In fact I would say the functional differences between what are often called the left brain and the right brain constitute what I've learned to refer to as human truths—profound wisdom that affects us deeply. And the idea that it isn't literally due to a complete separation between brain hemispheres is what I would call a mere scientific fact, one that is technical and detailed but really has no experiential bearing on us as human beings living our lives. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist, and she uses the tags left brain and right brain in her talk. In fact so did Jordan Peterson. Good enough for them, good enough for me
The third axis—what you called the subconscious and I call the unconscious. Yes, it is affected by culture, and also by training, as I explained in my previous post*. What we learn and practice enough or absorb well enough does get written into the architecture of what we call the right brain or the unconscious. In fact that's exactly what I'm referring to when I talk about bringing both spheres of thought into alignment in some dynamic way, through meditation or freewriting or various other methods. Such as learning the rules, internalizing them through enough practice, and then working intuitively. So essentially I think we're saying the same things using different language. *Sorry, I haven't made that post yet, I wrote it up in Evernote but haven't transferred it here yet. Coming soon, promise.
@evild4ve In fact, this is a perfect place to ask you something I've been curious about since you first arrived. I've seen you several times bring up these mysterious 'axes', and I wonder if you could explain what they are? I don't remember what you specifically call them. Hoping you'll clarify for us.
Sorry to post so many times in a row, but this is something I was vaguely thinking about earlier, and what you said here helped me to clarify the idea. I would say that sometimes when people write literature they're basically copying the form of other literary authors, rather than visiting the inner realm of the unknown themselves and wrestling directly with chaos. So that would be more like a standardized formula for literature. But then there's the other kind as well, where the author is really operating in the unknown and bringing pieces of it out for us to enjoy. And doubtless most literary work is some kind of amalgamation of both of these modes.
I wish somebody would post here so I don't have to keep posting after myself. Hey, maybe page 4 will be the All Xoic page? It occurred to me that since there is that complexity involved in the 'left brain/right brain' idea (the fact that "it isn't that simple"), that makes the Yin/Yang even a more perfect symbol of it, since each has a dot of the opposite inside it, as the 'eye'. They knew even then what it took modern science so long to catch up on. They knew there was a chaos/unknown brain and a logic/familiarity/order brain, and they symbolized them perfectly. Though they doubtless didn't understand that they were aspects of our own minds. As people have always done when it comes to the unconscious, they understood it by projecting it out onto the world or onto other people. They were like the fish who, when asked "How's the water?" Responded "What's water?" It took millennia before we understood that the unconscious was a part of the mind. Because we think only through and inside of the conscious mind (as far as we're aware), anything coming from the unconscious has that strange alien apsect of coming from 'out there' somewhere. Also, I want to say that if anybody is having trouble understanding my talk of a chaos brain etc, watch the videos I posted at the bottom of page 3. All is explained there by Jordan Peterson and Jill Bolte Taylor, two scientists who are definitely up on all the latest brain science.
Here's how to use all that knowledge about the brain hemispheres conscious and unconscious minds. This is advice I ran across on a visual art message board, but it works for developing any kind of skill. Learn as much as you can, practice until it becomes ingrained, and then work intuitively This is a method for maximizing the capabilities of the conscious and unconscious minds. When you learn new skills it goes in through the conscious mind. You create brain pathways and reinforce them, like learning to ride a bike. It's clumsy and awkward at first, that's how we are when we're learning, and that's actually how it is when the conscious mind is running the show. It' doesn't have the grace and elegance the right brain has. I've heard it said certain skills, if you practice them enough, can even be 'written on the spinal cord'. I don't know how much truth there is in that, but it's at least a great metaphor. And probably true—lizards can walk after all, and they hardly have a brain at all. Just a small swelling of the top of the spinal cord. Practice writes the code into the brain architecture and the nervous system, and when it gets deeply enough ingrained the unconscious can take over and it becomes smooth and graceful, because you no longer need to think your way through it with the plodding cumbersome conscious-mind apparatus, which thinks of only one thing at a time. Remember the unconscious can run multiple operations at once. It does that beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, so you can't review what it's doing, it just does it fast and effortlessly. At that point you're no longer struggling to remember each part of each skill, they're all in there in the natural mind where you have instant access to them. That frees you up to concentrate on other things, you just let the developed skills do their thing on autopilot. This is why I believe that in order to break the rules effectively you must first learn them. In order to do anything interesting outside of the traditions of writing, you need to understand those traditions, have them so well ingrained that you can see them as a whole, holistically, and then it becomes easy to work around or through them, to bend, twist, stretch or break them. Or just to go beyond them. Tradition is the string, innovation is the pebble tied to the end of it. Get it spinning over your head, and as long as the tradition is there you can get the pebble going pretty far. But if the tradition is cut, the pebble just falls to the ground. Without a tradition to accelerate outward from through centrifugal force, what's holding the pebble? Each depends on the other. If there's no tradition (no rules, no familiar structure) then there can be no rebellion against it. All good art is built on this dialectic between tradition (structure) and innovation (chaos, the unknown). All the really good Modern artists first learned traditional Academic technique and then decided to work outside of it in some interesting way. Then the society in the West (in most countries—Russia did maintain traditional Atelier training) threw out traditional training in the colleges and embraced modern art. Teachers stopped teaching proportioning, anatomy, composition, color theory, and just said "Draw what you feel, paint what you feeeeeellll!" (I know, I received this kind of training when I first went to college and took some art classes). But the next generation of modern artists didn't receive that grounding in traditional training, and their art wasn't nearly as interesting as that of their predecessors. I know, some people can do great innovative work without learning the traditions first, but those are geniuses. Somehow they're able to absorb it through osmosis, without needing to get good solid training. That isn't me, and it probably isn't you (though it might be some of you). So my process for now is to learn actual story structure, something I didn't know a lot about. Then I begin to step outside of it.
