Trikster123: переводы

→Strangeness in this context does not mean weirdness or experimental style or deliberate Catch-22 wackiness (although there is a wonderful strangeness about Heller’s Catch-22 that alerts us to something new and dangerous.) Strangeness can be clad in a spinster’s life-drabness and lack of direct experience – witness the almost frightening strangeness from the Brontes and a Dickinson named Emily – or it can crow its aggressive life story from the rooftops, adding its barbaric yawp to our endless literary dialogue in the form of leaves of grass hurled like glass daggers. Strangeness can arise from the staccato bursts of cutting-edge minimalist Carveresque prose or be found deep within labrynthine Proustian sentences that never seem to end.

→Strangeness in this context does not mean weirdness or experimental style or deliberate Catch-22 wackiness (although there is a wonderful strangeness about Heller’s Catch-22 that alerts us to something new and dangerous.) Strangeness can be clad in a spinster’s life-drabness and lack of direct experience – witness the almost frightening strangeness from the Brontes and a Dickinson named Emily – or it can crow its aggressive life story from the rooftops, adding its barbaric yawp to our endless literary dialogue in the form of leaves of grass hurled like glass daggers. Strangeness can arise from the staccato bursts of cutting-edge minimalist Carveresque prose or be found deep within labrynthine Proustian sentences that never seem to end.

→This is a term and concept I first encountered in Harold Bloom’s critical writings. “Strangeness”, he suggests, is the single common element to be found in all literary works that should be herded into that most dreaded, cursed, and secretly coveted corral – the Canon of Western Literature.

→Strangeness:

→As the Cowardly Lion said – “What have they got that I ain’t got?”

→In this case, I’m going to discuss elements of writing itself that tend to separate the great writers from the mediocre, those authors we find on the “Literature” shelves at Borders, separated by quality – or at least longevity -- from the rest of us lurking in genre aisles. More importantly, I’d like to look at the rarely discussed aspects of what is unique about the work of writers who really have changed lives and deepened our understanding of ourselves, even while entertaining us. These factors are the unknown-unknowns in the craft of writing and they separate the sheep from the goats.

→But now we enter the realm of the unknown-unknowns.

→Finally, there’s the huge known unknown of whether you’d enjoy being a full-time writer. The only way to answer that is to be good enough to get published and then to stick with it for a few years.

→Then there is the known unknown of how we may react under quite different kinds of pressure. . . pressure not unique to a writer’s life but at the very least rare in a non-writer’s life and work: the pressure of bad reviews, of so many opportunities to embarrass yourself at public readings and media interviews, of annual book tours that break your health and ruin your schedules, and of always having to be “creative” less you starve.

→Then there is the known unknown of whether we can maintain that disciplined isolation and writing regimen for years under the absolutely guaranteed pressures – financial, social, financial, domestic, financial, psychological, and financial.

→First there is the known unknown of whether we have the rather unusual ability to spend days, weeks, months, and literal years in the unusual state of disciplined isolation that being a professional novelist demands. It seemed easy enough during the brief, inspired wind sprints of our writing to date, but what about the long haul? Do we have what it takes for the marathon that is any professional writing career? (And “having what it takes” here may not be all that flattering, since it must include the inclination as well as the ability to subordinate many human relationships and experiences to the dubious priority of just planting your butt in a chair and working alone.)

→Then there are the unknowns that we may not have dived into yet, but which we know are out there and which we know will test us. (We can call these the known-unknowns.)

→We know what we know about what it takes to be a decent writer. (We can call that “the known.”) To write well it takes more than a modicum of intelligence, a command of the English language (in our case, at least, on this continent), an understanding of basic prose protocols, an ability to tell a story, and a story to tell.

→Well, what unknown-unknowns are there standing (invisibly) between us and becoming a really good writer?

→Way to go, Rummy! This reminds me of my philo-theo-psycho-historilogical discussions with the other guys at 3 a.m. as a Wabash College undergraduate lo those many decades ago, fueled by fervor and a half dozen beers. The unknown-unknown indeed. So much of life and experience fell into that category in those days.

→Anyway, what he said was (in a rambling discussion of either why we stay in Iraq or what our next major national threat was or . . . something) – “We know what we know. We can call that the known. We know what we don’t know. We can call that the known unknown. But we don’t always know what we don’t know. We could call that the unknown unknown. And there the greatest danger lies.”

→Not long ago, as I write this, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed to have blundered into the realm of ontology. Or perhaps it was epistemology. Or it could have been phytology for all I know.

→Writing Well