Reality Hunger (35 page)

Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though—standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night—flies at us in bright splinters.

Coleridge conceives God’s creation to be a continuing process, which has an analogy in the creative perception (primary imagination) of all human minds. The creative process is repeated, or
“echoed,” on still a third level by the “secondary imagination” of the poet, which dissolves the products of primary perception in order to shape them into a new and unified creation—the imaginative passage or poem. “Fancy,” on the other hand, can only manipulate “fixities and definites” that, linked by association, come to it ready-made from perception. Its products, therefore, are not re-creations (echoes of God’s original creative process) but mosaic-like reassemblies of existing bits and pieces.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say,
No, it doesn’t
.

If I’m reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Plots are for dead people.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

I’m not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I’m interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

All definitions of montage have a common denominator; they all imply that meaning is not inherent in any one shot but is created by the juxtaposition of shots. Lev Kuleshov, an early Russian filmmaker, intercut images of an actor’s expressionless face with images of a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child with a toy. Viewers of the film praised the actor’s performance; they saw in his face (emotionless as it was) hunger, grief, and affection. They saw, in other words, what was not really there in the separate images. Meaning and emotion were created not by the content of the individual images but by the relationship of the images to one another.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.