Fiction as Radical Philosophy (Look at George Elliott)

In the simplest of terms, a philosophy is a dispassionate study of the principles of being, knowledge, and conduct.  These principles thrust you into head-on confrontation with your own approach to story, which you appear to have gained through a slow, deliberate dialectic between description and dramatization.

When you use terms of equal simplicity for the metrics of your own vision, a dramatic incident is a representation of the attempts of one or more invented characters to come to some terms with the state of being, which includes her or his depth or shallowness of awareness, and the way she or he behaves in order to pursue goals.  The longer the work—narrative—the more the possibility arises to dramatize the spectrum of ethical behavior involved in the pursuit of goals.

Into these attempts for you to define the nature of story and your own relationship to it, you must add your wary relationship with descriptions rather than dramatization.

You find no comfort in the memories of all those wadded-up pages ripped from your note pads, pulled from your typewriter, and in more recent years, returned to wadded pages spewing from your printer, then subjected to your fountain pen.

The comfort to be found resides in the increasing number of completed projects where the dramatization grew beyond the explanation, where in fact the language seemed to shift from the tone and content you still associate with so many textbooks set before you when you were in junior and senior high schools, and into the number of novels you read as though your sense and understanding of being, knowledge, and conduct seemed to fly off the pages and into your heart regions.

Explanation of any sort still convey to you the state of instruction where you have less choice and are more often lulled into the sort of passivity that turns off thought and discourages emotional experimentation. You have in fact spent more time trying to unlearn the cultural codes impressed upon you by explanations dressed as education than you have spent learning vital tools of story and communication.

You were thinking earlier today that the acts of composing biographies of your characters and pairing those with the timelines of the arc of your stories would accomplish more for you toward establishing basis for story than any abstractions of cultural status or coding.  Focusing the goals of your stories directly on the character’s quest for being and understanding then produce the momentum for that character’s growing loss of patience, which you can relate to by recalling ways in which you lost patience with the speed and density of result.  Loss of patience often produces—and in your case indeed produced—departure from conventional behavior, which in its consequential turn produces reversals and conflicting energy, things that must be coped with because such mandates are a part of the genome of memorable characters through whom memorable story is transmitted.

This is in many ways a roundabout way of describing to you how you try to bring philosophy into story.  This also opens the door for further conversations with yourself and you characters about the Marxist and Hegelian concepts you see as they apply to Reality and which you try to introduce through indirection and osmosis into your dramatic writing.

No accident in the fact of you having returned through the years to readings of and about Leslie Fiedler, Karl Marx, and Georg Hegel, philosopher types who pursue via nonfiction the kinds of issues you have found as sources of frustration and opposition in your own life, indeed as you ponder matters of what being is and how characters cope with it.

Story, at the moment, means to you narrative of men and women, mindful and needful of relationships with themselves and others, seeking a way to act on their goals, starting with the discovery that sometimes their goals are revealed not to be their own, followed by the fallout.

Add the American novelist, Richard Powers, to the list, particularly with The Echo Maker.  Then add the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, to the list.  Stir in your own questions.  Then push for answers, which you already know cannot be answered as explanations and are best addressed as drama.

The Writer as the Drunk in the Parking Lot

 Life is the only game in town.  You are aware of such potentials for mischief as the house odds, controlled payouts, and the heavy potential for the tables to be rigged.

From your younger years spent working at a traveling carnival, you learned to look for the G, or gimmick, aware that there always was one, whether you could see it or not.  The game is constructed around the inevitability of a G, buried somewhere within the rules of the particular game or within the markers in the game.

You’re further aware that this knowledge gives you a cynical edge, in which you have tendencies to look first at persons, places, and things with the speculative eye of impending disappointment.  But as though that were not enough incentive to send you striding away from the game, you step up to the table from time to time, thinking to factor in the degree to which the G tilts the game to favor the house.

You and many others you have watched play at this only game in town according to our own perception of the rules and our system for not being brought to grief by the G.  You and many others continue to play at the game; rather than stand down to the helpless resignation of believing the system cannot be fought.

