I have an aversion to realism for esoteric (to me) reasons that I find justification for in an essay, Lemurian Time War, from the CCRU about William S. Burroughs:
Every act of writing is a sorcerous operation, a partisan action in a war where multitudes of factual events are guided by the powers of illusion….Even representative realism participates—albeit unknowingly—in magical war, collaborating with the dominant control system by implicitly endorsing its claim to be the only possible reality
I say this is a post-hoc justification because I don’t know exactly why I feel averse to writing realism. a story draft I just finished is more or less realistic; it takes as stylistic departure a certain kind of corporate HR language that lends the story a slight strangeness, but what “happens” in the story is normal everyday life stuff. for whatever reason, when I think of the kind of fiction I’d like to write, I imagine surrealism or magical realism, cartoonish burlesque, dream-logic narratives that defy clean categorization and play with the expected relationship of literature to whatever “reality” is. I like the story I wrote, but it also seems “small,” both for being more-or-less realistic, and for not being all that engaged politically or socially. (plus it’s short, only ~1700 words on first draft.)
relatedly, there’s probably some unresolved tension in my psyche that manifests in seeing my own life as “boring,” and that therefor the “things that happen to me” aren’t worth writing about. the one story I wrote isn’t about something that happened to me, though I can see where personal experience has been transformed into the emotional background of the story. the other story I’m working on is more closely informed by actual events of my life, but not related in the way I would tell the story to someone interested in the actual events of my life; things are exaggerated, characters are rendered unkindly, things are rearranged for effect. strangely, though, this story lends itself more to a surreal, unstable mode. so I guess what this post is about is, what exactly is art’s relation to reality, and what exactly makes something “realistic.”
the reason this question comes up for me is that the two artists—David Lynch and Thomas Pynchon—that I most admire and who I spend the most time thinking about do not tell stories that are “realistic.” and a lot of the time I spend thinking about their stories involves me wondering how exactly I can tap into the kind of dream logic they operate on. this line of thinking feeds on a kind of schoolmarmish, backwards undergraduate way of thinking about art, which conceives of artists as puzzle makers, cryptographers with secret correspondence keys for what their images, symbols, motifs “translate” into in “normal” terms. which is to say, it’s a conception of art as a purely intellectual exercise. Lynch himself says that the way he works is by intuition and revision, developing ideas, reworking, taking things out, putting new things back in, so that the symbols in his work are living, dynamic glyphs, not pure allegories.
there are two tangential concerns in this post, I think: one, that I need to allow myself to work at whatever I find engaging to work at, free of any preconceived notion of what’s “supposed to” be made. this might mean dropping the demand that I make something “weird” or “surreal” or “dreamy” in favor of making something at all, even if it’s closer to “realism” than I sometimes think I should be. and two, that to work in a dream mode, I have to be comfortable with not understanding exactly what the thing I make means, or at least not having a readymade account, were someone to ask for one. (worth noting that neither Lynch nor Pynchon [Lynchon, lol] ever deign to give an account of their work, despite there clearly being something the work means to them, personally)
and I guess, a third thing: that reality is stranger than anyone who demands realism from their art would ever admit. writing always requires contact with “real life”—even in the most effective but deranged stories, something resonates with our understanding of the world—but “real life” sometimes is surreal, or like a film noir, or a ghost story.
this all speaks to what I always want from art: making art ought to feel like getting away with something I shouldn’t be allowed to do. this is how I take Adorno’s declaration that “every work of art is an uncommitted crime.” art is an act of transgression, borne out of sublimated anger at a perceived lack of freedom (at least, it is for me).
which isn’t to say that the content of art has to be transgressive. but I have long been drawn to art that is transgressive. lately I’ve been watching more movies, but, not wanting to be someone who just watches what’s offered by a single corporation, I’ve been seeking out movies that aren’t offered by the good people at Criterion. if you’re someone who loves movies but doesn’t love mainstream movies, if you venture away from the hallowed halls of what Criterion collects, you’re bound to stumble upon a subset of movies that are broadly seen as “trashy,” “bad taste,” “lurid,” etc. I haven’t myself yet watched many of these genre movies, but as I’ve oriented myself in this section of the virtual video shop, there’s a thrill in realizing I can tell any kind of story I want. for whatever reason, it’s been immensely helpful to me to start thinking about the stories I want to tell as genre movies: crime thriller! erotic horror! paranormal noir! some of them I could actually even do treatments of as screenplays, but even if I don’t plan to make movie (I do), thinking of a story as a movie, to my broken 21st century brain, is way more exciting than thinking of stories in the Gordon Lish/Iowa Workshop way of words after words, plot’s not important, blah blah blah. using genre conventions is a way of swinging a crowbar against the confines of the Reality Control System.
even this post, I’m not sure I’m getting across what I mean, and I’m kinda just letting the ideas spill out without really knowing where it’s going, trusting it means something to me and sure I’ll draw connections as they come to mind but fuck you.
Leave a Reply