Creativity on the part of the author involves structural innovation, the ability to generate an, in principle, infinite number of different structures. But the reader's creativity is expressed by functional innovation: the ability to imagine what a text could mean. A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means. My path is an oblique one.
I would like to know what the ultimate purpose of writing fiction is. What are the best approaches to producing innovative prose? What is the real value of reality in fiction? Should the novel be clear and open to all? Who are the readers? And in a more existential vein; does it matter to the universe whether I write a novel or take a piss in the river?
The author who tries to expand the frontiers of the human experience can fail. On the other hand, authors of conventional literary products never fail, they take no risks, they use the same proven formula, a comfortable formula, a formula of concealment. Using language for the mere purpose of obtaining an effect, without going beyond what’s expected, is essentially immoral. The ethical approach is found in the search for new formulas.
From my interview with Thalia Field in Gargoyle Magazine, Issue #61:
ARMENTEROS: A plot is a plot is a plot, or is it not?
FIELD: There is plot, but I’m always more interested in situations. Situations change and that’s a kind of plot. Language is a plot, too, and so are mix-ups and nonsense. Really, any situation can be a plot because as it changes, time moves forward.
Most books today land on the reader’s lap, defanged, tamed by the weight of tradition, ready for easy consumption. I prefer when the book does not offer itself to the reader like a shelled pistachio. But when the reader has to do the work of shelling through words, rhythms in prose, and the unconscious in order to savor the book. And it is the alliance between the reader’s effort and the author’s meditations that conjures the best literature.
Cortázar called Hopscotch “a book of questions which continually asks why something is this way and not another way, why people accept that something is given in this form when it could be given in another.” When he wrote Hopscotch, he wanted a revolution to escape from the “prison of language,” the syntaxes that obliges us to say certain things. The philosophy of that book, if there is one, is that one should constantly undermine what seems certain. “Once one denies something, it is possible to continue a chain of negations.” So the imperative of our time is to lay the rules of the game outside the canons of literature. Happy birthday Julio!
In an effort to transcend traditional narrative, I need to wield words under the constraints of the novel’s tremendous weight. Consequently, I need to discard many rules to bring forth this vision. In so doing, I may be creating an anti-democratic experience that leaves out the middle-class, or middle-reader, the populous group which has generated the traditional novel. Yes, I explore the inner world of my characters, experiment with nonlinear formats, employ multiple points of view, embrace philosophical constructs, use lyrical language, and make clear and not-so-clear allusions while not explaining everything in an expository way. I may be writing outside of the traditional mold but I am not the first, nor will I be the last one. My challenge, dear reader, is how to manage this difficult and complex task, how to pull off the high wire act without crashing down to the floor. I invite you to watch.
More than thirty years ago Kundera wrote: "The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: 'Things are not as simple as you think.' That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off." Kundera thought the spirit of mass media was contrary to the spirit of the novel. The novel requires continuity, but the spirit of our time "is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only." Within this system what is a novelist to do? I say nothing but to write on...
Writing Mental Difference: A Multigenre Panel. (Jorge Armenteros, Steven Cramer, Leslie McGrath, Suzanne Paola Antonetta) To be presented next April in Minneapolis.
The mind generates every word we write. We listen to the stream of words as it springs from thought and perception, and render them as literary art. But how do we write or mentor students from the perspective of those who lie outside the mental norm? Four diverse writers will discuss how minds different from the norm have influenced their work. Harnessing the inspirational force of neurodiverse perspectives, they will share their poems, prose, and perspectives of writing about mental difference.
“The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.”
--Julio Cortázar
Is meaning created through the interaction of man and text? It seems so. In many of his short stories, Borges implies the disturbing supposition that the meaning of literary works is entirely dependent on the varying historical and social contexts in which they are read. In other words, that literary meaning is constructed through mental processes irrevocably tied to location and period. Reading, then, is more central to a text's intellectual "life" than its writing and, consequently, a reader is more important to a text than its writer.
We can see how influential Borges’ ideas were on contemporary writers. For example, in Hopscotch, Cortazar invites the reader to participate in his innovative project by letting the reader choose in what order to read the chapters. In his own words, “For my part, I wonder whether someday I will ever succeed in making it felt that the true character and the only one that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation, transportation.”
If we are to have a high esteem for the reader, we have to invite her to the party. Not every sentence needs to be complete, not every plot needs a twist, nor does every flower need a color. Let the reader create alongside the text. Easy prose is akin to baby food. It is time to take the spoon out of the reader’s mouth.
According to Milan Kundera, "If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it. The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: 'Things are not as simple as you think.' That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off."
My novel as seen in the Author's Bookshelf of the current issue of Harvard Magazine. Be ready for The Book of I, coming this fall.
It’s possible that the fact that literature has been commercialized now in a way it never was before has had an influence. That is, the fact that people now talk about “bestsellers,” that fashion has an influence (something that didn’t use to happen). I remember that when I began to write, we never thought about the success or failure of a book. What’s called “success” now didn’t exist at that time. And what’s called “failure” was taken for granted. One wrote for oneself and, maybe, as Stevenson used to say, for a small group of friends. On the other hand, one now thinks of sales. I know there are writers who publicly announce they’ve had their fifth, sixth, or seventh edition released and that they’ve earned such and such an amount of money. All that would have appeared totally ridiculous when I was a young man; it would have appeared incredible. People would have thought that a writer who talks about what he earns on his books is implying: “I know what I write is bad but I do it for financial reasons or because I have to support my family.” So I view that attitude almost as a form of modesty. Or of plain foolishness.
--Jorge Luis Borges
"No, not a lament. Ecstasy instead. The sound between common notes. My voice unencumbered. This may be how I sound without sheet music, outside the confines of the pentagram. Those five lines with spaces in between, the iron grid, the field of known sonority, and time, eternal time maybe, but predetermined, fated and a little dead. Were this to be a lament, I would surrender to my moaning."
--The lesser violin
"The air matters in those bars, and the thought of my voice immersed in that rancid miasma of smoke, sweat, alcohol, and the cacophony of other instruments, frightens me. What if I reach the space between half notes? What if I sing like a Roma? Why do I fear the night when at dawn the air will eventually dissipate and strangulate all voices?"
--THE LESSER VIOLIN
The lesser violin.
"And here is what I, Artaud, think of thought:
INSPIRATION DOES EXIST.
There is a phosphorescent point where all reality is rediscovered, but changed, metamorphosed--and by what?--a point open for the magic usage of things. And I believe in mental meteors, in individual cosmogonies."
--Antonin Artaud
And when the rain comes down, my words are safe in my dry within. I flourish from inside my skull.
"Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas, I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulses, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, the rhythm moves into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and which turns out prose, literature, or what have you. First there is a confused situation, which can only be defined by words; I start out from this half-shadow and if what I mean (if what is meant) has sufficient strength, the swing begins at once, a rhythmic swaying that draws me to the surface, lights everything up, conjugates this confused material and the one who suffers it into a clear third somehow fateful level: sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, book. This swaying, this swing in which confused material goes about taking shape, is for me the only certainty of its necessity, because no sooner does it stop than I understand that I no longer have anything to say." --Julio Cortazar