At various times in your life, you thought you had an equivalent of a bible, something to give you solace in the face of your recognition of the mountainous odds stacked against you and the equally mountainous ones favoring the house.  You variously carried about with you such secular bibles as the poetical works of John Keats, a book from your late teens you have not reread for some time and are fearful of doing so now, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, by the Avant guard novelist and poet, Kenneth Patchen, a book apparently carried about by millions like you, The Catcher in the Rye, and in more recent years a book-as-secular-bible you put much more faith in because it so well bears rereading, Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.

You do not believe these secular bibles have the same effect as a crucifix or a clove of garlic when held before you to fend off the advances of a vampire.  Rather, like the “ap” on your iPhone, these secular bibles produce a powerful beam of light, which help you see your way in the darkness.  Thus you have some help in the existential dark, the equivalent of the drunk in the parking lot, looking for his lost keys near the light poles rather than where he believes the keys were in fact dropped.

You and many others of whom you are aware, mindful the system cannot be beaten for long, look for some loophole by which to work capitalist magic, for you believe Marx was right about such matters as the creation and meaning of money, the value of work performed, and among other things, the attempts of the house or those in control to minimize the value you put on the work you do.

For a number of reasons, which transcend house rules, story has conventions and loopholes.  Along with sister and brother writers, you look for and exploit loopholes in dramatic conventions, willing—perfectly willing—to exchange certain Marxist financial gains for greater Marxist values related to the knowledge that you have discovered beyond a loophole, rather an explanation of the behavior of the species that directs the beam of light to a place in the parking lot where you might have dropped the keys.

Although you have not been drunk for years of recent memory, you have not forgotten the times you were, or the feelings accompanying the state.  You have been drunk in a number of landscapes beyond mere parking lots.  You have dropped more than your keys.  Sometimes you’ve dropped your dignity, your sense of reason, your sense of patience with the house rules, seeking in those moments of drunkenness to distance yourself from your cynical awareness of the G in the game.

Because you have not been drunk for a time does not insure your sobriety or your refuge in story.

The game, after all, is rigged.  You are doing your best to write your way out, against the odds.

Institutions and Conventions

You have difficulty now remembering an institution you disliked so much as you disliked your years in junior high school.

Your luck of the draw saw you experiencing your first venture into this hated institution in Miami Beach, Florida, a direct consequence of your graduation from a school directly across the street, Central Beach Elementary School.

Your animosity—even in memory—is less directed at Ida M. Fisher Junior High School and then, later, John Burroughs Junior High School, in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.  For a time, you were so relieved to be back in Los Angeles that any dislike of the institution of junior high school was minimal.  But puberty and hormones and internal issues with simultaneous wishes to belong and be an individual apart added their voices to the growing parliament that was you.

This panoply of inner conflict revisited you when your memory directed you back to a scene from one of your all-time favorite television dramas, that magnificent creation of David Simon, The Wire.

The principal character is the cop, Jimmy McNulty, whom you recall having a conversation with one of the young black kids, of all things Snot Boogie, which of course was a name tagged onto him by the System of which he is a part.  In actuality, his name is of even more consequence; it is Omar.  No, not the Omar, not Omar Little, but more a potential Omar Little, a foreshadowing.

“So your boy’s name was what,” McNulty asks.
“Snot Boogie.’
“God.  Snot Boogie.  This kid, whose Mama went to the trouble to christen him Omar Isaiah Betts—You know, he forgets his jacket his nose starts running and some asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him ‘Snot.’  So he’s Snot forever.  Doesn’t seem fair.
And the kid, not impressed with any concepts of fairness, because, like junior high school, the system rules, replies, “I’m sayin’ every Friday night in the alley behind the Cut Rate, we rollin’ bones, you know?  I mean all them boys, we roll till late.”
“Alley crap game, right?”  from Mc Nulty.
“Like every time, Snot, he’d fade a few shooters, play it out till the pot’s deep.  Snatch and run.”
“What, every time?”
The kid allows of Snot, “Couldn’t help himself.”
“Let me understand.  Every Friday night, you and your boys are shootin’ craps, right?  And every Friday night, your pal, Snot Boogie—he’d wait ‘till there’s cash on the ground and he would grab the money and run away?  You let him do that?”
Patiently, the kid explains to McNulty.  “We’d catch him and beat his ass but ain’t nobody ever go past that.
“I’ve gotta ask you:  If every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away—why’d you even let him in?”
“What?”
“Well, if every time Snot Boogie stole the money, why’d you let him play?”
“Got to.  It’s America, man.”

