Please respond by Wednesday, March 20, 4 p.m.
FROM STEPHENE MALLARMÉ WITH LOVE
To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of
it and be forced to share the rest with strangers. Don’t say what happened
exactly or exactly how what happened felt. Rather, say “The black dog whined to
be fed.” Make every poem you write a foreign city, where visitors can
understand only an occasional word, just like you that time you took another
Klonopin because you forgot you had already taken one.
22 comments:
I think what Orwell is projecting as fact can be viewed as comment, merely because he puts himself in the article. I don't think this is a bad thing at all because he is a human being. He is experiencing what he is seeing in an unbiased view. Since he has never seen these things his view is genuine and objective. Although it is a subjective perspective I don't think it is not also fact. It is a fact that a man asked him for the bread and it is a fact that he was wearing rags. It is the facts he choose which make it a comment
I think Stephanie Mallarme is trying to tell us that we don't need every excruciating detail to get our point across. Description is nice, but the detail can be made by the reader. When she says "to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of it" means that all the imagination, all of the life, will be sucked out of it. The best part about reading is being able to imagine that you are there right along with the characters. By defining an object, you are forcing the reader to look at your words, and not what you meant by them. I think this is a very interesting point. I write with a lot of detail, but I feel like my descriptions dance around the object. I focus on the feelings and the sensations rather than the thing. This may be exactly the opposite of what Mallarme is saying. I think she wants us to decide on our own what we want to feel about things as opposed to how the author tells us to feel. She makes me feel like she wants us to write in a hazy manner. Write in a way that you have your opinion, I have my opinion, he has his opinion, and she has hers. Write in a way that is indirectly getting a point across, not by telling you what it is, but by showing you how to feel it. To take a situation and define it as it was would be like a redundant reiteration of what has already been seen and felt. To describe a situation in few words and focus on what's left, is to allow the reader inside the character's body and let them feel for themselves.
I feel that the advice Stephene Mallarme is offering to authors is that by limiting what you write, your writing can be read as either subjective or objective, with an underlying point that the author is trying to get across. One can do this without including every single detail that occurred to get what they want to say across to the reader. By only including the main points, and getting to the end as quick as possible, it reassures the author that the reader will finish the writing. You don’t want to give everything away to the reader, but allow for some creativity while reading. Although, like I said before, there is an essential story point or plot the author is expressing, the author can do so in fewer words than more, with a more effective result.
Stephene Mallarme, in my opinion wants authors to write as a newborn. Don't expect the reader has any idea that blueberries are blue or what they taste like, but rather explain it to them simplely and poetically. I think this can apply to my writing because I rest on sarcastic resemblances. I want to let the reader see what I see and give room to thought. If I take her advice I feel like a have a motive behind my work. Maybe I don't clearly understand what she means but I feel like with her advice I would give the piece a voice which is not mine and I am not comfortable using.
I think that Stephanie Mallarme is trying to tell us that as writers, our job isn't to write so descriptively that our reader experiences exactly what we have experienced. Our job as writers is to give our readers a taste of what we've experienced so they will want to experience it for themselves. If we divulge every detail of something we've experienced, it becomes less special to the reader once they've experienced it because they've seen, heard and felt it already. It also suggests that they should have the same viewpoint or experience as us, which they shouldn't. We should tease the reader into wanting to experience what we're describing by not being overly descriptive about something.
Stéphane Mallarmé raises a good point with this poem. It's pointless to write out an entire situation, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, because then the reader has nothing to think about. You have to lead them on and give them shreds of details so that they are hungry for more. The first thing I thought of when I read this was H.P. Lovecraft's writing in the fantasy-horror genre. Lovecraft is famous for stringing the reader along with a story and building suspense until the end. And within the last few paragraphs or pages he will write the important things left out in the story and allow the reader to know the horrific detail or meaning behind what he wrote. This method is not exactly what Mallarmé meant with the poem but it is similar. If Lovecraft gave the important details first then readers would not find his stories so terrifying. If writers put the entire story from beginning to end into their work than it will be bland and unoriginal.
I think Mallarme is on to something here. A writer writes to get a point across, but you don't have to write descriptive nonsense to get to the point. An author supplies the reader with information and fine tuned details, but it's up to the reader to make what he/she wants with the information. That's what is so great about reading and writing. It's an art form and everyone looks a piece of work in a different way.
