Category Archives: Books


Postmodern Literature: what is it?

Taking the occasion of a forum discussion to clarify what Postmodernism actually is and how it works. Described in a way that is both powerful (it points to the real heart of the meaning) and easy to use (you can immediately say on your own if some work falls in the category).

Listen to me, but also consider I didn’t specifically study this at school nor I’m giving you a definition that is “orthodox”. I claim for something more: this is a so powerful definition that intrinsically defines everything falling under the Postmodern umbrella with no exclusions, and whether an author is aware or not of writing something Postmodern. Some stuff is legitimately Postmodern even if not normally identified as such, especially because it comes from something that is the center of a Post-modern world, so you are under its influence regardless of your awareness of it. It’s this world and age to be “Postmodern”.

So when Erikson says that Malazan is Postmodern, making it even harder to pinpoint, or when bland terms are tossed around like “meta-narratives”, “deconstruction”, “skepticism”, or “unreliable narrator”, “fourth wall”, and so on, then you’d know that they are all flavors of the same thing. And knowing the thing itself makes you understand why it can have so many different flavors, and what is that unifies them all.

—

Reflexivity and self-awareness.

Postmodern Literature is basically writing about writing. Everything “meta” (Gödel) or metalinguistic belongs here. The writer being a character in the book is basically a signature trope, but the point is: worlds within worlds. Escher’s Drawing Hands are postmodern.

In general: the frame and what lies beyond. The frame of a painting, the frame of a book, being the book itself, the pages, the ink. In general all these, in classical stories, are invisible. But in postmodernism they are subject. What’s outside the picture is what the picture is about. The frame itself. So again: reflexivity and infinite loops.

Myse en abyme.

That’s all you need to understand. Everything more commonly recognized as postmodern is a subset of the core I’ve pointed to. For example “questionable narrators” are part of this because a narrator is himself a framing device of a story. Being the frame itself the focus, so the narrator, you go and “question” it as an actual character. If classical stories are one-way, toward the story and immersion, with Postmodernism the viewpoint becomes reflexive, and it can reflect the reader himself, or the writer, or the medium.

Same for “fragmentation” and “paradox”. They are devices. They are meta-structure, so metalinguistic. Reflexivity about language and structure.

And all of this surfaces merely because the original framing device, and reflexivity, is the brain. Consciousness.

Postmodernism is about the unreliable narrator that is consciousness.

Epic in the making

This kind of stuff goes automatically in my immediate (when/if is out) to-buy list:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/10/alan-moore-finishes-million-word-novel-watchmen-v-for-vendetta

Comics legend Alan Moore has finished the first draft of his second novel, Jerusalem – and it runs to more than 1m words.

has been working on Jerusalem since 2008.

It focuses on a small area – half a square mile across – of the town where he grew up, Northampton, and explores its history through stories from his family’s past, Moore’s take on historical events, and of course fantasy. “Any editor worth their salt would tell me to cut two-thirds of this book but that’s not going to happen.

as long as I get my huge, cripplingly heavy book to put on my shelf and gloat over, I’ll be happy.

a section will feature his brother’s adventures in the fourth dimension, while the “middle bit” is “a savage, hallucinating Enid Blyton”.

there is also a “Lucia Joyce chapter, which is completely incomprehensible … all written in a completely invented sub-Joycean text”, a chapter in the form of a Samuel Beckett play, because the author once visited the town to play cricket, “a noir crime narrative based upon the Northampton pastor James Hervey, whom I believe was the father of the entire Gothic movement”, and “a combination of the ghost story and the drug narrative”.

“I am currently on the last official chapter,” he told the Guardian late last year, “which I am doing somewhat in the style of Dos Passos.

There is no word yet on an official release date for the book, and Comics Beat reports that it has not yet got a publisher

Looping Worlds

Just a link to an article, whose theme is already a delicious example of Looping Worlds and wheels within wheels: Reading Wallace Reading.

“Do you have like a daily writing routine?”

A basic postmodern pattern

While immensely lagging with my reading queue, I was looking at my copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, menacing to start reading it. Not yet, but there’s this quote from Weisenburger’s companion book:

In my view, the most significant revelation of the annotations is that Gravity’s Rainbow unfolds according to a circular design. Across the novel’s four parts, historical events intersect the Christian liturgical calendar, suggesting possibilities for return and renewal, but possibilities that Pynchon’s satire hopelessly equivocates on. This means that readers might have a novel as elegantly modeled as Joyce’s Ulysses and have their deconstructionism too. Indeed, one might well read Gravity’s Rainbow as a satire on the very desire for grand plots or metanarratives, a desire the narrative unmasks as the terrible dynamic of a culture huddling on the brink of nuclear winter.

