In Flight
January 3, 2009 – 11:02 pm
Outside the Thread
January 3, 2009 – 10:56 pmI was reading Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel in Barnes and Noble today. He said some interesting things - the idea that the purpose of the novel is to reveal new lines of thought that were previously not possible for the human mind. Quite a leap. But really, if you think of the core of the novel: it’s a extended train of thought of a single individual, recorded, persisted and maintained.
He even goes as far as to group the propaganda novels that were written during communist Russia (which I’m sure possessed ample amount of heroism and patriotism and self sacrifice) outside of the “novel”. In effect - nothing. I can only guess his opinion of genre fiction.
What new lines of thought could even be uncovered by the novel? I think one of the latest trends is the meta-novel - where the structure and the storyteller are themselves part of the tale. I think this can be a very useful pattern for painting the way we compartmentalize modern life, with tiered nests of hierarchy and categorization. Even the fact that in modern psychology, we bury the root causes of psychoses under onion skin layers of symptoms and attempts at pharmacological help.
And yet when I think of what modern life entails, even more than any other era - its multitasking. The fact that we have to split our attention into parallel threads, most often enforced by increasingly pervasive and ubiquitous digital gadgets.
I think the mind, at least of the newest generation, has begun to adapt. Even now, I can write this entry while listening to Fleet Foxes on iTunes, browse through the weather and (multiple) emails, switch over to N-Game for a few seconds to pull off an insane ninja stunt, and then jump up, out of the immediate screen and fetch a beer.
If multitasking is the next leap in human consciousness, how can we represent this in the form of the novel and turn it into something meaningful? Something that could be considered art?
Creative footnotes are one way. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and David Foster Wallace utilize footnotes in clever ways, often chaining them through multiple pages. Part of the decision while reading is whether to continue with a section, paragraph or even sentence to completion - or to jump down and fill in the detail elucidated in the footnote. It almost mimics the action of multitasking on the browser.
Another method: Lots of short, discrete sections. There’s certainly something to be said about the long passage with a fine narrative thread, maintained for long pages. But these days, the majority of the text we read fits in the size of a blog post, or worse, a Facebook status or twitter feed.
Flash fiction has begun to accommodate this quick-cut ADD stylistic quirk. And I think flash fiction could integrated into the novel in the form of tangential stories that aren’t completely essential to the immediate narrative, but contribute to the world, the character or even the tone and feel of the central story.
I think for my next project I’m going to experiment with non-sequential and multi-threaded storytelling. Should be quite interesting.
Halls of Madness
January 2, 2009 – 1:53 pmIt was a tarnished paperback, the cover (which strangely sits a
1/4th inch away
from protecting the crumpled bulk of pages)
torn and fraying.
I hefted it, flipped through, the text itself split between Courier and Garamond, odd arrangements of footnotes and text and some pages even barren save
a
few
floating letters.
The title: House of Leaves1
1. In the early 90s a sex-obsessed tattoo parlor junkie2 (who curiously has the eloquence of Kerouac) finds a black chest of assorted manuscripts in the darkened apartment of a recently deceased old man3. The manuscript, annotated with Jonny Truant’s wild rants and sexual exploits, attempts to critically dissect a strange film known only as The Navidson Record5, by the fictional artist Will Navidson, photographer of the Pulitzer winning image of a dying Somali girl4.
2.Johnny Truant.
3. Zampano.
4. 
5. The Navidson Record is a documentary (the factuality is dubious) compiled from various cameras Will Navidson employed in his house on Ash Tree Lane. A few weeks after moving in, a strange, pitch-black hallway appears, connecting the master bedroom to his children’s room. Later, an even larger passageway appears in the living room, leading into a freezing dark labyrinth beneath the house.6
6. House of Leaves could effectively be called Meta-Horror7, as the madness perpetuates from the core of the Navidson record, up through Zampano, interpreted and intermixed with Truant’s colorful commentary, and finally into the physical pages. This is the kind of stuff Lovecraft was getting at in his Cthulu mythos - an unnamable horror that defies reason. I haven’t read a book like this in a while, a thick rumpled tome that gets in your head and doesn’t relent till you are at the final page and scan it quickly and finish with a slightly melancholy sigh of resignation. Overall, I enjoyed it, and am interested to read Mark Danielewski’s sophomore effort.
7. Why does the meta-narrative structure give the feel of truthfulness to the tale? Is it because we’ve become accustomed to the structure of footnotes and dense academic text equals truth? Are films like the Blair Witch Project and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre more effective because they combine amateur camera techniques and the purported guise of documentary?
And furthermore, why does the experimental format unnerve so many readers? Have we become so accustomed to the text lying passively and cleanly within the margins of the page that we rebel against the idea the text fleeing those bounds - it feels unnatural, misshapen, oddly unsettling.
All these characteristics combine to make this quite a scary book, even more so because the reader can wonder - will I just be part of the meta-chain, the insanity moving up yet another level to infect my own head?
Spectral Scribe
January 2, 2009 – 11:35 amI’d read that Philip Roth was one of the best living American authors, and for a while I’d always had a few of his novels on my ever-growing list of books to read.
I think I decided on Ghost Writer wandering around Strand Bookstore: it was propped up in a featured fiction section, all paperbacks, little handwritten blurbs by the staff in sharpie on a yellow post-its.
The Ghost Writer is the first of his long-running Zuckerman series, and introduces the character as a young writer living in New York, come to visit his literary idol (I.E. Lonoff) at his snowy upstate home. The entire novel takes place over the course of an evening, night and morning as Nathan has dinner and drinks with Lonoff, Lonoff’s wife and a seductive young European student named Amy.
The bulk of the book, however, is composed of various flashbacks and musings by Nathanial concerning his family and youth, Lonoff’s hermit life, and Amy’s mysterious past.
Nathan is plagued by a non-fictional short story he wrote and submitted to various literary magazines that painted his own Jewish family in a light that could easily feed anti-Semitic bigotry (squabbling over money, petty ritual). His father and family friends were incensed, and he goes to Lonoff to seek out an image of what it means to be a modern Jewish literary figure.
Roth has an interesting writing style. At first glance, his prose is pedestrian, competent and smooth, if a bit mundane. But as you continue to read, his flow becomes increasingly lyrical and impressive. He doesn’t ever devolve into stream-of-consciousness rabble - his writing is always clean and precise. But he can string together impressive multi-layer metaphors, that not only paint well the bleak mid-winter landscape but also reveal the inner mindset of his protag (Zuckerman).
The next time I was in Barnes and Noble I picked up American Pastoral - I’m looking forward to it.