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Today we have a guest post from Jorge Armenteros, author of the upcoming release The Roar of the River, which drops on September 15th with Spuyten Duyvil Press. He shares some insight into his writing process and how he reacts to the pull of the plot and the reader/narrator relationship.
On writing
On a warm August
afternoon, walking down La Promenade des
Anglais, the rhythm of my steps approximating the basso continuo of my thought process, I open the floodgates.
There is
plot, but I’m always more interested in situations. Situations change and that’s
a kind of plot. Language is a plot, too, and so are mix-ups and nonsense.
Really, any situation can be a plot because as it changes, time moves forward.
Forward, I
walk.
And a
writer meets another writer who’s ten years younger and has a keen eye for
people on the street, but has a drowned mind. The writer sees a tennis player
meeting another tennis player who is ten years younger, but has reached
stardom. The writer meets his friend from childhood and wonders, What took you
so long? All within a writer’s day.
I write
the books I have yet to read. In essence, I jump over the edge of tradition and
throw my words up in the air hoping for the wind to take them places no one
else has reached.
Yes, I
wrote and explored. I learned not to be harmless.
Not harmless…
Everyday
contains a moment when you think you will touch immortality. What follows next
is the stuff of novels.
And when
the rain comes down, my words are safe in my dry within. I flourish from inside
my skull.
From that
very skull the vision of meaning ascends.
Is meaning
created through the interaction between person and text? It seems so. In many
of his short stories, Borges implies the disturbing supposition that the
meaning of literary works is entirely dependent on the varying historical and
social contexts in which they are read. In other words, that literary meaning
is constructed through mental processes irrevocably tied to location and
period. Reading, then, is more central to a text’s intellectual “life” than its
writing and, consequently, a reader is more important to a text than its
writer.
We can see
how influential Borges’s ideas were on contemporary writers. For example, in Hopscotch,
Cortázar invites the reader to
participate in his innovative project by letting the reader choose in what
order to read the chapters. He writes: “For my part, I wonder whether someday I
will ever succeed in making it felt that the true character and the only one
that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I
write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation,
transportation.”
I like his
use of “alienation.”
If we are
to have a high esteem for the reader, we have to invite her to the party. Not
every sentence needs to be complete, not every plot needs a twist, nor does
every flower need a color. Let the reader create alongside the text. Easy prose
is akin to baby food. It is time to take the spoon out of the reader’s mouth.
I walk
some more, never looking back.
In an
effort to transcend traditional narrative, I strive to wield words under the
constraints of the novel’s tremendous weight. Consequently, I discard many
rules to bring forth this vision. In so doing, I may be creating an
anti-democratic experience that leaves out the middle-class, or middle-reader,
the populous group which has generated the traditional novel. Yes, I explore
the inner world of my characters, experiment with nonlinear formats, employ
multiple points of view, embrace philosophical constructs, use lyrical language,
and make clear and not-so-clear allusions while not explaining everything in an
expository way. I may be writing outside of the traditional mold but I am not
the first, nor will I be the last one. My challenge, dear reader, is how to
manage this difficult and complex task, how to pull off the high-wire act
without crashing down to the floor. I invite you to watch.
I watch
myself as I walk but I do not see me that well.
Most books
today land on the reader’s lap, defanged, tamed by the weight of tradition,
ready for easy consumption. I prefer when the book doesn’t offer itself to the
reader like a shelled pistachio. Better to compel readers to do the work of
shelling through words, rhythms in prose, and the unconscious in order to savor
the book. And it is the alliance between the reader’s effort and the author’s
meditations that conjures the best literature.
Un-conscious,
uncon-scious, unconsc-ious…
The author
who tries to expand the frontiers of the human experience can fail. On the
other hand, authors of conventional literary products never fail, they take no
risks, they use the same proven formula, a comfortable formula, a formula of concealment.
Using language for the mere purpose of obtaining an effect, without going
beyond what’s expected, is essentially immoral. The ethical approach is found
in the search for new formulas.
I slow
down and start to walk in a diagonal down to the old port of Nice.
The
relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed
there is no good art that is not consciously oblique. If you respect the
reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by
indirect means. My path is a diagonal one.
Creativity
on the part of the author involves structural innovation, the ability to
generate an, in principle, infinite number of different structures. But the
reader’s creativity is expressed by functional innovation: the ability to
imagine what a text could mean. A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes
it.
This is
where a cup of coffee is completely necessary. But I chose red wine instead.
According
to Foucault, “Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole
definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and
becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that
of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous
existence.” It then follows that in literature, questions of fact or truth are
subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for
its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their
importance as a structure of interconnected motifs. So, can we finally do away
with literary genres?
Maybe…
According
to Ezra Pound, [we live] “in a country in love with amateurs, in a country
where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile
and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction
of competent criticism.”
That is
the USA for you.
So how,
then, do we identify good writing? It is now plain that any debate over
who is, or is not, a better writer, or what is, or is not, a more legitimate
writing is, for the most part, a surrogate social struggle. The more pertinent
questions are what is the community being addressed in the writing, how does
the writing participate in the constitution of this audience, and is it
effective in doing so. The state of our literary nation is fractured.
And I
think of her…
A woman
thinks thoughts that barely make sense. A man thinks thoughts that make no
sense to anyone. A woman knows not to reveal she knows you’re after her
thoughts, that you want to devour her. A man tells you nothing but lays a
suspicious look on you. A woman knows not to trust you. This man thinks you are
all mighty. You know you’re not but he doesn’t know that. A woman keeps on
thinking thoughts that barely make sense to her.
And as I
walk through the cities whose people still believe in libraries
and bookstores, I feel as if I am walking through Paradise. And
for as long as I can, I will suspend my disbelief. I will go on dreaming.
Nice,
please, don’t close them down. The temples of the book.
It is not
about religion, that is the easy way out. It is not about idiocy, for you would
need to be almost mentally retarded. It may be about the very essence of
the human condition, a malleable mush, a fertile ground. We are children
of our time, of our town, and of our ignorance. So how do we transcend hate? With
books, naturally.
Another glass
of wine…
The
relationship between a reader and a narrator is as intense and emotionally
complex as any relationship between that reader and another human being. The
slow manifestation of the soul of the other, a satisfying human need, occurs in
the turning of pages and the deciphering of life as rendered by prose. The
novel offers an intercourse with selves, albeit imagined, but just as real. And
as the contemporary self is being obliterated by the continuous fragmentation
of attention and time, we need the novel more than ever.
Breathing
now. Wary of the day.
I would
like to know what the ultimate purpose of writing fiction is. What are the best
approaches to producing innovative prose? What is the real value of reality in
fiction? Should the novel be clear and open to all? Who are the readers? And in
a more existential vein, does it matter to the universe whether I write a novel
or take a piss in the river?
Please,
don’t answer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jorge Armenteros has written four novels since the start of the MFA program.
THE BOOK OF I is the first novel to be shared with the public. The second
novel, AIR, was recently published by Spuyten Duyvil Press.
Nowadays Jorge resides in the South of France. And when
there is a free minute in the day, he practices the violin. Coincidentally, the
violin is the subject of his fourth novel.