Maybe - Genre tells you what to think about an idea. i.e. Racism is bad Literature tells you how to think about an idea. i.e. What is Racism and why is it bad. Both can use similar techniques - a genre book about racism might not be far off from To Kill a Mockingbird but there is a certain depth to how everything is tied together in literature that doesn't quite happen in genre. Harper Lee was clever enough to get everyone to identify with Tom because he was a man falsely accused. It has a quite brilliant echoing effect. Black people were already stigmatized falsely and it's further emphasized by a false accusation of rape. She used a crime to show the crime of how black people were treated and the injustice of it.
Sorry I don't have a neat reference for this. I've written out my version of it and put links to some of the proper stuff underneath. 1. Axis of Syntax When we write or speak, we line up a series of contiguous ideas like beads on a string. THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT Definite Article | Subject | Verb | Preposition | Definite Article | Object <~~ this is the grammatical syntax Technically we're interested in the semiotic syntax, not just grammatical syntax. The point is that while we're composing or reading we build up the ideas from left to right, in the same order as we think them. THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT, AND RUMBLED OMINOUSLY THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT, AND RUMBLED OMINOUSLY, BUT THERE WAS NO OTHER WARNING When we leave a out, that can be thought of as a lapse on the axis of syntax. 2. Axis of Selection As we go along the line, our vocabulary-recall offers us a list of words or phrases we could use for each idea. It's a bit like a drop-down menu or an index-wheel. CAT / PERSIAN CAT / FELINE / GARFIELD / MY OLD CAT / THE FLEABAG / ANIMAL / CREATURE... etc Our minds seem to be able to recall the options and select one very quickly: it happens simultaneously with syntagmatic composition, and in most people it's less conscious. When a word or a phrase is overused, that can be thought of as a lapse on the axis of selection too. When we make a Freudian slip, that can be thought of as a labia on the axis of selection. 3. Axis of Context This is sometimes added to the other two. As well as connecting the ideas together on the line, the lines themselves have to be connected into the context:- of the text; the culture; and generally the writer-reader or speaker-listener relationship. THE PERSIAN CAT SHAT ON MY PERSIAN RUG ALIENS FROM SPACE LIKE BLUE APPLES <~~~ on the axis of context this isn't contiguous with the other two I DROWNED THE CAT IN REVENGE TITUS GROAN GORMENGHAST TITUS ALONE <~~~ this book isn't contiguous with the other two ======= The general approach is named after Saussure. It's been refined since then, particularly to keep up with developments in neuroscience and semiotics, and there are lots of different versions now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Jakobson https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280039755_PARADIGMATIC_SYNTAGMATIC_AND_CONTEXTUAL_RELATIONS_IN_ARABY I believe that when critique finds consistent lapses, it's useful to suggest which axis they are happening on, so the other writer's editing discipline can shore it up.
Thank you. I think it's going to take some time to fully wrap my head around it. It might also be necessary to educate them on what the terms mean
@Xoic, do you recall the film Terms of Endearment? How would you describe it (as you recollect it) in terms of narrative. I don't remember it all that well, and will probably re-watch it in coming days. I'm skeptical of it because it had so much commercial success, but I recall it as meandering in a way that appealed to me precisely because it wasn't synthetic narrative. Well, I mean, of course it was synthesized. But it wasn't proceeding step by ratcheted step to some goal or conclusion. It was more like a realistic portrayal of people's everyday lives and the emotional content in those. (Because really, haven't we all lived next to an astronaut at one time or another?) I know it's from a Larry McMurtry[1] novel, but I haven't read that yet. He's a good example, I think, like Annie Proulx, of those writers where , when you describe one of their books with a genre like Western, you have to precede it with "literary." [1] whom we lost less than a year ago, I see. If you've seen it and recall it, do you have comments on its narrative style? For some reason I associate Terms of Endearment to to Places in the Heart, which one might wrongly assume to be adapted from a literary novel. More recently I stumbled over Certain Women, woven together from several stories of Maile Meloy. It had an organic appeal to me that was markedly less Hollywoodish than Terms of Endearment's appeal, and turned me on to the author. I've seen it several times and found it oddly appealing each time.
