fourth round of answers

to the question, “what should fiction do”:

 Stacey Levine says: The smallest transaction or event in life, anything, is an opening.  That’s how.

Lance Olsen says: In The Middle Mind, Curtis White maintains that the narratives generated and sustained by the American political system, entertainment industry, and academic trade have taught us over the last half century how not to think for ourselves. Essentially, those narratives shun complexity and challenge; avoid texts that demand attentive, self-conscious, and self-critical reading; and embrace The Middle Mind’s thoughtless impulse toward the status quo.  In a phrase, what we are left with is the death or at least the dying of what I think of as the Difficult Imagination. What writers can do is attempt to revive that Difficult Imagination by exploring various strategies that call attention to, reflect upon, and disrupt the assumptions behind conventional narratives, thereby challenging the dominant cultures that would like to see such narratives told and retold until they begin to pass for truths about the human condition.  “Our satisfaction with the completeness of plot,” Fredric Jameson once noted, is “a kind of satisfaction with society as well,” and I would add much the same is the case with our satisfaction with undemanding style, character, subject matter, and so forth.  My orientation, then, rhymes fairly closely with those posed by Viktor Shklovsky for art and Martin Heidegger for philosophy: the return through complication and challenge (not predictability and ease) to perception and thought.

Mark America says:
Writing should do what it’s always done when performing its shamanistic tricks ON

the one who writes, that is –

it should trigger new FORMal investigations

for the writing body to play OUT

its hyperimprovised MOVEments

IN the compositional field of PLAY.

Watch out, though, the last thing you need to do is get a concussion!

Trevor Dodge says: Writing should share a hot shower with you, towel you off with a high thread count, and then retreat downstairs to powder the sugar on your pancakes.

But before all that, writing should throw a psychotic fit in front of you because you haven’t been paying enough attention to it lately.  You, with all your InterWebs and XBoxing and iLife–a-ma-jigging that you do; with all your attempts to tell writing what it is (a juice extractor!) and what it is not (a mini-fridge!), you are missing what writing *could be*, and this is why writing is so thoroughly and justifiably pissed off at you right now.

It is, after all, Valentine’s Day this week.

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