 5 paragraphs you admittedly stopped after. This is the problem I referred to as being unable to literally, completely, wholly, certainly get across a certain idea to someone else. Since there is no absolute meaning or “grand-narrative” to anything, it’s not possible. But what my entire argument has been about is the idea that, instead of saying “since it’s not possible, I’ll just give up, play with abstractions, style over substance since there is no substance anyway, etc etc etc”, I like writers who say, “No, I will try harder.”
“I do specifically say “If realism actually meant realism it would be limited to talking about things happening or not happening because in life that is all that happens.””
DFW talked about this way better than I ever could. In the interviews I’ve read at least, he considered his style to be more realist than post-whatever, even though it has all the footnotes and meta-trappings and so forth. His argument, I believe, was that realism actually includes all these other complicated thought processes, the media/pop culture, self-reflection, awareness of being watched, and so forth. And I agree. You’re ascribing to me a narrower definition of realism than the one I have been using.
Maybe another angle will help. I have been approaching it by saying I want characters/humanity etc, whether the premise is plausible or not (“Metamorphosis”, WE DISAPPEAR), whether the style is orthodox or not (THE SOUND AND THE FURY, DFW, whoever). Another way of phrasing that is that I look for a feeling of authenticity, of substance and not showiness… which is what I think JTC was getting at below.
“i also don’t understand how it makes sense to be against the ‘experience’ of the book. are you implying, with that sentiment, that a book’s only use-value is… escapism? detached learning experience? or are we looking, ultimately, for simple empathy (the experience of empathy is still an experience, no?)? i have written, often, on this site, about why i deny privileging the experience of empathy as a novel’s primary use-value, already.”
Well, the point I was trying to make with that quote is that I don’t like the sentiment of the reader’s own baggage mattering more than the words. Absolutely, a reader will bring his/her own shit and that’s going to affect the experience (and I do think that good books offer an experience), but I’m saying that there should be enough meat to a book/story that it can stand on its own for a variety of readers.
But since you brought it up, yes, empathy is incredibly important to me when reading. It’s the magic of literature–feeling like we have connected with other people through words, despite the fact that we can’t ever 100% literally connect through words. Magic. It’s so much more beautiful, to me, than pages, binding, artful typography, or schools of criticism. It’s why I read.
i have no problem saying that both EVER & Scorch Atlas were hit & miss for me– but this new one is fucking amazing
although incredibly depressing to someone like me who values words way more than their delivery system
The thing is words are ALSO, ostensibly, just “delivery systems.” Word deliver ideas, they are signifiers, no? What happens when you allow form to factor into the equation as much as the words themselves, both the form & the words can be used as signifiers.
OK, so, “there is no narrative thread” while there are “plenty of … narrative threads” … i.e. there’s no “grand narrative thread.” Alright? I don’t even know what distinction you’re trying to make there.
What I’m trying to say here is that the narrative of the book does not progress in a manner in which A leads to B leads C leads to D, or, it doesn’t follow a traditional plot diagram (i.e. rising action/ conflict/ resolution/ etc)
I never said anything disparaging books/stories for being episodic, I only said I wanted them to have characters/substance.
Are you equating characters with substance here? Or you are just using a forward slash as an “and.” Because the book has both characters and substance, it’s just that, arguably, the characters are less relevant to the “substance” than the things that happen to them are.
Franzen writes about humans/the human condition
I should note that Franzen is clearly just being used as a totem towards the idea of contemporary ‘realist’ literary fiction, or whatever, i care just as much about him as any of the people who write in this mode, which is, of course, “not at all”
To respond to this I’ll quote Blake’s own twitter, because this shit is basically completely outside of the realm of my approach/relationship with literature:
“maybe someone should gather up all those books that “tell us something about what it is to be human” & build from them a child”
This is what I tried to say in my very original post, although it may have been beyond the 5 paragraphs you admittedly stopped after. This is the problem I referred to as being unable to literally, completely, wholly, certainly get across a certain idea to someone else. Since there is no absolute meaning or “grand-narrative” to anything, it’s not possible. But what my entire argument has been about is the idea that, instead of saying “since it’s not possible, I’ll just give up, play with abstractions, style over substance since there is no substance anyway, etc etc etc”, I like writers who say, “No, I will try harder.”