In your time as a junior high school student, you were all these characters and as well several more, your name not Snot, but variously Shorty and Tarzan, your roles shifting even though you did not at the time understand the dynamic of the shifting politics much less the tides of your own wants and attitudes.

Now, you are more used to being all the characters in settings of your own creation.  These settings are, in their way, remarkably like junior high school was for you in their relationships to the characters.  There is more involved here than you, having moved from a position of little power in a microcosm to a position of little power in a reality of greater potential for inventiveness.  The crux of the matter is the need to take in the dynamic of the settings in which you find yourself, noting the internal politics and your own response to them.  There is an important balance to be struck. You must neither demonize the junior high school bullies who chased you down the corridors or the teachers with whom you got on at such intense chemistry nor deify the individuals you so admired and sought to emulate.

Of course your characters should be larger than life to distinguish them from the characters you consider of life size or less, and indeed from the individuals you meet in Reality who are every bit as larger than life as a robust character from a writer you admire.  No patience whatsoever for clichés or zombies.

Expectations

Whether you are about to embark on a reading session or a writing session, your goal is the same.

You expect to be transported somewhere.  You are in effect signing on as a tourist, your senses alert for signs of local color, local passions, and the thrilling expectation of finding encounters and experiences you cannot hope to find at home.

You are more than a little open to discovering behavior with the simultaneous capacity to shock you, satisfy a submerged, secret longing, and at some future moment, to provide you with a residue of guilt.

To enter either reading or writing, without such expectations and subtext is to encourage the routine of the expected, with the final result that you’d have subjected yourself to the disappointment of the ordinary.

Even when you claim to do either reading or writing for more than exploratory purposes, you nevertheless have hopes you reading matter or your written output will surprise you with some connection that is at once audacious and provocative.

In the manner of some conspiracy theorist writers and critics you know, you read or write to discover innuendo you missed, nuance you did not grasp.  The pull of the provocative reaches under the protective clothing of your comfort zones and fantasies, where it often delivers a forbidden thrill.

Under ordinary circumstances, you’d think you’ve arrived at a stage of life where such knowledge is either quite open to you, but there you are with hopes and expectations that both activities, reading and writing, will reveal undiscovered territory within you still to be traversed, charted, and interpreted.

You take these imaginary trips of reading and writing for the thrill of being a stranger in a strange land or a recurrent tourist to a place that has continued to fascinate you to the point of prompting another visit in hopes of noticing a detail you’d neglected earlier.

At home, you are less likely to confide secrets, not from any sense of being on guard or protective but in the sense of being lulled into the routine of the ordinary.  In reading and in writing, you’re more likely to confide actual experiences and fantasies with short-term acquaintances you believe you’ll never see again, identify with unsafe and unknown attractions.

The lure of the occult, the hidden, unseen, unsuspected, is there to lure you off the path.  You find yourself sometimes in bookstores and libraries, pondering, reaching out as though your hands were the willow rods of the water diviners, seeking underground caches of story.

You find yourself sometimes halfway down a note pad or a page on your computer, reaching through the paragraphs and words, seeking buried stories and insights to bring to light.

Research: Internal and External

The way you see the matter of research, there are two basic approaches to source material.

First comes the research of external resources such as the library or such reference books as you happen to have strewn about the house, then the various Internet sites, including search engines you use on a more or less regular basis, followed by Internet searches for online sites you need at some point to assess for such matters as accuracy and bias.  There are times when you wish a particular passage from a particular book.  There is also the potential for recommendations from acquaintances and friends for source material and special collections with which they may be familiar.  In a positive sense, these are all potential research tools, whose availability and validity you pursue.

