Explico algunas cosas

I recently received an e-mail from friend of mine, herself a writer living here but who is afraid to self-publish her own work. The e-mail was more of an interrogation than a critique of Fictions, as she took the time out to explain. In this post, I want to address a couple of the very valid questions she poses because I believe that this sort of interrogation is not crucial only to a reader's understanding of a writer but also the writer's understanding of himself or herself:

Neena
"Every story has a beginning, middle and an end…these are the rules of storytelling. Obviously, this is not happening in Fictions. Why? The rules are being broken here…why? What is writing? Why do we write? What is this writer trying to say by toying with the rules? What does this mean to the reader who doesn’t give a hoot about ‘writerly’ preoccupations?"

Ironically enough, the best reference point to address the issue of plot is a writer whose work I cannot stand and which I will be parodying in one of the stories in Fictions, Wilson Harris. I can hold up Harris novels, with their plot structure of "a beginning, a muddle and an end", at one extreme as a break from the traditional requirement of narrative to have an ascending plot which culminates in a climax (perhaps followed by a denouement) which is what I believe Neena is trying to identify and fails to in my work.

For me, trying to ascertain plot in the modern short story is like trying to ascertain plot in the modern poem. While I can certainly write stories which adhere, at least on the surface, to the traditional formula for short fiction, I believe that these are more prescriptive than statutory. While I don't subscribe to the bullshit perspective that there is something inherently valuable in the sort of unreadable gibberish that is typical of a Harris novel, I am anything but a traditionalist when it comes to story structure.

Why? Because if you read enough books, plots begin to become extremely predictable, even the ones whose predictability comes out of their unpredictability - like, pour exemple, you just know that there is going to be a third twin serial killer who was castrating the hermaphrodite belly dancers in novel 112 of the James Patterson's 200 Marketable Plots Series. Every time I see a book that has the some review proclaiming the storyline to be a cliffhanger, I want to hang the reviewer and the author from a cliff. And then drop them.

Let me give an artistic parallel to why I write the way I do. Pablo Picasso was schooled in traditional drawing and painting techniques and excelled at them but after a while they were not enough. One of my favourite Picasso pieces is Guernica pictured above which is his representation of the bombing of a Spanish town by Nazis during the Spanish Civil War - no traditional/realist representation of the bombing could capture the terror and the tragedy as well as Picasso's abstract mural did.

Similarly, there are certain things that I want to capture in some of my work which a traditional plot structure is inadequate to contain. In some stories for example, and this is the sort of thing which I started, if a bit subtly in Ariadne & Other Stories is the disintegration of narrative as both method and message. The main character in "Ariadne" for example is attempting to write a story which he fails to do because the place and the woman did not truly exist for him at the time because of his status as outsider, interloper. The first half of the story is the unfinished narrative ("I tried my hand at fiction, you know, started a story called 'The Beach'..."), while the archetypal myth that is the skeleton of the story, that of Theseus and Ariadne, is in itself an abandoned narrative.

The main character in Ariadne makes an allusion to the myth and the unfinished narrative of the affair with when he says "That afternoon, our last, that kiss, our Naxos; I don't know how I shall conclude it. Maybe I can invent some European, or American, or Canadian, some tourist who shall descend, god-like in all his economic splendour, and carry you off, actuate that voyage half-traveled by the heart."

We live in the era of not only literary works which subvert the traditional concept of narrative, like David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but we see this subversion in other media as well, from as innocuous an example as Beyonce's "Me, Myself and I" video which is shown in reverse, to the much more highly accomplished and enhanced execution of the idea in the brilliant if controversial film Irreversible to other movies like Memento and Vantage Point which all shake up the basic elements of the traditional narrative or plot.

In Fictions, my most 'audacious' subversion of narrative is in the story "Apres Le Deluge" - every other story falls a more or less linear developmental path - linear and cumulative. "The Last Affair" has some temporal leaps and digressions but all in all it's pretty sound narrative, plot and all, particularly post-"Spring in Fialta" as it is.

In summary, for me writing short fiction is an art. I am not going to do anything so ridiculous, in parallel, as splashing paint on a canvas and saying "Et voila! C'est l'arte." But after about a century and a half of existence (and we are of course not including its antecedents the myth and the fable), the art of the short story is evolving and any writer worth his/her salt is going to be at the vanguard of that process.

Finally, the question of writerly preoccupations. All the above is and is not classifiable as such. It is writerly preoccupation but this does not mean it excludes the reader. In fact, my preoccupation with the above concerns originated in my identity as a reader...it is, for me, only coincidental that as a writer I have the means to try to do something about it.

P.S. In case, judging from the above, this blog may come across to some as elitist or intellectual, I would just like to keep true to my infamous reputation and say anyone he thinks that can kiss my ass like the skunthole that he is.