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12:04 pm: "Burning Down the House" ir krutākā pēdējā laikā lasītā literatūrteorijas/filozofijas grāmata. Esejas galvenokārt par apkārtējās vides ietekmi uz literatūru.


"We have been living in a political culture of disavowals. Disavowals follow from crimes for which no one is capable of claiming responsibility. Mistakes and crimes tend to create narratives, however, and they have done so from the time of the Greek tragedies. How can the contemporary disavowal movement not affect those of us who tell stories? We begin to move away from fiction of protagonists and antagonists into antoher mode, another model. It is hard to describe this model but I think it might be called the fiction of finger-pointing, the fiction of the quest for blame. It often culminates with a scene in a court of law.

"In such fiction, people and events are often accused of turning the protagonist into the kind of person the protagonist is, usually an unhappy person. That's the whole story. When blame has been assigned, the story is over. In writing workshops, this kind of story is often the rule rather than the exception. Probably this model of story telling has arisen beause sizable population groups in our time feel confused and powerless, as they often do in mass societies when the mechanisms of power are carefully masked. For people with irregular employment and mounting debts and faithless partners and abusive parents, the most interesting feature of life is its unhappiness, its dull ocnstant weight. But in a commodity culture, people are supposed to be happy. It's the one myth of advertising. You start to feel cheated if you're not happy. In such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don't now what their lives are telling them, and they don't feel as if they are in charge of their own existence. No action they have ever taken is half as interesting to them as the consistency of their unhappiness."



"I can imagine someone - probably an American - objecting to all this by saying that the true beauty of a story often has to do with freedom, with choice, and with feeling of a unique action, a one-time-only occurence happening in front of our eyes. Americans love singularity. Ah, we say, the unexpected. How beautiful the unexpected is. (No: The unexpected is seldom beautiful.) The more we talk about patterning, the more we reduce spontaneity, and the more we increase the impression of heavy-handedness, a kind of artistic overcontrol. All right, yes, perhaps. But I'm not just talking about narrative technique here anymore. I'm talking about the way some writers may view the world. Technique must follow a vision, a view of experience. No technique can ever take precedence over vision. It must be its servant. it is not the unexpected that is beautiful, but the inevitability of certain literary choices that surprise us with their sudden correctness."