All these possibilities have the added, accidental potential you associated with browsing in the libraries of universities with which you were or are associated in some way.  You’re saving the magazines, journals, and supplements to which you subscribe.  Most all of these sources have a specific section related to books, which often provoke interest or curiosity to discover more specificity; many of these are in fact compilations of reviews of books which, by their titles and/or their authors, provoke curiosity.  Some of these have essays, informative versions of the ”what-if?” trope of story.

The “other” approach to research is much less conventional; it has to do with internal gathering of information, as in:  How do you feel about a particular person, place, thing, or condition.  There are often internal equivalents of books strewn about the house for you to consult.  When faced with the possibility of being served any of the species of squash, your early response would have been one of extreme distaste followed by a desire to avoid.  For the past twenty-five or so years, you have been quite the opposite, appreciative of any number of types of squash; well motivated to try any you’ve not yet met.

Even though the notion of not knowing how you feel seems an irony to you, a condition bordering on incomprehensible, you have to admit there are times, places, and circumstances where you have to pause, then browse hurriedly to discover how you feel because the circumstances are either foreign, complex, complicated, painful, and unsettling to the point where you not only don’t know how you feel, you’re motivated by some sense of aversion not to want to know.

This last is a tricky business.  If you don’t know how you feel about a thing, how can you hope to deal with it, perhaps learn from it, perhaps even profit from it on an emotional and/or intellectual level?

If you are to have any sense of success as a writer, an editor, or a teacher, there is an urgent sense about your need to know how as many of your known and unexplored aspects feel so that you may portray individuals as a simulacrum with a strong potential for being believed and understood.  Of course you must secure this information if you are to have any possibility of success as an individual.  

Both approaches to research, the external and internal, are curiosity based.  Each begins with a faint gnawing of wonder.  What if?  What would it be like?  Do you suppose?   Don’t you feel the irony inherent in external research often being easier, more accessible?

What can you do to provide yourself with more resources?  Funny you should ask.  You can write with a ferocity of focus on what the characters in your drama want because if you care for them at all—and you ought—you’ll catch some of the aura of their wanting.  You can resolve your stories so that your characters are buying into as little propaganda as possible.  You can want to do better, not be satisfied, alert for ways to make your negotiation with Reality have more weight, because in the end those negotiations are all you have. You become the person against the forces that most keep you from knowing how you feel.  This is often painful, frustrating knowledge, but it is your best chance to negotiate for the sense of you that will allow you to do your best work with those whom you chose as allies.

In so many ways, curiosity to know, understand, and connect is the genome that drives the species along the narrow cusp of risk between extinction and excellence.  You may not always like what you find when you do your research, but you are better equipped to live with the results.

Vocabulary

At one time in your late teens, you had the unfortunate tendency to confuse vocabulary with intelligence, which was bad enough.  You also took vocabulary to be a means by which you keep pace with and out-write those authors whose works had begun to matter to you.

This last step was a particular disaster because in large measure you were reading on two levels, the level of your own enjoyment and the level of being introduced by teachers to what has been called The Western Canon.  To render the former matter at its simplest, you thought most writers of The Western Canon placed a premium on vocabulary ahead of story.

As for the latter pathway to literary disaster, you failed to note how such worthies who meant so much to you as Mark Twain did or Willa Cather did, or F. Scott Fitzgerald did, and while you’re at it, why not throw in Stephen Crane and, okay, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and why stop there, why not Jane Austen—why was it vocabulary was one of the last things you thought about with reference to them?

You did not think about, nor in your examinations and papers, did you write about vocabulary.  You thought and wrote about their approaches to story and their ways of relating the small, close-at-hand to the larger and more inclusive.  Of course you referred to this process as synecdoche.  Considering many of your papers and examinations were read by teaching assistants, such uses of vocabulary got you noticed rather than challenged your understanding of the real process.

