Discussion → "The work I love explodes in every paragraph"

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    Kane X. Faucher
    Apr 14, 05:18am

    Hm. I hadn't thought of the problem presented by the superfluous. I suppose if I took the dim, or myopic rather than hyper-metropic view, I could envision the black hole as a kind of deselection device. However, if we look at it a different way, this same black hole in its totalizing, absorbing way can make anything that falls into it "useful" by altering its connotative code. But even that sounds like I'm asserting some kind of utilitarian schema or even promoting essentialism in writing!

    What Edward says above sounds reminiscent of the old sculpteur's credo of hacking off the extraneous material to release the form trapped within. I suppose the possible brokerage would be this: yes to excluding the unnecessary, but only that which is unnecessary to the artist's work and concepts. Even a somewhat non sequitur or segue paragraph describing a series of telephone poles might be made necessary to the work if it is a work allied to that kind of literary realism where minute details that don't add up or lend themselves to the resolution of the plot become necessary features/installations in the writing method. So, in the end, if the inclusion feels too forced, and also is viewed by the writer in a kind of ambivalence, it should be made necessary or purged altogether.

    I wonder what would happen if this idea were finessed by appeal to Nietzsche's eternal return and the questions posed there, modified to suit writing. I could envision the writer asking the question "can I affirm inclusion of this particular element in the fiction? Could I will that it returns eternally, as a type? Can it endure its own return?"


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