Ive been thinking a lot about this lately, and believe the following article bears re-posting. William Carlos Williams addressed it indirectly in The Red Wheelbarrow, and I believe its true of all artistic endeavors -- so much depends... I think all human beings understand and appreciate inherently the symmetry and power of tacit meaning, but more and more lately it appears to me that not too many among us appear capable of executing it with any real success. Most (even a lot of artists) tend to ignore the implicit connections, even during the creative process, and thats a shame. We end up with messes -- works of art for arts sake, loose baggy monsters as Henry James put it. Im not sure why this is true, but Im afraid that the deconstructionists have played an important role. Time to regroup, methinks. Heres the best quote from the article: In a good novel—it hardly needs to be said—every word matters. Dedications matter. Epigraphs matter. The size of the font on the Library of Congress listing matters. The order of the names on the acknowledgment page matters. A writer friend of mine once likened a completed novel to a pressure cooker—the weight placed on every stylistic decision should be extraordinary and evenly distributed. A trigger warning or, really, any sort of preface, would disrupt the creation of those highly pressurized, vital moments in literature that shock a reader into a higher consciousness. newyorker/online/blogs/books/2014/05/trigger-warnings-and-the-novelists-mind.html
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 15:25:33 +0000
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