Chrononautic Log: Four Beats With Five

Four Beats With Five

4 o'clock, May 10, 2005

Wow. I love* experimental fiction, and yet this is so not what I love about it:

Never mind that this is precisely what most experimental fiction is attempting to accomplish: to draw attention away from the immediate “content” a novel or story is expected to contain, like a vessel its liquid, and to focus some of the reader’s attention on the vessel itself — better yet, to demonstrate that content only exists according to the shape of the container, the latter, after all, contributing the “art” to the art of fiction. More than anything else, experimental fiction works to remind the reader that fiction can be artful in this way, that it is more than a way to pass the time or give one’s emotional receptors a little exercise.

(Daniel Green, via Scott Esposito, via Chris Rowe, via Gwenda Bond — God, I love the Web! )

I read this, and — after I filter out the contempt for emotion and the contempt for the passing of time — two things come to mind.

I heard this jazz vocal piece once on the radio, probably from the 60s or 70s. It was, and was called (as far as I could tell), and was about, and had the refrain, “Four Beats with Five.” Either the vocals were in 5/4 and the instrumental music was in 4/4, or the other way around. The lyrics consisted, literally, of extended grandstanding about how difficult this was and how cool the singer and musicians and composer were for doing it.
Quoth Hitchiker’s:

“So what you’re saying is that I write poetry because underneath my mean callous heartless exterior I really just want to be loved,” he said. He paused. “Is that right?”

Ford laughed a nervous laugh. “Well I mean yes,” he said, “don’t we all, deep down, you know . . . er . . .”

The Vogon stood up.

“No, well you’re completely wrong,” he said, “I just write poetry to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief.”

There is a point of view that says that the highest form of art is art that is not about anything — irreducible art — art for its own sake — Walter Pater — condition of music — all that.

I’m okay with that. I don’t necessarily feel that way myself, but I don’t have a problem with it. Just —

Lose the damn lyrics.

Don’t pretend to have both form and content when all you’ve got is form.

I know Mr. Green isn’t arguing for writing without content. But he does seem to be arguing that the point of experimental fiction is to elevate ~~content above form~~ form above content. [Thanks, Ted!]

I don’t think that’s true at all. But I suppose it’s entirely possible that this is exactly what, as Mr. Green says, most experimental fiction is attempting to accomplish.

If that’s true, I think it’s not art. I think it’s, at best, an amusing technical exercise.

Its logical end point is the equivalent, in fiction, of “Four Beats With Five’; of music meant, as they say in the Berkeley composition department, “to be seen and not heard.” Fiction written not for readers but for writers and critics.

Which would be a cryin’ shame. Because there’s no reason on God’s green earth why form and content have to work at cross-purposes, except that writers — experimental writers who sacrifice content for form, and bestselling hacks who sacrifice form for content, alike — have educated readers to think that way.

The purpose of a work of fiction is not to demonstrate lyrical or technical virtuosity. Nor is it to acquaint the reader with a series of bald but made-up facts. Nor even to involve the reader in an imaginary emotional landscape.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to engage all the reader’s faculties — not just the heart or the head or the eyes, but all of them, or at any rate as many of them as possible — in order to do something, some nebulous third thing — to (paraphrasing Eco) generate interpretations, to (paraphrasing Kundera) discover what only fiction can discover.

What, exactly, that thing is, depends on the work, and the writer, and the reader. But I think it takes form and content to get there. If it doesn’t, then don’t just do a half-assed job on the other one — get rid of it.

And if you’re going to have both, then it’s stupid to pit them against each other.

* (plenty of)

I think there's room for different pieces of fiction to have different goals.

It was Alan DeNiro who introduced me, a couple years back, to a similar metaphor: he said some writing is intended to be a clear glass window that you can see stuff through, and other writing is intended to be a stained glass window where the point is to look at the glass.

I'll certain agree with you that there're plenty of good partially-stained glass windows out there, stories that engage both the heart and the head, that achieve traditional goals at the same time as they experiment.

But I think that a story that doesn't aim for traditional goals, that's entirely about (for example) the sounds of language rather than the sense, can also succeed on its own terms. In literal terms (ignoring the metaphor for the moment), it's quite possible to create a beautiful stained-glass window that's no good for looking through, or an extremely well-crafted Klein bottle that can't hold liquid at all; to argue that those items aren't art, are at best an amusing technical exercise, seems to me to miss the point that some art can still be successful on its own terms even if it doesn't achieve traditional goals along with its experimental goals.

To put it another way, I disagree that there is such a thing as "the purpose of a work of fiction" in the general sense—each work of fiction may have its own purpose, and the purpose of one work may well be at odds with the purpose of another. I tend to like it best when traditional and experimental goals are in harmony, but I think there's plenty of good work in which they're not.

Does that make sense? Am I missing your point?

Oops — corrected, Ted. Thanks!

Jed, I like the stained-glass metaphor, but I’d put a different strain on it. What clear windows and stained-glass windows have in common is that (and this, I think, is the original purpose of the window) they both admit light. Writing a story in which the content is only an afterthought is like hanging a stained-glass window on a gallery wall without illumination.

A stained-glass window doesn’t invite you to look through it; a Klein bottle doesn’t invite you to fill it with water; sound poetry doesn’t invite narrative interpretation. If a story presents itself as being about something, then it invites itself to be judged, among other things, on what it’s about.

I don’t think I’m making myself clear, and partly, I think, that’s because I myself am not very clear on a not very clear concept. But I’m not, not, not arguing that stories have to aim for traditional goals or succeed on traditional terms. I am not — and this I think, and hope, I was clear on — arguing that all stories share a common purpose.

What I am arguing (let’s see how far this metaphor will go before it snaps!) is that a stained-glass window is a poor tool for demonstrating your skill at metalwork, and that a stained-glass window in which the metalwork, the quality of the glass, the choice of colors, the placement with respect to sources of light, and so on, all combine to achieve some common purpose — whatever that purpose might be — is superior to one in which one is supposed to ignore the poor lighting and muddy colors and admire the soldering.

On a more serious note, there was a long discussion of something somewhat related at Dan's weblog a few months back here.

This is what I said in part; I thought I'd repost it:

"Any reading or writing process can have value. They're technologies. Their worth is highly fragile and situational. Intensely political art? At times. Negative capability? Sure, why not (although history and time already do the escaping from personality routine rather handily, they have it down pat). At times. But these technologies are only valuable so long as they achieve a project--a project that the writer or reader themselves might not be consciously aware of, or only in flickers. Perhaps that project has a panoply of layers--readerly pleasure, changing people's minds, personal need to drive away demons or play with words, whatever. But I want as many tools in my toolkit as humanly possible, because there really isn't enough time to read or write everything I want. It's inescapable that we are all vulnerable, and foolhardy, and we try to scavenge what meaning and pleasure we can. But no aesthetics is pure. John Clare's poems aren't pastoral dioramas with bows on them; they are little blog entries in sonnet form about madness, lost love, and Enclosure Acts. Keats was never the "stricken fawn" that Shelley made him out to be; he cut up corpses in med school and knew he had TB right after he started coughing blood. Celan, Tiptree, Desnos, whoever--what makes their art great and, sure, beautiful, was that the world (and at times a literal political system) was loaded with bear shot and it took a shot at them. And so they fired back in the only way they knew how. Not for art's own sake but for theirs. And ours."

Chrononautic Log

Four Beats With Five

4 o'clock, May 10, 2005

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