TRAVERSING Z

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process, not so good.

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i am flagging a bit.  perhaps it is a kind of seventh-inning stretch.  if there are two great narrative arcs at work, i am nearing the big finale of one, while at the same time building heavily on the second.  all the while feeling just how far i’ve come (lots of looking over the shoulder) and my word count issues don’t help.

there is much received wisdom out there, about writing.  to write what you know (hah!).   to write what you feel, to write from your heart (as long as your heart is telling you to write what you know?) because if not the plot won’t feel genuine, the characters won’t feel real, the twists and turns not honestly reached . . . as if all of writing was not one massive act of artifice, as if you are not immediately distorting the world in the simple act of choosing to skip ahead from morning to night, from character a to character b.

and, more pertinent to me at the moment: that there is nothing said in 50 words that can’t as easily be said in 20, that you want clear, concise prose, with every word pulling its weight.  a nice idea, and when done well it can be a pleasure to read.  but not done well and you lose texture, depth, any sense of being in this world you’re creating: you’re left with a script, not a novel.

do they do this elsewhere, or is this an american thing? i’m not sure.  but it is yet another example, to my mind, where the received wisdom and the mediocre products it engenders does a massive disservice to the general public.  they can handle a bigger book; if anything, the more lost we can get in a work these days, the better.  it’s the same with movies (see that recent n.y. times bit on slow film), the same with visual art which lately seems to be more about simpler line illustrations, rather than big, epic paintings.  nothing wrong with quick and straightforward, but when it becomes a requirement of the market it starts to feel like our very culture is anorexic. depth, patience, care, detail, poetry . . .  these things are not the enemy.  so-called excess is more than OK, it can be downright delightful.

just sayin’.

process and juxtaposition

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am trying not to freak out at the obscene size of my word count, far beyond anything viable for a first-time author.  trying to cut the narrative in half is not going to save me, i think.  i’ve been suffocating a few babies but there might have to be some wholesale slaughter happening, and man, that bites.  if richardson could write 1 million plus words about one woman’s rape, why can’t i write half a million about a dozen characters and their conflicts great and small?  self-publishing is laughable, the idea of serialization seems to have gone the way of dickens, and i am looking to be **** out of luck.

instead of shooting the horse now, though, i am still going to let the old nag do as she pleases.  once more into the breach, damn the torpedoes, raise high the roof beams, ask not what your country, etc. etc.

so back to work, which at this moment includes two little excerpts from letter 130 of liaisons, rosemonde to tourvel:

A man enjoys the pleasure he feels, a woman the pleasure she bestows.

And

[Men] have the support of public opinion which has drawn a distinction—for men only—between being unfaithful and being inconstant . . .

contrast with a line of valmont’s to merteuil, a few letters later:

First of all, for lots of women, pleasure is always just pleasure and nothing more; and with such women, whatever high-falutin title we may be given, we’re just ciphers, stand-ins whose only assets are our performance and the most vigorous man is always the best.

let it be recorded here for all posterity that magnus’ little speech about being a cipher, if it survives the slaughter, predates my reading of this letter.  i thought of it on my own, thank you very much! laclos, c’est moi.

but the contrast has been bopping around in my head all day, to the detriment of the day job; add to that this rather fabulous interview with china miéville (i have a crush on his brain):

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/unsolving-city-interview-with-china.html

and i’m thinking that at the very least some tightening of atmosphere is required.  whose paris are we seeing? it does not have to be everyone’s, and for the principals involved, their experience of the city is far more limited than i have been explicitly describing.  dark and thin and fluttery, dim lights in the windows by public decree (a precursor to streetlamps, at least per my limited research thus far), cold without feeling cold—

i need to see better, in this.

l’ami jean-jacques

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From the Prancing Half-Wits. Reading of reading and thinking of reading–as in the essay on Rousseau from The Great Cat Massacre  (dropped in the bath twice! Cue pun about wringing.)

As developed by Rolf Engelsing and other German scholars, this notion divides the development of reading into two phases.  From the Renaissance until 1750 approximately, Europeans read ‘intensively.’ They had access to very few books—the Bible, devotional works, an occasional chapbook or an almanac—and they read them over and over again, meditating on them inwardly or sharing them aloud with others in family and social gatherings (the Spinnstube and veillée).  In the second half of the eighteenth century, educated people began to read ‘extensively.’ They ran through a great deal of printed matter, especially novels and journals, the favorite genres in the reading clubs (Lesegesellschaften, cabinets littéraires) that proliferated everywhere in urban centers.  And they read each item only once, for amusement, then raced on to the next.

Rousseau a throwback to the “intensive” mode, by his own insistence.  Héloïse made readers so distraught as to be ill; their letters to J-J recounted fits of weeping, no matter their sex or age; its ideas of virtue and authenticity provoked huge upheavals, lives irrevocably altered. Readers made pilgrimages to him, offered themselves emotionally and sexually; they refused to believe the characters were only fiction; they were passionately transported in a way beyond even the earlier Richardson novels.  Darnton says:

Ranson and his contemporaries belonged to a peculiar species of reader, one that arose in the eighteenth century and that began to die out in the age of Madame Bovary.  The Rousseauistic readers of prerevolutionary France threw themselves into texts with a passion that we can barely imagine, that is as alien to us as the lust for plunder among the Norsemen . . . or the fear of demons among the Balinese.

This is part of my struggle now: how to even hint at such a mindset, much less capture fully the mind of an individual who can be moved to histrionics by a novel of sentimental love letters, for whom virtue is a vital, palpable concern.  To even go there? As difficult as it is to present such a person palatably, it also feels completely inauthentic (ha!) to try and animate such a character.  There is a reason why I felt almost physically repulsed at reading Clarissa—so frustrated, so annoyed, so wanting to reach back through time and just shake them all.