De-fine, De-note, De-mark... just say it.

"Literature is the question minus the answer." –Roland Barthes

“Life itself is a quotation.” –Borges

“Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence." –Foucault

"Art is the placing of your attention on the periphery of knowing." –Robert Irwin

“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.” –Borges

“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love.” –Kundera

“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.” –Vargas Llosa

“But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously...” –Cortázar

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.” –Woolf

“The pen is the tongue of the mind.” –Cervantes

"True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful" –Goethe

“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.” –Duras

Why do we need the novel?

The relationship between a reader and a narrator is as intense and emotionally complex as any relationship between that reader and another human being. The slow accumulation of the soul of the other, a satisfying human need, occurs in the turning of pages and the deciphering of life as rendered by prose. The novel provides an intercourse with selves, albeit imagined, but just as real. And as the contemporary self is being obliterated by the continuous fragmentation of attention and time, we need the novel more than ever.

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Egon Schiele

When the poem and the novel go to bed together

If one were to look at genre when it comes to fiction, the numerous categories that novels would belong to nowadays would not find a well-known label as “lyrical novel” when it comes to general classifications. The purposes of marketing related to the publishing industry would generally mark novels being classified by their subject matter and the theme of the story -romance, crime, political fiction, thriller, horror, mystery, and so on. And when it comes to classifications based on a more academic orientation novels could be categorized for their relations to theoretical grounds -modernist, postmodernist, post-colonial, Migrant Writing etc. But it appears that when the idea of the “lyrical novel” is approached it marks a distinct basis of formal distinctions being the means by which is it identified. In other words, it is the narrative form that creates the basis on which it may be placed in such a genre over concerns of what the story of the novel is about.

The conventional novel has a set of expectations to fulfill for the reader, when it comes to the aspect of narrative. This "expectation of narrative" as termed so by Freedman is to do with some of the most salient fulfillments such as -plot structure, character exposition and development, successions in time (the chronology factor) as well as certain questions of ethics (perhaps social), which the novel as a work of art would deal with.

When it comes to the identifying of defining qualities of the lyrical novel, Snyder cites Freedman in saying that elements of lyrical poetry combined to create paradoxes in their meanings and created new expanses in "metaphoric suggestiveness" which could not be achieved through "purely narrative means," which one may safely assume is what the conventional novel form would not offer. The technique of weaving a fabric of images therefore is one of the foremost crafts of a lyrical novel. In a way its imagery becomes a sequence of narrative that builds the idea in the subtleness of poetry.

The reader may not find the whole story with all its expectations neatly laid out as in the conventional novel and therefore the fitting together of the “picture” may become a task placed upon the reader in the case of works like lyrical novels.

And I think the spectacle is worth watching. The hybridization of these two mediums of literary expression provides some of the best reading experiences to be had.

Transcending hate with books

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It is not about religion, that is the easy way out. It is not about idiocy, for you would need to be almost mentally retarded. It may be about the very essence of the human condition, a malleable mush, a fertile ground. We are children of our time, of our town, and of our ignorance. So how do we transcend? With books, naturally.

Excerpt of my novel in progress: The Lesser Violin

I like to thank Hope Johnson and the good people of SLING Magazine for publishing an excerpt of THE LESSER VIOLIN, my novel in progress.

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The Lesser Violin

The Library as Paradise

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” --Jorge Luis Borges

And as I walk through the cities whose people still believe in libraries and bookstores, I feel as if I am walking through Paradise. And for as long as I can, I will suspend my disbelief. I will go on dreaming.

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Writing from the unconscious

According to Robert Olen Butler, "the nonartist knows exactly the effect they wish to have on the reader before they write a single word." Of the artist he says: “[T]he artist does not know. She doesn’t know what she knows about the world until she creates the object. For the artist, the writing of a work of art is as much an act of exploration as it is expression, an exploration of images, of moment-to-moment sensual experience. And this exploration comes from the nature of the artistic process.”

Shouldn't we all write that way, from the white center inside?

A woman/man thinks thoughts...

A woman thinks thoughts that barely make sense. A man thinks thoughts that make no sense to anyone. A woman knows not to reveal she knows you’re after her thoughts, that you want to devour her. A man tells you nothing but lays a suspicious look on you. A woman knows not to trust you. This man thinks you are all mighty. You know you’re not but he doesn’t know that. A woman keeps on thinking thoughts that barely make sense to her.

The state of our literary nation is fractured

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According to Ezra Pound, [we live] “in a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism.”

So how, then, do we identify good writing? It is now plain that any debate over who is, or is not, a better writer, or what is, or is not, a more legitimate writing is, for the most part, a surrogate social struggle. The more pertinent questions are what is the community being addressed in the writing, how does the writing participate in the constitution of this audience, and is it effective in doing so. The state of our literary nation is fractured.

Foucault on literary genres

According to Foucault, "Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence." It then follows that in literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs. So, can we finally do away with literary genres?

The writer, the reader, and the book.

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.

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My path is an oblique one

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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.

Pissing in the river

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?

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New/Formulas/Experiment/Fiction

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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.

In the year 2014 plot remains supreme, and so does macramé

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. 

Of Literature and Pistachios

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.

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Questioning All Narratives: Cortázar's 100th anniversary

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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!

Come watch the high-wire act

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.

Milan Kundera on the novel. I say nothing but to write on...

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...

Great AWP Panel on Mental Difference

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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.