I haven't seen any of those films nor am I familiar with the books they're based on, sorry. My experiences with what I call poetic film include many by Terrence Malick such as The New World, Tree of Life, or Thin Red Line. One of my favorites is a Japanese film called Fires on the Plain. The links go to my own writeups, with video, on my blog. There's a really beautifully shot film by Alejandro González Iñárritu called The Revenant. It looks like it would be extremely meditative and poetic, but the visual style doesn't really match the story form, which is not really poetic. A strange mismatch. All of these films are extremely meditative and poetic visually, including elements of what I called the world of objects, animals and nature. You can look up trailers and clips on YouTube, they're all audio/visual feasts of stunning beauty. I did writeups on a couple more that maybe aren't as visually stunning but still seem poetic to me, like All That Jazz and M*A*S*H. I would call All That Jazz a poetic film because it doesn't take place in linear order, it consists of flashbacks through the MC's life and a lot of dance numbers. Music and dance are powerfully rhythmic elements that provide a strong sense of the poetic, epecially if there's a surreal or dreamlike sense to the film, which there definitely is here. Plus there's no change arc for the MC and I don't think there's what you would call a classic story structure, it's probably more episodic. And MASH is totally episodic, there's no story structure at all. I'm not sure if I'd qualify it as poetic though.
Here are trailers or clips from some of the films that first got me into poetic film: Street of Crocodiles by the Brothers Quay And A Game with Stones by Jan Svankmajer (entire short film)
And the incomparable Marketa Lazarova It is available with English subtitles. But it's so surreal it doesn't help much until you've watched it 4 or 5 times and begin to understand it.
These films all delve strongly into the world of objects, nature and animals, and feature long segments with no dialogue, so we're out of the social world where most movies and stories take place. They're dreamlike and surreal. And I know, movies are audio-visual experiences, they do things you can't do in writing, but I do consider certain kinds of literary writing to be the written equivalent (to what degree that's possible). Example, I recall entire chapters of Moby Dick that are nothing but inventories of the tools of the whaling trade or descriptions of undersea creatures. It also had a very surreal and symbolic dream section. And many literary stories will have long sections that are nothing but stream-of-consciousness or descriptions of the textures, sounds, and surfaces of the world around the character. I would say there are literary techniques that do things to the brain of the reader similar to what the dazzling visuals and sounds do to the viewers of these movies. I'm out of my depth here, because I haven't read enough literary works, but things like what many of the avant-garde Modern authors have done, like James Joyce or Nabokov for instance. I'm starting to gather unto myself some literature to explore.
Thanks for posting the video links, @Xoic. I was too young for the heyday of art cinema, so apart from seeing The Red Balloon as a pre-teen and Bergman's semi-mainstream The Magic Flute as a teenager, I saw my first Swedish, Japanese, French, German, and Italian art films starting around maybe 1978. Of the ones you posted, the only one I'm familiar with was The Virgin Spring. (I see we lost Max von Sydow during these years of Covid-19 as well, in March of 2020.) Always fun to see Swedes trying to do an authentic version of Finnish sauna Right now I'm in the middle of reading the Rethinking Transcendental Style you posted, but I'll get to the clips in time.
I feel I should apologize to readers, because this thread isn't really about literature in general, it's about the very narrow range of literature that might be simialr to the kind of poetic films I like. At least when I post it is. But then, that's me for ya. I hope some people come in and discuss literature in a broader sense, like @peachalulu and a few others did above. Here's a thought, maybe I should even try to do that. Hmmm....
Are you referring to Jordan Peterson the Manosphere darling and celebrity? If so, what characterizes his other side?
This is entirely without context, but I assume you ran across his name in the blog post. Yes, it is that Jordan Peterson. Are you familiar with him only in that context? He has many other sides. He's a psychologist and very well read in many related subjects, and also has extremely interesting takes on the Bible and religion/spirituality in general. I don't remember what I might have said about him
I'll bring it back in the next day or so to the original revised topic, namely the definitions and primary characteristics that distinguish between literary and genre writing. We've gotten pretty deeply into secondary characteristics of literature, which some distinguish a bit from literary writing. Yet in the very spirit of literary writing itself, that digression is all interesting and valid in the context. I've got some refinements to my original thoughts on the distinction, but first I owe some critiques here and elsewhere.
Ah — was it there? I do tend to lose track. I've been trying to keep up with the thread while looking at your linked materials. I've previously only heard Peterson named by his adoring pop-cultural disciples, but will look more deeply when I get a chance.
