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.