The latest discussion of my reading group, on Toni Morrison's Beloved, is here.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this discussion is the difficulty the members had with the complex structure of the novel, a structure without which it seems to me Toni Morrison could not have conveyed her material with emotional and psychological truth - which raises some interesting questions about the tension between the cultural and political need for innovation/complexity and its problems.
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I've read "Jazz" but not "Devotion", so I've been holding back. Now I think I'll try to get the ball rolling.
I'd guess that "Beloved" is trying to create an illusion of the Real World. This already makes it more a riddle than an enigma - maybe even a little reactionary. It depends who you believe
* "Realism is essentially the democratic art", Gustave Courbet, 1861.
* "reality, the oppressor's tongue", Adrienne Rich
It's the way she's expressed things (rather than what she's expressed) that might be a challenge. In the States some writers decided that Language wasn't neutral. Reagan, Feminism, Black Power, Multi-nationals, Colonialism etc, all get tangled up in this issue. If you're Algerian and write in French you're making a statement. If you're writing in England and write "color" you've succumbed to the USA's global ambitions. But even the style of writing matters.
It's clearest in poetry. In the USA especially, Forms came to be considered WASPish, right-wing, male. Clarity became the oppressor's tongue. According to Susan Vanderborg, Olson's "narrators associate a flat, statistical style of documentation that forecloses interpretation with a bureaucratic pendant for dehumanizing persons as enemies or casualties". The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets went further, breaking sentences into disjointed phrases and breaking phrases into words in order to cleanse language of corruption and banality. Lyn Hejinian tells us that language poetry "invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierachies". N. NourbeSe Philip "saw the lyric voice as one of the tools used to further the ends of colonialism".
I sympathise with some of these views, but some of the later ones seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater (and throwing the bath out too).
Is difficulty a good thing? Is Minimalism complex? Depends on who you believe
* "And in truth ambiguity may often add strength. An idea suggested is more weighty: simplicity of statement excites contempt", Demetrius
* "The technique of art is ... to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged", Shklovsky
* "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system", Yury Lotman
But people who write "difficult" stuff sometimes have a re-think. Here's something I read this week by Charles Bernstein, one of the original Language Poets.
"[I]t's very hard for us, for me, to get over the desire for this elegant, seamless, logical discourse when writing criticism, because for one thing it has real power. People all of a sudden start to listen to what you say"
Surprise, surprise. Or surprize, surprize.
Thanks so much for this, Tim!(It's certainly a complex matter!)
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