At the time of which you refer, you could still get those small, throw-away gifts of paper sculpting which you’d toss into a glass of water, curious to see what form the sculpting would take when it “opened” to its intended result.  With some degree of pain at the memory, you recall describing the process as the Entelechy—“When the dried-out paper sculpting was placed in water, it opened to its entelechy.”  Thus did you discuss how Cather or Crane, writing about one person, could be interpreted as writing about a larger spectrum.

Not to forget your similar use of Fitzgerald’s observation from his longish short story, “The Rich Boy.”  He wrote:  “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created--nothing.”  Once again, comments in the margins from ”them,” because you couldn’t let it go at that, you had to throw in the synecdoche trope.

Those years are behind you now, but the words remain burned in to your memory, words such as rebarbative and prolepsis, and pleonasm, ekphrastic, and one of your favorites, tantivy.  Thus have you given yourself yet another search-and-destroy mission to find such words and send them packing.  Sometimes one of them slips through and you will hear from an editor or a reader or both.  Sometimes, while reading a novel or a review written by John Banville, you’ll recognize the same fascination with vocabulary in addition to his—dare you say it?—grip on some form or other of synecdoche, and you’ll nod in admiration.  He can get away with it.  He does get away with it.  You admire the hell out of it, and it still tempts, but you edit the hell out of it.

You love the sets of tools you’ve needed to acquire in order to attempt the craft of writing.  Sometimes, you take great sensual pleasure in spreading some of the tools before you, wiping them down, squirting a bit of 3-in-1 Oil or perhaps WD-40 or in some cases of acute rust and stickiness, both.

Knowing what to take out is as important a part of vocabulary as the

Understanding what goes in, where, and how are no less integral parts of the larger vocabulary of story.

Balancing Act

Unlike Gregor Samsa, you slept well, had pleasant dreams but when you woke up, there was a stranger in your bed.  This was not the once-upon-a-time stranger you met in bed in the years of mating, carousing, and mischief.  This stranger was you, in large part strange to you because you’d spent so little time in his company.

He seemed to be on auto pilot, knew where the coffee things were, even got Sally outside for her morning pee, turned on the toaster, set the milk for the latte.  But there was no hint of conversation from him, no venturing of opinion about how the day looked, showed not the slightest interest in the books on the kitchen table.

Pretty much a loner, he was, not at all the you who sometimes wants to think things at slow speed for a time or get a handle on who’s in charge, which of your ensemble case of selves will be in effect steering the ship of state today.

In some ways, you owe it to him and yourself to get to know him better, much as you’ve taken the time to known and interact with the others, even those aspects of you you’d like least to spend time marooned on a desert island with.  You have no trouble with owning all of them, taking the responsibility for their actions or their significant lack of actions.

You sometimes confide to yourself how much a balancing act story is, but story is nothing of a balancing act in comparison to the self, with all its moods, quirks, and social gaucheries.  The self is in many ways like a firm of high-powered lobbyists, trying to capture your attention in the service of some goal, which may be momentary or long-range, a whim or a hidden agenda.

There are times when your component parts remind you of the frequent TV news tropes wherein questioning reporters chase legislators down the hallways of the House or Senate, trying to get that seemingly impossible thing from them, a simple yes or no answer.

Sometimes, holding office hours helps in much the same way it does at the university.  At least, some potential is there for conversation.

Even though you do not feel you’re at your best in a balancing act mode, you do your best to maintain it on the theory that you are present for anything that will throw you over into the progressive mode of your being, which draws its energy from enthusiasm.  Your form of enthusiasm comes from connecting two or more seemingly disparate things or from seeing for the first time relationships you’d not noticed in previous circumstances.  This kind of energy is clean, does not produce undue side effects of potential harm to the ecology.  The worst thing about your bursts of enthusiasm is the way it tends to make it comfortable for you to forget about tasks which may be necessary but for which you need all your wits to manufacture some performance.

On balance, you’re more often chipper and alert than not, more likely to get along with your ensemble cast of selves, who still don’t seem to have a clue about how you exploit them.

Perhaps this ongoing exploitation explains the stranger this morning.  Balance due.