Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist.
David Foster Wallace
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David Foster Wallace quotes
A certain amount of the form-conscious stuff I write is trying - with whatever success - to do the opposite. It's supposed to be uneasy.
Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what's "permissible" in serious art or else writing about some other world.
Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me.
But at some point "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by the critics. Now here come the crank-turners.
But there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off.
But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art.
Even today, when people I don't know ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I'm "in English" or I "work free-lance."
Fiction-writing's lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work.
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.
Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero.
I 've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego.
I don't seem to be able to call myself a writer. And terms like "postmodernist" or "surrealist" send me straight to the bathroom, I've got to tell you.
I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about.
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos.
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because the big R's form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment.
Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.
If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon.
In a mass mediated nation, it's no longer North vs. South. It's under-thirty vs. over thirty.
In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare.
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists.
Irony's useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone.
Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really supposed to be therapeutic in an Aristotelian sense?
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.
It might just be that simple.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.
It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called "the click of a well-made box." Something like that. The word I always think of it as is "click."
It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound.
It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now.
It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it."
Maybe our touchstone now should be G. M. Hopkins, who made up his "own" set of formal constraints and then blew everyone's footwear off from inside them.
Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist.
My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore's poetry or like DeLillo's "Libra" had done with other mediated myths.
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
Observing a quantum phenomenon's been proven to alter the phenomenon. Fiction likes to ignore this fact's implications.
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
Postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding.
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
Raymond Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he's supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners.
Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text.
Rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set by parents, ancestors, older authorities.
Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child.
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
The stuff in "Broom" that's informed by that sense of play ended up pretty forgettable, I think. And it doesn't sustain the enterprise for very long.
There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage.
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
TV-type art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to "reward" passive spectation.
TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.
Very few people I talk to understand what "generation gap" 's implications really were. Kids loved rock partly because their parents didn't, and obversely.
We still think in terms of a story "changing" the reader's emotions, cerebrations, maybe even her life.
We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.
Well, it's too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV's ruined readers. Because the U.S.'s television culture didn't come out of a vacuum.
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products.
Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons.
You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.
You could argue that it affects only "her reaction to the story" or "her take on the story." But these things "are" the story.
Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals, whatever. These are the people pretty much all the younger writers I admire are writing for, I think.
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