Wondering

In writing fiction, should the author present concepts or problems in a way that is as overtly thought-out as in theoretical essays? That is to say something a little different than what I wrote: while a book like Ziziek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce unwinds the implications of the real-life narratives in politics, economics, and television, should a work of fictive narration strive to structure its own future debates? I tend to answer these questions too simply (right now I am afraid that I would say something like “well even if one tried to do that, inevitably there are always other kinds of processes available in any text…”

But still, I wonder if writing fiction demands less of  a stance. Now that I’m thinking of it, this question might be stupid, because it doesn’t really matter what the intention of an author is. In other words, literature as fiction seems to be  symptomatic and maybe requires a positive, theoretical (no, no a realistic!) tether (from either within the book or via an outside writer) to move it into meaning. Yes? No?

What to write, what to write

The thing is, I do love to read. If we take the real percentages of my time, I spend most of it reading, followed by writing. But for all my posting, for everything I find myself most concerned about, the majority of it has nothing to do with literature. Isn’t that a bit odd for an English major? Maybe it isn’t… I’m thinking that I need to read contemporary literature (not that I don’t love other kinds, of course) but it doesn’t fit all with what I spend most of my time thinking about (if it’s not current). But this might be sort of bullshit, and a lame excuse for not trying hard enough to avoid the most obvious types of reading, problem-raising, and cultural exposure.

The thing is, although I do like reading, I agree with Jameson when he points out that we (and here I am *generously* clustering myself with real thinkers) spend most of our time exposed to the base, crude churnings-out of the cultural apparatus. Instead of calling it whatever it might be called, or purposefully avoiding its presence (its unavoidable presence) even in the most elevated of intellectual lives, maybe that is what should really be confronted. I don’t think it’s enough to just think about the media or literature or “politics” (in its function as culture and entertainment) as anything bracketed off from each other, or from the realm of philosophy. Do I want to read more contemporary novels? Definitely.

I just don’t feel guilty that I’m not, right now. I’d rather read theory, “philosophy” as they call it. And I couldn’t tell you why.

I had a thought but I’m not convinced

I’m reading Badiou and Zizek’s Philosophy in the Present and in Zizek’s section of the book, he describes the disconnect between philosophy in concrete and creative practice. Well I don’t know if that’s really the right way to put it. But basically, here’s what he writes:

Instead, we find [philosophy] in cultural studies, in English, in French and German departments. If you want to read Hegel and Badiou, you must paradoxically choose comparative literature with majors in French and German. If, on the other hand, you do research on the brains of rats and perform experiments on animals, you go to the philosophical faculties. But is is not uncommon that philosophy occupies the place of another subject: when, for example, communism fell apart, philosophy was the first place in which the resistance was formulated. It was more political than ever at this point in time. However, here you might like to object that great German philosophy was nothing but philosophy. Absolutely not! Already with Heine, not just with Marx, we know that philosophy was the German substitute for the revolution. That is the dilemma: you can’t have both. It is false to claim that the French could have had philosophy if only they had been clever enough. Conversely, the non-appearance of the revolution was the condition for German philosophy. My idea is the following: perhaps we have to break with the idea that there is a normal philosophy.

Now that’s a lot to handle. But what I want to talk about is the survival of philosophy in English- leaving aside the idea of a normal philosophy, perhaps philosophy (in the B/Z sense) survives in “creative” writing and more specifically in fiction because it can survive the particular and the universal. Individual characters or narratives that would otherwise be bogged down by the concept of the individual circumstance manage to highlight and diagnose social symptoms of the moment. I don’t think that I can go much further without being much more specific, since there are many different types of literatures (and I don’t think all fiction can be considered literature…). It was just a thought and I will write more on this, I’m sure.