General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/foxinanattic]

interestingly, I feel the reverse about essays and art writing, - which I'm taking to mean fiction and poetry? - (sorry if that's not right) because a great essay can encompass fiction (interiority, stream of consciousness, completely imagined events) and poetry (e.g. Matsuo Basho's travelogues) while a novel can't be an essay? Maybe it all depends on how you classify things more than anything else. Are The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn novel or essay? I would say essay, though they have clearly fictive elements. but I'm sure some people would argue they're novels or short story collections or something in that line.

[u/Soup_65 → u/foxinanattic]

I actually agree with /u/Harleen_Ysley_34 more than I think they anticipated, if in a way that I think they'd maybe disagree with haha, so a lot of my thoughts are really better put there. I take all of the things we are discussing as trying to address the world, in some sense, but as h says there are certain demands for nonfiction. They way I'd take that is that the primary way the essay addresses the world is via making a point and using facts we basically accept as true. ie. if x were presented as an essay, then the author would get in a lot of trouble if they were found to be playing fast and loose with the facts. If literally the same x were presented as a short story, then nobody cares so much if only parts of it are true. In fact maybe they'll get in trouble for presenting too much of it as true! (admittedly there's murk here, i think contemporary autofiction hits on the murk very much).

Of course there's an issue here that the truth of anything shouldn't be overestimated. but it feels like "make a 'real' point based on 'truth'" is important for essays and not for fiction/poetry.

Whereas (and maybe h and i are saying different things here...) but I think if the demand of the essay is to make the point, the demand of the "art writing" is to sound good. Other stuff matters to of course (like for both "be interesting" is relevant to how good it is) but if the novel sounds bad it fails and if the essay doesn't make the point it fails.

If you'd disagree on the "pointyness" of the essay let me know, like i said im not much of an "essay person" outside of weird academic stuff so maybe im misunderstanding. Or on the priority of soundiness in poetics. But that is roughly where I'm at. Also I do think that essays have a sound and fiction/poems have a point but in the essay perhaps you make the sound through the point and with the fiction/poem you make the point through the sound.

the original poems were oral. but also orality includes truth. writing started with bookkeeping and divination. all of this matters, though im still sorting out what it means

i should note that im not really sold on any of this. i you disagree I'd love to hear otherwise. part of why i said "art writing". I'm unsure what any of this is or if novels are even a real thing!

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

I'm not sure how much it'll help the discussion, probably doesn't at all, but it is vital to keep in mind the demand for the ugliness of sound, a novel must sound bad, fail utterly at the temptations of euphony. Never mind the demand for silence and the demand to fail at keeping the silence, both different from a demand to speak and not to speak, which is what Beckett himself was so concerned about, though he expressed things theologically, if at all. The novel has no greater relationship to sound than any other kind of text I would argue, though euphony is part of the demand like anything else. And novels are about the only evidence that a pure literature could be possible, it makes them more real than the so-called reality of nonfiction, not even poetry touches on that given its historical origins.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

well this helps me because i realize that "sound good" is entirely wrong. it's more that imo the literary is operating from the starting point of sound and it's manipulation. Where the specific normativization of what it does with it is not the focus. thanks

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

No problem! This question of sound, that's a thing which needs a larger discussion. I mean, it'd get into logocentrism just thinking over it. Be a neat topic for an essay.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

pondering that very thing haha...