From: mprisco@puma.cat.syr.edu ()
Subject: Re: careful handling required?
Organization: Syracuse University
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 92 13:44:16 EST

In article <1992Nov7.033452.15289@crl.dec.com> barb@martigny.ai.mit.edu (Barb Miller) writes:
>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

I believe there is a Clue Store at a mall near you


>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.  

Pity then that you would not be around to verify that death did,
indeed, have the deepest, or nearly deepest, emotional significance
of your life.  I think you need to get out more.  But on a lighter
note, it seems to me that a great writer makes the mundane moving
where is is significant to her story, regardless of the style of
writing.
>
>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

I would guess that the only genre where death and passion *always*
have the greatest significance is the Romance.  (I'm guessing as
I've never read one).


>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.

I, personally, don't approach literature this way as I'm usually
looking for a different point of view than my own.


>
>Barb Miller

 Margot
--
"I think we're passing through here kind of fast,
  Did you think these tracks in the dust can last? "
                                         - David Crosby