I had to read Stephanie Mallarme's piece over and over again because her thoughts just didn't seem to fit together for me. It seemed that by trying to write about never giving the reader too much information, she didn't give us enough information. Her writing was too elusive for me and therefore, hard to connect with. I think she might have been getting at the fact that the writer should work on being concise, but in a way that only gives so much information. Writing doesn't need to be accompanied by every WORD, but rather the right words. The writer should write enough to capture a scene, but not enough to give all the information away. Reading is interesting because you're trying to solve a puzzle or a mystery. You're given just enough information to move forward to the next clue. That's how a writer should treat their writing; only ever give just enough.
OOPS And it's Stephane Mallarme. He's a man. I apologize for calling him Stephanie. It's easy to add an "i" in there.
Mallarmé is trying to say that we should say less and let our readers interpret things the way they do, not necessarily the way we had in mind when we wrote it. There is no wrong way to interpret someone's ideas; there are just many different ways, and that's a good thing. People should take what they want from your work.
This advice actually applies to my work as a photographer a lot. I learned not to say as much in my artist's statements because my work should speak for itself. It's interesting to hear different people's interpretations of my photography instead of my own ideas being forced upon them, which they might not enjoy as much.
If you don't like the response you're getting from your work, you don't need to say more, but you do need to come across in a different way. If you don't get others' responses to your work, and they are forced to see things how you do, your work cannot grow in this way.
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When you see someone naked all the time it ceases to be exciting.
Don't explicitly say what you want to say. Let it unravel. Nod and wink. Bat your lashes. Point faintly in a direction. Let the reader see the smoke trail before the lit cigarette.
People attach to meanings the most when they discover them on their own. The ego tells them good job. Significance is a little trophy of memory cells that gets shinned for a period then starts to collect dust.
Plus it's way easier to fake it this way.
And nothing really has a name. Names are just representations of forms, forms only exist in the mind. Our experience, our stream of consciousness, is an interaction between ourselves and inherently unique phenomena. To give something a name is only to communicate a form not the unique phenomenal essence we would like to convey. In writing, one could communicate essence effectively by setting a scene of phenomena rather than by using abstract conceptual descriptions that assume forms. Describe the unique details of a situation, and let the reader put the phenomenal pieces together and feel the disparities of shapes and patterns.
In my opinion, I think Stephanie Mellarme is trying to let authors know that writing should be a guessing game--by which I mean that one should not offer up every excruciating detail of an object or an event, but rather simply show the audience the object or event and allow them to figure it out. The first line of her poem seems like a reaction to T.S. Eliot's objective correlative--the idea that specific objects and words compel a specific, irrevocable emotional response. "To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of it and be forced to share the rest with strangers." Here, I believe that Mellarme is saying that just writing "dog" DOES elicit a specific emotional response, but that it is up to the author to CREATE that emotional response by sort of filling in the three-quarters of the object that are missing. In regards to literary journalism, I believe this has to do with the mix of objective and subjective that authors should have in their work. On the one hand, authors should just show the "surface" of an object--suppress the three-quarters--in order to report events as they happen. On the other hand, authors should direct that surface image subjectively, by allowing their descriptions of the event or object to direct their audience's emotional response accordingly.
I think Mallarme is articulating the phrase, "show, don't tell". Show your reader what happened and allow them to make inferences based upon what you have written. The job of an author is to play God, to create the reality the reader will delve into, the "foreign city". I think the prose is telling writers to create an unknown essence to the reader, a place where the feel lost and confused so they don't feel bored with direct descriptions of exact moments or things.
I think this relates to my work because through the editing process I have realized my tendency to overwrite. Since I am writing about something that is such a fresh wound on my life and the lives of the people around me, it is hard to not place my emotions on a reader. I want the reader to see my friends and their drug addiction how I saw it, because I don't want there to be judgement calls made against people I hold so close to me. So over explaining, in my case, has coddled that part of me that wants people to love my friends despite their faults, like I do. It has been a crutch definitely, so I guess the advice given to me here is that even without the "in your face", "telling" details, the point of the author will still get across.
This poem sounds like a companion piece to the advice you gave us in class, "Start as close to the end as possible." This poem advocates skipping all the tiring exposition--why the dog has to be fed, what circumstances have led to the dog not being fed, why the family picked a black dog in the first place, why they named that black dog what they did. Instead, skip straight to the point: the dog is hungry. We don't need to know all those process details; we just need to know the immediate situation and what's being done to fix it. The reader doesn't need to be spoon-fed every single piece of information; he or she can piece things together him or herself, like a visitor to a foreign city who might not understand every word of the directions he's being given in French, but who can catch the gist well enough.
