But even exaggeration can serve the truth.
diary /
Though of course not everything mainstream is ‘bad,’ or to be avoided. I shouldn’t exaggerate.
diary /
Although, to assume that such populations would want anything to do with industries and systems as corrupt and dysfunctional as the ones upon which Western civilization now hobbles is, I think, to underestimate the mettle of peoples who are accustomed to observing, from the outside, the circus of vapidity that is mainstream commerce and its rackets.
diary /
And yet maybe that is beside the point, for it is true that there are populations and demographics whose voices ought to be prioritized, in certain industries, if for no other reason than they have been excluded, historically, and have not had the chance to make visible their talents, and to try to make their livelihoods by those talents. In this context a ‘necessary’ work, if described as such, is worthy of that descriptor.
diary /
In other words, a work that is ‘necessary’ because its social critique is particularly relevant, or urgent, can be said to be art when that critique cannot be separated from a sublimity that reaches into every aspect of the work. (Perhaps all great art is ‘necessary’ in some sense). But when a work has no sublimity, and yet retains by its message a ‘necessity’ that belongs to, say, the strictly social order, it does not obtain to the level of art. Which, fine, who needs it to be art? But I would maintain that we ought not to mistake one thing for another; we ought to distinguish between such things, otherwise we confuse and deceive ourselves.
diary /
Though I should also say that while the problems that result from making an imperative of such a condition are many, the condition itself is not a problem, not while it remains merely a condition that is free to either be present or not present in a given work.
diary /
Persistence is, of course, useful to an artist, and character, as a requirement, needs no defense, until the seeking out of it (or the excessive proving or disproving of it) becomes a parody of its own intentions. But having something ‘necessary’ to say is about as good an indicator of an artist’s worth as the quality of a dress is an indicator of the beauty of the person who will wear it.
diary /
One of the strangest pretenses our culture seems to want to sustain is the one that would disregard the reality of what I have just said, at least as it relates to the arts, so as to perpetuate the idea that everyone is equally disposed to achievement, by way of natural talents, or by way of the fact that, to its mind, talent is not so important (not, anyway, the measure by which art should be judged). And that achievement in the arts (when tied to recognition and exposure) requires only persistence, character, and having something ‘necessary’ to say.
diary /
Which would seem like stating the obvious, only I’m not certain that is the case.
diary /
Meaning, not everyone is equipped to be an artist, in the most meaningful sense of that term, though everyone is capable of making ‘art,’ or of involving themself in that activity. Just as everyone is capable, more or less, of swinging a tennis racket, and having fun doing so, though not everyone is capable of competing at the highest levels of that sport.
diary /
Which is not, I don’t think, a sign of artistic arrogance, but only of the confidence that is natural to any creature whose attributes allow it to thrive in the habitat where it has found itself. Which is to say, conversely, that not every creature will be in possession of those attributes, and will not be equally adapted to that habitat, and will not thrive in the same way, if it finds itself there, or if it places itself there, for it will have evolved for some other purpose, and some other environment.
diary /
The paradox being, perhaps, that the more certain a writer’s talent, the less fixed that writer’s grasp will be on the direction taken by a fiction they would imagine, because they can trust in their talent to articulate a way forward no matter where, or how, or with what characters they choose for that fiction to commence.
diary /
In other words, without an orchestration of language, the imagination of a writer remains captive to that which the writer already knows, or would like to anticipate, or feels determined to reveal. And so the narrative never achieves a life of its own, because the writer, not understanding that this life depends on a virtuosity of form (whereby the invention of a story can occur), remains too in control of the fiction, too much at the helm, too much a captain and not a guide.
diary /
Though it is true that most writers need to produce such material in order to learn, and to progress in their talent. Which is why a writer’s early work is often described as juvenilia.
diary /
Otherwise what you find, in a work devoid of style, is only an exercise of the imagination, which can be amusing or therapeutic for the writer, but which offers nothing to the reader except, perhaps, the spectacle of that writer’s personal tragedies or preoccupations, which, in retrospect, the writer will often regret having revealed.
diary /
Because here is another thing about plot, and the themes to be found therein: they are going to manifest anyway (as a result of the narrative impulse that is native to human expression), whether the writer has developed a style or not; the only difference being that, in the work of the writer who has developed a style, that plot and those themes will have a naturalness and unpredictability that occur when the imagination has been brought under the discipline of one’s talent.
diary /
Which isn’t to say that the selection and sequencing of events in fiction aren’t important, or that their thematic implications are not consequential, but that for a writer to attend to them, or to worry about them overly, before that writer has begun to recognize that language is a medium (like clay for a sculptor, or paint for a painter), the manipulation of which must be consciously and uniquely achieved, is to reduce the art of fiction to its conventions, and to close off the valves of its potential.
diary /
Meaning, the fabric of a novel must be all of one piece, the genealogy must be there in the first sentence as in the last. Which is why revision, when it is taught to students who are trying to write literature, ought not to be approached as a method by which the selection and sequencing of the events of a fiction are prioritized, or are even considered very far, but rather as the development of a style that is honest, original, and profound.
diary /
But the thing about a plot, for the writer who is writing it, is that it rarely turns out the way the writer imagines it will turn out, and can even be said to not ‘turn out’ at all, but instead reaches an end that is already there, in gestation, in the plot’s first utterance, like the final measure of a ball of yarn whose substance does not change but only runs its course, or is used up in its unraveling.
diary /
I may as well finish telling you about the plot of that novel I’d imagined writing the beginning of, wherein the painter who didn’t know how to finish the painting she’d started had visited the studio of her friend (who was also a painter) and had ended up sitting on the floor of that studio and talking with that friend and with a third woman (the neighbor who the two of them had met outside on the sidewalk, when they’d been returning from the store to which they’d wandered, after a while, to purchase some alcohol, so that they’d invited her to join them, which she’d done after leaving her dog in her apartment).