Thoughts on fiction & literary criticism

(Thoughts sparked from online readings)

I find the idea incomprehensible that writers should be criticized for commenting on their own work once the work has been published. It seems reminiscent of arguments that would stop the Word from having any more words for mankind since those written by John the Revelator.¹ If a critic can have thoughts, insights, or revelations about a creative work once it is published, why can’t the writer? And why should we resist elaborations to the first telling of a thing? The Gods themselves don’t tell or interpret the whole story all-in-one-shot; rather, here a little and there a little, often depending on the preparedness or receptiveness of the hearer or the times.

Now, as to another thread of comment. I question whether we can be certain about the “fiction-ness” of any work or character. If there are phases of existence, where we transcend but include prior states (intelligence, spirit, mortal, post-mortal),² are we so sure that what a writer creates is fiction, even when labeled as such? Even when it appears fantastical or archetypal or purely symbolic? Can there be such a thing as genetic memory speaking through a writer? What of a collective or archetypal unconscious? Of communication between spheres? Of flashes from veiled memories? Of other worlds? Can true stories, characters, events, etc., span the eons retelling themselves in “new” versions? Do authors, by their life-choices, align themselves with real story or archetypal patterns and retell the same 36 plots³—interjecting, for better or worse, various degrees of their own experience? Can things be both fictional (representative) and real (individual) at the same time?⁴

How many times have writers felt themselves a conduit—a transmitter of a character, event, or story that insisted on taking its own direction? What is real and what is fiction in the realm of writing is not something, in my opinion, that we can make clear pronouncements about. There is too much that is beyond us. Most of us can’t even crack the purpose and meaning of our own strange dreams. Where is the grip of reality in that? And isn’t that the “reasonable and rational” grip that has spawned innumerable stories, plays, and novels about strangulated hopes and dreams, callings and passions?

What is fiction? What is real? I suspect that only a view from the next dimension (or revelation there from) can tell us the full truth about this 3-dimensional world and the so-called fictions that writers write.⁵ (As usual, I have far more questions and suppositions than answers.)

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1. New Testament Revelations 22:18-19
2. Some of my worldview beliefs as a Christian of the Mormon faith.
3. Based on Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations
4. E.g., Doctrine & Covenants 77:3Q&A
5. For an interesting perspective, read Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

“Lucky” You? Lucky Them?

(Concerning Samuel Beckett’s play-on-life?!)

Recently, a Thanksgiving-dinner conversation turned to the multiple sins of multinational corporations. Our well-to-do host sprang forcefully to the defense of corporations, discounting their sins, because they create jobs—MILLIONS of jobs, filled by lucky employees! The discussion aborted and we turned to more banal matters.

But the image of “Lucky,” from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,^[1] began to percolate. Pozzo, Lucky’s master, sought to explain Lucky’s servility:

Pozzo: … Why he doesn’t make himself comfortable? Let’s try and get this clear. Has he not the right to? Certainly he has. It follows that he doesn’t want to. There’s reasoning for you. And why doesn’t he want to? … He wants to impress me, —so I’ll keep him. … Perhaps I haven’t got it quite right. He wants to mollify me, so that I’ll give up the idea of parting with him. No, that’s not exactly it either. … He wants to cod me, but he won’t. … He imagines that when I see how well he carries I’ll be tempted to keep him on in that capacity. … He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I’ll regret my decision [to get rid of him]. Such is his miserable scheme. As though I were short of slaves!

Vladimer—one of those waiting for Godot—eventually observes:

After having sucked all the good out of him you chuck him away like a … like a banana skin. Really …

Now, this Déjà Vu post is not meant to present the other extreme—that all corporations are evil. Or that all employees are “Luckys.” It is rather to wonder whether the aggregation of power and wealth in a profit-driven, competitive culture binds employers, whether corporations or not, into Pozzo-prone perspectives vis-à-vis their “lucky” employees.

But just how lucky are many of these employees? From a Pozzo-perspective, they are lucky to have paychecks. Lucky to have necessities and amenities sustained by those paychecks. Lucky to be able to devote their gifts, talents, energies, and time to the employers' great causes, agendas, ideas, and dreams. Lucky to have daily purpose and place to go. Plain lucky to have a job.

Maybe so. But on the other hand, how much do those Luckys surrender by becoming employees, specialized to the needs of their Pozzo?

Pozzo: … He even used to think very prettily once. … He even used to dance the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the fandango, and even the hornpipe. He capered. For joy. Now that’s the best he can do. Do you know what he calls it? … The Net. He thinks he’s entangled in a net.

Or from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations:

In the progress of the division of labour [specialization], the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, ^[2] that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, … The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, …. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred.^[3] His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it [through mandatory educational requirements] (Bk.5, Ch. 1, Pt III, pp. 839-840).

Perhaps it is time for a revolution of thought and practice vis-à-vis employers and employees; between competition and cooperation. Maybe it is time to review what lucky really means. How necessity and fear can tie a “Lucky” to abuse, injustice, stagnation, and exhaustion. How competitive and profit-driven obsessions can bind a Pozzo to perpetuation of the same. Maybe it is time to rethink what the pursuit of happiness really means. And perhaps to consider whether Pozzo is also “the burden of Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see” (Isaiah 13).

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[1] Waiting for Godot was written in 1948/49 and first performed in 1953.
[2] Includes the oft-scripted service industry of our day, where employees, even high-level ones, are given scripts to handle situations as if every situation can be indexed into a tidy number of satisfactory solutions to which no additional creative thought need be given.
[3] And s/he goes home too exhausted for much of anything but beer and the blather of too much TV (the Roman equivalent of “bread and circuses”?).

1st Posted December 7, 2009 on dejavu-times.blogspot.com

Déjà Vu: Eden & Beyond

Seven-second drama by SMSmith, playwright

Adam & Eve (et all thereafter): Oh, what are we to do?

Voice (Off-stage): Just put one foot in front of the other, and try not to slip on your tears.

(IF TIME PERMITS, and there are potential sinners in your audience, the play may be extended to approximately ten seconds by adding)

... Or get dung on your shoes.

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First published, in part, 16 April 2009 at dejavu-times.blogspot.com