In my opinion, I think what Stephanie Mallarme was trying to tell us was kind of like Hemingway's Iceberg Theory. That in order for a piece of writing to be compelling, in order for it to get the point across to the reader, you don't need every detail. "to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of it", you need to allow room for creativity in your words and the reader's mind. Mallarme states, "Don’t say what happened exactly or exactly how what happened felt. Rather, say “The black dog whined to be fed.”" In realation to my own writing, I always find it hard to leave out details, but I now understand the importance of why you should. It allows the work to hold more power over the reader, makes them think more about what's on the page. You want to write implicitly but not to the point where the reader has to read too much into things to figure it out. In describing actions, events or experience in less detail or fewer words, it allows the reader to get more connected with the characters inside and out, as well as allowing the reader to have their own feelings.
I think Mallarme is trying to tell us that it’s dangerous and fruitless to be so descriptive in our writing. Even if we’re so descriptive as to lay out the entire story exactly as it happened, readers would still look at it through their own lens. Your point of view will inevitably become warped because as people, we look at everything with at least some subjectivity. We all come from different walks of life and have different experiences, so no matter what you’re trying to get across, your readers will look at it differently. So the best thing you can do is make it a mystery to them. It’ll probably make everything less frustrating when you get feedback.
I think I have a tendency to fall prey to what Mallarme is telling writers not to do. I’ll get wrapped up in insecurities about my work and I’ll take readers word for word and image for image to make sure they know exactly what’s going on. In the end, I wind up being really bored with my writing because it will rely too heavily on image and not on substance or meaning.
What I took from this is to not tell the reader what they should be visualizing. As the writer you're already telling them what to think based on characters, feelings, emotion and dialogue. So when it comes to description, leave it for them to imagine. People who don't write are given the opportunity to use their imaginations when they read a book -for better or for worse. Make your writing like a foreign city, "where visitors can understand only an occasional word." They don't understand it, so they seek to fill the blanks with what they do understand. Images in their heads from previous experiences and encounters.
I believe Mallarme is telling us that rather than being overly descriptive and definitive in your writing, things need to be left open to interpretation for the reader. Rather than telling them what exactly is happening and what they should see, feel, think, etc., writing is always going to be something different for everyone who reads it, which is kind of where the beauty in it lies. Every reader is going to see things differently and be subjective in their reading, thinking and understanding. By telling the readers everything, you are taking away from the writing and the reader's experience with it. Including every detail is in most cases unnecessary and leaves no mystery for the reader or room for them to take things from it in their own way.
Stephene Mallarme manages to get a lot across in this short poem, and that’s the point. He feels that a great writer should explore new horizons without going too far. Mallarme does not think a writer should bother his work with vague impressions or too much clarity. The world transforms under nothing more than inverted lenses; write about that. Writing is funny; words seem to emerge without conviction when the writer is trying very hard. For others, it comes. Although I have internally decided that being a writer is a very serious intention of mine, I definitely feel like I have a long way to go until something worthwhile materializes. I think I need to better learn how to tell of things I’ve been shown, recreate a sensation. The only question then is: is it?
In your prose poem, I think the advice is that you don't have to be blatant in your writing. You must be clear and concise, but you don't have to tell everything. As a writer, you choose what you show through your work, so choose well. Don't merely keep a list of all the things you did, saw, and experienced—write them to make sense of those events and, hopefully, extend that understanding to the world at large. The line “make every poem you write a foreign city, where visitors can understand only an occasional word” is so incredibly true, and I think it has two meanings. What you write should be an adventure to you; it should feel like exploring a foreign city for yourself and the reader. Writers shouldn't hand everything to the reader; they should let them take in the writing, translate it, and make meaning for themselves. Writing should feel like uncharted territory where the metaphors are fresh and the images feel foreign, but not in the bad way; it should feel like the moment when you recover from standing up too quickly. The last line (“just like you that time you took another Klonopin because you forgot you had already taken one”) is probably the most telling for writers, or at least me. Sure, I've never taken two Klonopin in one sitting, but I keep coming back to writing even when it hurts.
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