From: barb@martigny.ai.mit.edu (Barb Miller)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: careful handling required?
Date: 7 Nov 92 03:34:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: crl.1992Nov7.033452.15289
Organization: DEC Cambridge Research Lab

Fiona, the questions at the end of your post left me rather confused
about just exactly what you were getting at, so I dug out
_Living_by_Fiction_ to try and find your reference.  I assume that you
are responding to the following paragraph fragment:

 "Finally, plain prose is almost requisite for handling violent or
emotional scenes without eliciting dismay or nausea in the reader.  We
have long since tired of imitation fine writing, of bad fine writing,
of the overwritten, gushing prose which we find not only in unskilled
literature but also in junk fiction--and we tire of it especially in
the wringingly emotional and violent scenes of which failed literature
and junk are made.  So unless he is William Faulkner, a serious writer
of this century has little other recourse than to plain writing for
violent and emotional scenes.  If a writer wants to play safe, he will
underwrite all drama.  Plain prose affords distance; it permits scenes
to be effective on their narrative virtues, not on the overwrought
insistence of their author's prose."

And your interpretation was:
*   Annie Dillard (in _Living_by_Fiction_) says it is very hard to write
*   good fiction about strong emotions or violence.  By "good" I think she
*   means not only beautiful, but also truthful.  She implies that a
*   narrative behaving in a surface-only fashion toward the great awful
*   moments in the life of a human being, is just not up to snuff. 
*   Profound insights are obligatory.  No amateurs allowed.  Kid gloves
*   are optional equipment.

I'm not sure that all of your interpretation necessarily follows from
what she wrote.  While I agree with you that what she terms fine
writing has a surface-oriented quality to it (writing for the sake of
a musical and perhaps dense sound), I think that what she is saying
here is simply that it requires a tremendous mastery of technique to
use that style successfully in narrating highly emotional or violent
scenes.  (Success would mean that the reader is moved, failure would
mean that the reader's involvement would be lost due to impatience
with the "overwrought insistence" of the style, a distinction being
made between "overwrought" and "properly wrought".)

I don't see the requirement for "profound insights" anywhere in this
paragraph (although I can see how you might draw that conclusion,
given that much of her own writing reaches for the "profound insights"
as a constant exercise).  If anything, what she's asking for is
simplicity, a lack of commentary embedded in the prose and possibly
detracting from the reader's own reaction to the highly charged
subject matter.

Now, getting to your questions:

*   But what if the surface is very beautiful?  What if it's a hot pink
*   sixty-five Cadillac of a surface?

Well, now, this would sound to me like an example of successful,
rather than failed, fine writing (leaving aside the intriguing matter
of how one decides just what is "very beautiful"--I might have picked
a different metaphor, but if this sort of surface is very beautiful to
you, then it would presumably work for you as you are reading it), and
therefore not forbidden, just difficult to achieve and hence risky to
attempt.

*   Isn't it an outmoded romantic
*   notion that passion and death are any deeper than anything else,
*   except insofar as we construe them that way?

Far be it from me to say what's outmoded, since I'm hardly hip to
what's inmoded. And I'm not sure whether you are using "romantic" to
refer to the legacy of Romanticism or something else (it would seem to
me that death, at least, goes way back beyond the nineteenth century
as an occasion of deep significance).  Still, a simple-minded answer
would be that, yes, to the person who dies (particularly if they die
violently) or achieves the Significant Other of Their Dreams, that
moment would hold deeper emotional significance than a moment in which
they are brushing their teeth or visiting the grocery store.  At least
it would for me if I were that person.  

But I assume that you are in some way taking Dillard at her word when
she speaks of living the Life of the Mind.  So are you saying this:
that in the world of the mind, where all the events being considered
are understood to be fictitious creations presented in one literary
style or another, why should death or passion have any greater
objective significance than, say, your hot-pink Cadillac?  (Other than
the fact that we habitually apply a value set to them in which death
and passion come out ahead.)  I personally do not approach literature
this way, so I can't really answer that.  It would seem to me that
what resonates with the reader's own deep experiences will be
construed as deep when encountered in fiction (assuming that the
fiction is executed skillfully), and for most of us, passion and death
are right up there.

Barb Miller
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books