Tags
Agatha Christie, Alexandre Dumas, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Burning Chrome, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Dead Souls, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Infinite Jest, Invisible Cities, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Steinbeck, Literature, Malcolm Lowry, Mark Twain, Mark Z. Danielewski, Modernism, Nathaniel Hawthorne, nihilism, P.K. Dick, Post-Modernism, Realism, Robert Faulkner, Salvador Plascencia, Shakespeare, The Angel's Game, The Man in the High Castle, The Winter of Our Discontent, Thomas Malory, Under the Volcano, William Gibson
Once upon a time, back before the novel was an art form, art was unrealistic and nobody expected it to ever be anything else. This is not to say that all art was downright fantastic: rather, there was an acknowledged artifice in the style and production of art that emphasized form over mimesis. For instance, nearly all of the literary arts, be they poems, plays, epics, or otherwise, tended to be written in poetry, not prose. And even when a work of prose was written (say, Malory), emphasis was not on internal consistency (Malory famously recalls the death of several knights multiple times) but on the arc and craft of storytelling. Let us pause, then, for a moment, and consider the change between this outlook and the one we bear now, which often aspires to realism far over the artistry of a work.
At the time of my writing, my reading list has become very strange. In my usual habits of reading one short story collection and one novel simultaneously, I have moved from reading P.K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and William Gibson’s collection Burning Chrome to reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and David Foster Wallace’s wonderfully-titled Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Now anyone familiar with David Foster Wallace’s work will know that he is always very conscious of his dealings with this realism/artistry tension: Infinite Jest is arguably a book that places this compositional decision center stage: every line bounces with enthusiasm and the plot is often absurd and fanciful, but the two characters he spends most of his time following represent these two poles of artistic delivery fairly strongly. In the story collection I’m reading now, the stories are broken up with interludes – the titular “brief interviews” – written in conversational prose so closely attuned to our normal speech as to be almost impossible to read and understand at times.