Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 1662074" data-attributes="member: 1025">First off, I object to the kind of critique that discourages authors from taking creative chances with structure or form. I like experiments--sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. But if no one experiments with structure, all stories start to sound formulaic and predictable, and the body of work suffers as a whole, even if it is made up of nice parts. I find the supposition that there are inherently invalid ways of telling a story to be arrogant and self-serving. Second, I think it is ok for an author to have an adversarial relationship with the audience, as long as the author has some well-conceived and passionately-held relationship with the audience, and doesn’t try to insult our intelligence. It is ok to lie, to withhold information, and even to deliberately mislead the audience if you can get away with it, but it must be done well, so that the feeling at the end is “ah! ya got me,” as opposed to “well, how was I supposed to know that?” The more adversarial the relationship, the greater the need to ultimately satisfy--a hostile and estranged audience does not cut the author any slack, or forgive any logical fallacies. But that is a digression--Macbeth’s story does not attempt to do any of the above. The narrator is at war with himself, not with us. We are just watching him squirm as the author explodes his pain open for our pleasure. The slow unraveling of layers to his pain, the dawning comprehension as we assimilate it, that is part of the tantalizing delectation. [/syyalea] Third, while we live through time facing forward, we often understand it retrospectively. Archivists, archaeologists, forensics specialists, psychologists  . . . .all strive to understand now by examining evidence of things past. Many readers derive pleasure from untangling evidence, which is why mysteries are a popular and profitable market segment of mainstream literature.  More importantly, after truly horrific moments, it is common for the human mind to review, rehearse, purge, and learn from the experience. I liked the backwards flow of trying to understand how this character got to be in the state he’s in. He can hardly allow himself to understand it, and he can’t let go of trying to understand it. The tension in the story is between his need to understand, and his desire to blot out the whole thing. He wants to know, and he doesn’t want to know. Structurally, I think the conceit of this works well, and the form expresses the function of the piece.</blockquote>

Verification