I don’t think I “get” this. By “idea” do you mean “truth” or do you mean “representation of experience” ? If you mean the latter, I’m arguing, in favor of “experiential literature,” that Blake as an author, and the other authors that I praise, are trying harder– they’re trying to bypass the representation of an experience by simply creating an experience in itself that’s not an experience derived from either representation or empathy. That is remarkably more difficult, I think, so to dismiss this idea as lazy and meandering and devoid of substance strikes me more as lazy on your part than the author’s.
I have been approaching it by saying I want characters/humanity etc, whether the premise is plausible or not (“Metamorphosis”, WE DISAPPEAR), whether the style is orthodox or not
Here, ultimately, I don’t know what exactly there is to get out of an engagement with each others ideas. You are saying you want these things, and I am saying I don’t. There is nothing to be gleaned from arguing about this, right? I am certainly questioning why you privilege these things over the idea of a non-representational experience itself, but I understand that as the enjoyment of something is, duh, entirely subjective, then you are free to simply answer “because that is what I like better.” You have to understand that it’s not like I arrived at my articulation of my literary preferences by somehow skipping the canonical mode of writing– I’m very aware of it, have read plenty of it, and have decided that that is not my particular cup of tea. I suppose this is why I am continuing to try to argue for my preferred mode of experience– Perhaps I’m wrong and people have magically started reading just as many books that fall outside of an ostensibly non-traditional mode of writing as they are that fall within it, but the money being spent on books seems to indicate that that isn’t true int he least.
I’ll address the last two paragraphs when I get back from lunch, because there is a severe misunderstanding here in terms of my “project” so to speak.
ok. ok. i’ll check it out. what’s the main character’s name again?
I do that too, but there’s something to be said of dialectical tensions and never being in one or the other even though you KNOW it totally has to be either one or the other…
… but there is not really a way to confirm one way or another, since the goal of inquiry (Ontological Reality) must be assumed to be understood at the outset… and Ontological Reality (Reality-As-It-Is-In-Itself) is incoherent as a concept and cannot be understood… we’re all in deep doodoo all the time with this stuff.
It’s pretty obvious that he’s not lying around not giving a fuck, so you you should re-evaluate that. There are easier ways to get cheap ego thrill satisfactions. The rest you are free to speculate and polemicize about.
And what if there really aren’t barriers, like, at all, finally, really? If that’s true, which it could be, then to continue to “press against barriers” is the silliest thing.
I like when – all in twenty-three minutes – lucy, with ethel’s help, tricks ricky, and then ricky, with fred’s help, tricks lucy, and then everybody learns a constructive life lesson
I really appreciate Postitbreakup’s comment, but I would differentiate between the adoption/mimicry of a certain “Ultra-Sparse” style, and an attitude of “giving up” which has perhaps functioned as a post-script to this style; an explanation for why one doesn’t have to try to write like Franzen or Roth. Of course the point as I see it is only to be good at what you do, and while I personally Don’t admire Franzen or Roth, I also wouldn’t put someone as antithetical to them, like say Brian Evanson, into the same camp that Postitbreakup is describing. By which I mean that the absence of pellucid emotional realism and deep characterizations do not signal for me a giving up on the powers/mystery of language, prose, or storytelling.
I’ll wait for Blake’s book to arrive in the mail and make up my own mind.
I don’t think the screed was aimed at There Is No Year (caps correct?), but rather, at a perceived attitude informing the blogicle in enthusiasm for the book. postitbreakup is knowingly not saying anything about the book itself, right?
“the house”
Bleh, just getting to the point of “stfu and do what you want to do in your own writing”, save the vitriol for people who are actually harming the world.
Jesus. You two get a boxing ring or a room.
