Gilbert Sorrentino:
"A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an 'idea' already formed. It is the person or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form."
Say what? What is this man talking about? Talking first and thinking afterward?
Funny, I always thought writing was the expression of an idea. (I gather ideas are rare commodities in the present literary sphere.)
Note in the quote that Sorrentino says "NO artist writes" to "objectify an 'idea.'" (He questions that there are ideas.) Sorrentino says that a writer knows "only" in terms of his writing. Really? This is believing the writer exists in ignorance like a drooling baby in its crib, gazing mindlessly at vague pink and blue baby shapes, then out of nowhere finds knowledge-- though not ideas. A solipsistic outlook!
The Sorrentino quote is a good explanation though for why contemporary American literature sucks.
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4 comments:
Don't be stupid.
What Sorrentino is saying is so obvious that it is absurd to question it. He's saying that we discover the truth of things as we write about them. He's simply expressing the power of writing.
I don't get why that offends you.
Writing is a way of working out our ideas --- it's absurd to think that we have completely worked out, and thought through, our subject before we write about it. As we write, we discover.
Are you really as dense as your glib comment made you sound?
A writer need not "exist in ignorance" for Sorrentino's proposition to be true. A writer begins writing about a subject with a vague idea, an intuition, perhaps a set of ideas. But they are not clear -- he/she doesn't know where the vague intuitions will lead. You work these things out as you write.
Um, actually, jackass, Karl is quoting the Sorrentino quote in the same spirit as the infamous Rumsfeld quote about "known unknowns".
No offense against Sorrentino, but the quote Karl highlights is quite silly. Yes, Karl overanalyzes it, but the original still merits mockery.
Sorry, but Sorrentino's statement is flat-out wrong, well-phrased or not. Does anyone believe that Tolstoy didn't already hold his ideas about family, history, Russia, etc., before he began writing "War and Peace"? Isn't his novel an expression of ideas? Likewise for Dostoevsky's ideas in "Brothers"?
What is Sorrentino and his defenders talking about?
Yes, when one begins writing one stumbles upon nuances and amplifications to the thread of thought one is already following. What Sorrentino talks about is more on the order of automatic writing, a psychic stage routine where the psychic begins writing on a blank sheet of paper with a blank mind while in a trance. As we know, most psychics are con artists.
(I addressed this quote because a leading demi-puppet lit-blogger made it the crux of his argument against the ULA. It's nonsense.)
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