My note
about expectation & perception in
In motion
pictures, novels, even poems – especially longer ones – any time-based art
form, something to the same process applies. Often in a motion picture –
regardless of quality – there is a period in which the details feel quite
chaotic to the viewer as he or she sorts out basic elements (e.g., who is the
main character here?). In more formulaic
·
Chaotic
introduction of detail that gradually sorts into elements of plot, character,
genre, etc.
·
Machinery
moving the plot from point A to point B
·
A
car chase or similar FX-heavy conclusion
Almost all
the pleasure for me occurs in the first of these three movements. Indeed, I
would argue that the works I like best are those that do the best job extending
& propelling that first stage to the greatest degree possible. When I think
of the list I gave January 7 of the novels
that have most held my interest written over the past fifty years – Gravity’s Rainbow, V, Satanic Verses,
Visions of Cody, Naked Lunch, Underworld, Dhalgren, Islands in the Net –
which I characterized at the time as “almost all narratives that ‘go nowhere,’
& which would be unrepresentable in film”** – a major feature is that each
lengthens this first movement & to some degree seems predicated on
stretching it out as far as can be imagined.
The same
dynamics apply in poetry of course. A poem in quatrains tells you an enormous
amount about itself even before you’ve absorbed the
first word – an entire series of expectations are set & framed. These can
be met or confounded – either approach has its pleasures – but it’s
significantly different from a poem that leaves the reader unsettled,
off-balance, not certain quite what to expect. The latter seeks to preserve the
experience of newness formally precisely by denying the reader predetermined
landmarks. In some sense, I think this was the way in which a good deal of what
came to be known as language poetry was first received in the 1970s. People
were – and to some degree still are – unsure of whether or not to take Lyn
Hejinian’s My Life as a poem or a
novel. Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps
won a Pushcart Prize for fiction in 1979, even tho the work has no
characters, no plot & nothing fictive in its text – it was, however, in a
paragraph, In 1979, a hard right margin
was all it took for the Pushcart editors to not only decide something was
fiction, but award-winning fiction at that.
One problem
that any serious post-avant writing confronts is that, over time, readers come
to understand the landmarks to any new terrain. What was comically
misidentified in the 1970s becomes instantly recognizable just 25 years later.
In order to keep it new, the writer (me or you or
whomever) must go beyond the exoskeletal components of structure to create a
sense of liveliness internally – through word choices, sentence juxtapositions,
the underlying logic. I obviously have a serious bias towards building in
devices – like the “new sentence” – that block or at least slow the integration
of the text, the point at which it moves from the first of my three mock stages
into the moving machinery one. Even as a reader, I am more apt than not to
avoid reading the title until the very end of the poem & oftentimes not
even then. I’ve gone through entire books without taking note of a title. I
simply find them too confining. And I guess that my own titles have a tendency
to point anywhere but the text.
The logic
behind all this isn’t newness for the sake of novelty, some sort of attention
deficit approach to contemporary meaning, but rather to maximize the reader’s
(& my own) attentiveness to detail. That’s what gets lost when a reader
gets too comfortable with the landmarks of the poem – why, for example, it’s so
very hard to write a good haiku – just as it’s what gets lost when you get too
familiar with a landscape or city. Slushing around
* Indeed, in
some circumstances I could literally do it. Having grown up in a MacGregor
house in
** I
subsequently heard from someone who has written a screenplay for Dhalgren.