If it’s accepted that GR is a book squarely within the postmodern canon, to the point of representing it fully, then from my point of view what’s written there contains the most manifest aspect of postmodernism.

Try to abstract the pattern there. This quote says the book is modeled carefully, as a meta-structure or a kind of organization that exists on a different level. At the same time, these two levels wrap around (return and renewal). So, abstracting, we have a dichotomy of structure that at the same time returns on itself. What have I just described? Self-reference.

The pattern described can be narrowed down to a line of that quote: “have a novel as elegantly modeled as Joyce’s Ulysses and have their deconstructionism too”. Which is made of a blatant abstraction: “have a cake and eat it too”. Again, this is Gödel and self-reference. The structure has its built-in paradox of the dichotomy of the mind.

On top of that basic pattern there’s also the postmodern “flavor”: satire and humor. Mocking the very premises, the supports you’re standing on. Which becomes, in a circular way, self-reference on itself: what makes the novel is what is mocked, yet is what is relied on, yet is what is mocked (and so on, see the next quote). This self-reference is both object and subject (being self-reference), it’s both validated and then demolished. Serious-and-not. Self-doubt of the self-feeding kind, degenerating into the neurotic (so “of the mind”, which is the point, since it’s literature, which is of the mind, which is the point).

While Pynchon surfs the wave of postmodernism, on the very razor edge, without bleeding. David Foster Wallace instead cut himself.

Writing is a dangerous sport.

Infinite Jest, despite the jest, loves, carefully builds and worships its meta-strcuture. It is god-like as it gets in literature. Yet there’s the deep suffering in the background that is as authentic as it gets. It takes itself VERY seriously.

There’s this super short story by DFW, with its droning, neurotic, looping last line:

A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life A short story by David Foster Wallace

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Nothing is real, especially what I’m telling you.

Hidden under

I randomly bumped on this old Erikson interview. A couple of quotes:

The dialogue that I have written that I remain pleased about is generally the tersest kind. The massive understatement. The line with a hundred volumes hiding under it, pages ready to explode but all, somehow, held back, contained. Exchanges where all parties skirt around what’s really going on. Evasions and the like.

Well, that’s what I like reading indeed :)

1: Finish what you start.

2: When a scene drags, when it gets brutally hard to get out the next line, the next word; when blood starts beading on your forehead, don’t switch scenes, don’t shift characters, don’t do any of the running-away things you might be inclined to. Push through. Everything up to that point was the lead-up to this moment, and this moment is when you learn – you learn how to write, what it is to be a writer, and all the reasons you possess for being one. That tight, claustrophobic place, is your call to courage. Don’t evade, don’t back away, don’t shift laterally. Keep going, until it hurts.

3: Finish what you start.

Malazan covers – how they should be

I was looking at Subterranean Press limited editions of the Malazan books and being quite disappointed at the art there. But then I always am with that sort of stuff.

For fun I decided to describe what I’d instead put on the covers. I’m not an artist, but this is the sort of stuff I see in my mind and that I think would look great. Obviously just the first five books, because I’ve still to read the rest.

1- Gardens of the Moon. Well, Pale. Camera at the ground level, bottom up. You see at a distance Pale’s high walls, enough to give the walls some details and impressive scale. The cover should have a sense of verticalness to it. So the eye is drawn right at Pale’s walls, imposing, going upward. But then the impressive vista should escalate in scope as hovering above Pale you have Moon’s Spawn, maybe very slightly askew. So no characters on the cover, just a wide view of the scene, to focus on scale and scope. It should give a sense of disproportion, as if you cannot give a proper size to the elements in respect to each other. Sense of wonder.

2- Deadhouse Gates. Chain of Dogs. I’d go with top down, a look at a valley far below from an high point, the Chain of Dogs going through it. Not close enough to really detail people, just again giving a sense of scale at the long trail going through the dry land. Capemoths and stuff. Warm colors along with a sense of bleakness in the environment. Could even play with dust forming up a skull-like shape, in the background, but very subtle.

