Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Friday, December 05, 2003 Pick a Peck of pickled peppers Kevin Holtsberry has an interesting blog on the novelist and critic, Dale Peck. I read all the links, particularly The New Republic article of his. I was struck by one of the concluding sentences: "Semiotically, syntactically, at the level of the sign and the level of the sentence, from which all narrative proceeds, language waters the seeds of its own failure." As a writer of fiction, I am interested in what intelligent people think about it. Shop talk about it piques my curiosity, too. The article is basically a diatribe against modern fiction and its precursors in the 20th century like Joyce's Ulysses. That's fine, but I have to wonder, when I consider any artist who is faithless, why they ever expect that the sand won't cease to shift under them no matter what they do? Peck adds finally: But only after a work of literature has accepted its own failure--has, as it were, elegized its stillborn self--can it begin the complex series of contextual manipulations by which meaning is created and we locate ourselves as surely as the ancient navigators fixed their positions between stars...Contemporary novels have either counterfeited reality or forfeited it. In their stead we need a new materialism. A new materialism? Where shall he go and find such a thing? He can't. There are only so many materialistic ways of looking at a rock or an ant. His complaint is that of Ecclessiates - vanity of vanities, all is vanity. He has run out of perspectives. Only he is not about to despair, but to keep griping. Let's look at Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son. This is pure fiction. Exactly where does the language of this fiction "water the seeds of its own failure."? Where does the reader or listener slap his forehead and say - "I get it, now! It's all just another meaningless metaphor about life!" Here we have a fiction that speaks to a primary difficulty of human being in a transformative way. But Peck writes: "Real fiction does not "discover" truth, let alone present it to readers: real fiction invents and dispenses with truth as it sees fit. That's why it's called fiction. " But real fiction can uncover truth. To not know this is to live with a basic disgust of beauty. What does literature come down to anyway? People like to hear stories. They must have meaning in order to be enjoyed. Where do we find the meaning? In the words, the signs and symbols, or the plot? Obviously, in all those elements. I keep forgetting what it's like to be faithless, though, and having to keep trying to extract meaning from a meaningless life. Words are the most meaningful things we have, in actuality. We can't think without them. Without thinking, there is no meaning. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:55 AM | |
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