At first I was with postit because I also happen to find the comment of Kitchell’s he isolated ridiculous and mind-numbingly reductive. Then I was with Kitchell because the misplaced outrage over a single comment in a fairly extensive and well-written post was ridiculous and mind-numbingly baffling. Now I’m with a beer writing “Two deaf men walk into a bar” jokes while occasionally trying to remember what the original topic of discussion was intended to be.
I’ll pick up a copy next time I get the cash.
At first I was with postit because I also happen to find the comment of Kitchell’s he isolated ridiculous and mind-numbingly reductive. Then I was with Kitchell because the misplaced outrage over a single comment in a fairly extensive and well-written post was ridiculous and mind-numbingly baffling. Now I’m with a beer writing “Two deaf men walk into a bar” jokes while occasionally trying to remember what the original topic of discussion was intended to be.
I’ll pick up a copy next time I get the cash.
Mike is referring to Jon Kyl’s response to having been caught in a Reaganesque lie – since scrubbed from the “substantially” accurate Congressional Record – , which was (uncharacteristically, for a conservetard in the contemporary, media-savvy vein) to keep digging: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23notintendedtobeafactualstatement . (There are 1000s – maybe tens of thousands, by now – of these tweets.)
… and then lucy and ricky produce star trek
newvement: exemplary of and celebrating endosmosis
May I see Sean’s comment and raise him. Fuck the boxing ring. I want a cage.
WHOA
what do you mean, “produce”
This is the best response I’ve ever read in a comment thread. By a wide margin.
This is from James Wood’s “How Fiction Works” and is quoted from “Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett”:
“The punchline of the story relates to an American academic saying of Beckett, ‘He doesn’t give a fuck about people. He’s an artist.’ At this point Beckett raised his voice above the clatter of afternoon tea and said ‘But I do give a fuck about people! I do give a fuck!'”
I like this anecdote, seems like an okay place to reference it.
clearly you guys are reading the wrong blog then
I agree.
“If Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem combined into one super hero, they could kill Jonathan Franzen. (This is to illustrate how fucking weak Jonathan Franzen is.)”
“If you bend the spine on Freedom hard enough, you hear the sound of a baby being beaten to death with a rubber hammer. Fortunately, no one’s cracking the spine that hard.”
“No, really, some of Franzen’s sentences are pretty great. Like the one the lord has in store for him when he dies.”
A deaf traditionalist, a blind non-traditionalist, and a dumb plumber walk into a bar. The deaf traditionalist says “I know there is narrative between the first and last page, and I am nauseated.” The blind non-traditionalist says “There might be narrative before the first page and after the last page, and I am nauseated.” The dumb plumber says “It starts out as religion and ends up as plumbing.”
I think you hit the nail on the head with regards to why I can’t read Tao Lin novels…
It sounds more like an illustration of how fucking weak Foer, Eggers, and Lethem each are.
Last night I got really, really drunk while reading at this super-late-night Mexican restaurant and ripped like half the pages out and gave them away to other patrons. Some from the end, which I haven’t read yet. I had to order another copy this morning. One of those books, you know? Nice review.
Desilu’s series on television at the time [circa 1967] :
Mission: Impossible, Mannix, The Lucy Show and Star Trek
‘our source was the new york times’
oh, sorry, wrong movie
source, wiki
Kick Ass Comment
mathlete
I thought ‘beget’
m kitchell,
HYPNOTICA and I have been looking you up and came across your quote:
this incredibly prolonged argument in a comment thread today has lead to me
arriving at things i’ve needed to figure out how to articulate
this is exactly how i feel too man.
like i think we both started with dueling jackhammers of hyperbolic premises and the ensuing battle drilled/distilled our arguments into ideas that we now both understand and appreciate more..
even if these resulting ideas are just as contradictory as those initially dueling jackhammers, it doesn’t matter, because we’ve gone beyond rhetoric and found for ourselves a kind of mission statement or value system, something intangible and therefore hopefully incorruptible that will stay with us both a long time.
I feel so much beauty towards you because of this wrestling match we’ve had, and so much hope
if this was debate camp, you’d’ve won a long time ago.
i thought ‘lettuce’
It’s been done.