3- Memories of Ice. Just Kallor on his throne of bones, right in the center of the cover, arms open wide, hands too, but relaxed, as in welcoming. The layout should have a sort of curve to it. So that Kallor is almost facing the center of the cover, while the bottom part of the cover is through a top down angle. In this part, the three gods. K’rul in the center (bony, accusing finger pointed at Kallor), Draconus on left (I can’t remember if he has the sword already, if he does, let it drag behind, like a sack barely held by one hand), Nightchill on the right. All facing away, toward Kallor, from this slightly top down perspective to give the image some depth. The cover should be black & white (I’d love a strict ink style, no shading), with some slight/faint bluish highlights.

4- House of Chains. Oh, think of Hamlet holding the skull in his hand. Only that Hamlet is Karsa, and the skull is a poor Malazan soldier (looking like a child compared to Karsa’s bulk). The cover should be almost like a silhouette in black. On the right you see Karsa’s impressive sword thrust on the ground. No detail, just a black shape, slightly tilted and about as high as Karsa. It should dominate the view even if aside. Karsa should be with a knee down on the ground, a massive hand completely wrapping up the Malazan soldier’s head, helm still on (and the whole body still attacked, not just a head). The scale of the hand should be massive, dominating the comparably small head, as if about to completely crush it in his hand. The guy is dead, but Karsa is lifting him, so he’s as if upward, hanging from Karsa’s hold, just the feet and lower part of the legs dragging slightly aside on the ground. The height of the guy should be almost level with Karsa, who’s kneeling down though, so bringing the height ALMOST on the same level. Exception to the silhouette style is: the scene has some depth to it, Karsa slightly on the back, the soldier slightly on the front. One trick is: Karsa isn’t looking at the skull, but right through the cover, right at the camera. The scene should also have a sort of dichotomy that fits well as a theme. In the back you see a forest at dawn, mountains in the background, or some T’lan construction (as in the book). But a peaceful, warm colored scene. Then there’s a sharp cut, with Karsa and the soldier almost like a dark silhouette, so much darker, but enough to give them a lot of detail. Just lack of color. So you have these two different levels, the warm background, and the very dark foreground. With Karsa frowning at the camera.

5- Midnight Tides. That scene at the sea, where the massive thing comes out out the water. Something inspired to the third picture you see here. Scene again based on wide scale, slightly tilted for dynamism. Camera from the land looking out at the sea. Looking like something straight out of the apocalypse.

As it goes

Okay, to hell with boundaries. I make a sport of this blog confusing everything with everything else.

Reading Malazan book 6 I found a quote that is basically the Malazan formulation of the Kabbalah quote:

The gods, old or new, did not belong to her. Nor did she belong to them. They played their ascendancy games as if the outcome mattered, as if they could change the hue of the sun, the voice of the wind, as if they could make forests grow in deserts and mothers love their children enough to keep them. The rules of mortal flesh were all that mattered, the need to breathe, to eat, drink, to find warmth in the cold of night. And, beyond these struggles, when the last breath had been taken inside, well, she would be in no condition to care about anything, about what happened next, who died, who was born, the cries of starving children and the vicious tyrants who starved them – these were, she understood, the simple legacies of indifference, the consequences of the expedient, and this would go on in the mortal realm until the last spark winked out, gods or no gods.

Here’s again the quote from Kabbalah:

(about the question “What is the meaning of my life?”)

“It is indeed true that historians have grown weary contemplating it, and particularly in our generation. No one ever wishes to consider it. Yet the question stands as bitterly and vehemently as ever. Sometimes it meets us uninvited, pecks at our minds and humiliates us to the ground before we find the famous ploy of flowing mindlessly in the currents of life, as always.”

Then I happened on this page (with some interesting nice pictures), and I found this quote that metaphorically matches the previous posts on Free Will and being bound to a point of view:

The descent of the divine emanations concretized in cosmic creation is occurring at this moment, and the fact that the world is such or such a thing, for the modern mentality, or that in accord with our viewpoint we perceive this or that, is completely indifferent to the process of the universal creation, which is ongoing, even visualized from the horizontal viewpoint, and simultaneous, from the vertical projection.

The interesting part is the formulation of the system as “simultaneous, from the vertical projection”. Meaning deterministic. There’s no time scaling. Yet experience from within, our viewpoint, is bound to time and seen as becoming.

So this aspects of Kabbalah seems to retain (and explain away) the problem of compatibilism.

Related, but only if you are a particular type of crazy like I am, here’s a page of David Foster Wallace’s personal copy of Joyce’s Ulysses. Showing how a text with bi-dimensional perspective is given three-dimensionality because of 2nd level (recursive) observations: