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What I enjoy the most about taking this week off, is the unstructured time. Aside from yesterday's July 4th neighborhood block party, nothing's really been pending all week. Wonderful unstructured time!
On Monday I went with Victoria to a meeting of Left Coast Writers at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Vic was asked to talk about what literary agents do, and what writers should expect from them. She gave them a good dose of today's reality facing writers trying to get their work published.
Of course, she did a great job and was really well received. But one question from the audience proved hard to get around. Someone asked what differentiates a work of commercial fiction from one of literary fiction.
What a question. Vic did her best, but really it boils down to "you know it when you see it."
The question stayed with me for quite some time. It applies to all the arts, especially music and the visual arts.
Then, yesterday, looking for something to read, I scanned one of my better bookshelves and fell upon Milan Kundera's collection of essays, Testaments Betrayed from 1993. I figured I must have read it when it came out, but had no memory of it.
Sitting out on the porch, it was an absolutely beautiful morning here in Oakland. With hours before the July 4th festivities on the block started, I was well into Kundera's essays on literature, music, and Kafka.
And there, in the first chapter on page 17 was the answer to Monday's question. He tries to imagine what the "end of history" might be like:
"..that end I can imagine only too well, for most novels produced today stand outside the history of the novel: novelized confessions, novelized journalism, novelized score-settling, novelized autobiographies, novelized indiscretions, novelized denunciations, novelized political arguments, novelized deaths of husbands, novelized deaths of fathers, novelized deaths of mothers, novelized deflowerings, novelized childbirths -- novels ad infinitum, to the end of time, that say nothing new, have no aesthetic ambition, bring no change to our understanding of man or to novelistic form, are each one like the next, are completely consumable in the morning and completely discardable in the afternoon.
To my mind, great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history. It is only inside history that we can see what is new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what is imitiation; in other words, only inside history can a work exist as a value capable of being discerned and judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall outside its own history, for it is a fall into the chaos where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived."
That is the answer I was looking for.
Then to make matters even more interesting, today the latest New Yorker arrived, with Alex Ross's article on Sibelius. Here, he too quotes the very same book (Kundera has much to say about music!).
I just love unstructured time.
Now I'm too intimidated to write anything. :) I think it's tough for writers to try and stand outside of ourselves and ascertain where we stand in history. I suspect that most of us muddle along trying to tell the best story we can and illuminate the lives of a few characters and hope for the best.
Have you read Kundera's The Curtain (most recent piece of lit crit)? He's got lots to say about music there too. I think music and literature are blood brothers for Kundera.
rchrd replies: Not yet, but I will. Thanks.
