What organizes fiction is conflict—and only characers experience conflict, [so find] the dominating human conflict in your situation.

—Stephen Koch on how to find your story when writing.

I realize, reading this, that one thing that makes J. M. Coetzee’s work so unusual, and so powerful, is his understanding and depiction of humanity as decidedly unspecial.  Rather than anthropomorphizing non-human “characters”, he depicts humans as merely creatures like any other.

Three scenes, therefore, where imagination wins over representation; three moments, three keys which become locks, but which no present-day director would think of leaving out. On the contrary, he’d make them heavily explicit and, of course, banal. As a result of saying it can show anything, cinema has abandoned its power over the imagination.

—Chris Marker, the French New Wave director, on the use of ellision to spark the imagination in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It’s a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate’s court. I think it’s far better, as Burroughs did and I’ve tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.

—J. G. Ballard in an interview about William S. Burroughs
(via porous borders)

No matter how much steam is coming out of my ears as I’m stuck in traffic between Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek, no matter how ridiculous and sick my rage against the slow driver ahead of me might be, I can’t help putting my rage in the context of gasoline prices, exurbanization, sprawl, consumer-based individuality, consumer “freedom”— all those things that being stuck in an automobile now brings to mind. I don’t write about these things because I want to be a “social novelist.” I do it because I can’t ignore them as a person.

—Jonathan Franzen (from an interview in boundary2)

Trying to compete head-on with the national political narrative was a dead end. You know, the novel is a bourgeois liberal form, and it succeeds to the extent that it confers importance on relatively Everyman figures—on the non-famous, on the non-consequential. It’s not a tragic form. It works just the opposite of Macbeth. It’s a matter of what you’re able to experience as you read. What a president is able to experience is so far beyond most readers’ ken as to not produce a recognizable texture. There are obviously exceptions to this, but I think the broad majority of novelistic production is based on forging some kind of connection between the texture of a fictional character’s life and the ordinary reader’s life. Somehow it’s a lot easier to do with a child soldier in Africa than with Idi Amin. The child-soldier character gets to live as a character, whereas the Idi Amin character walks around in the chains of being Idi Amin. There is a large body of historical fiction about these great figures and about the specialness of them, and I find it unreadable, pretty much to a book. There are a very few exceptions, like Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a few others. By and large, though, fiction thrives on the anonymous. The anonymous life can be inhabited, the public life is closed to you. Historical fiction works more like a kind of non-fiction. It’s non-fiction in all but name to write about the king, the president, the great one. I prefer straight biography and imagination.

—Jonathan Franzen on character (from an interview in boundary2)

Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It’s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with “post,” it is fundamentally ambidextrous. Postmodernism can mean, “We’re all modernists now. Modernism has won.” Or it can mean, “No one can be a modernist anymore. Modernism is over.” People who use “postmodernism” in the first, “mission accomplished,” sense believe that modernism—the art and literature associated with figures like Picasso and Joyce—changed the game completely, and that everyone is still working through the consequences. Modernism is the song that never ends. Being postmodernist just means that we can never be pre-modernist again. People who use it in the second sense, as the epitaph for modernism, think that, somewhere along the line, there was a break with the assumptions, practices, and ambitions of modernist art and literature, and that everyone since then is (or ought to be) on to something very different. Being postmodernist means that we can never be modernist again.

—Louis Menand on Postmodernism (in an essay on Don Barthleme)

You must go through tradition, absorb it, and become in a way a reincarnation of all the artistic periods that have come before you.

We all live in the same time forever.  There is no future and no past.

—George Balanchine

To look at adaptation in this broad-spectrum way, to take it beyond the realm of art into the rest of life, is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question of what is essential – in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line?

The text is human society and the human self, in isolation or in groups, the essence to be preserved is a human essence, and the result is the pluralist, hybridised, mixed-up world in which we all now live.

What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there’s no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it’s the thing that gets us through.

—Salman Rushdie on adaptation in film and life in The Guardian

Many of his readers, having been “educated” by Flaubert and other modern novelists, knew that autobiography was a form of fiction and that a confessional writer could never be taken at his word. But artifice is also a means of self-discovery. Even in its skillful distortions of biographical fact, Afloat is a voyage into the writer’s mind.

—from the NYRB review of a recent reissue of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Afloat.

Even so, most movies, especially movies that are well received, are terrible, for reasons that the Oscars make routinely obvious, both by what films they omit and of course select.

Although I appreciate Mason’s principled defense of literature and of criticism and of realism & lyricism in literature on this blog, I just don’t think I want to waste my time reading a critic who would so quickly and easily dismiss the vast majority of film, as if the form itself were tainted.  I imagine Mason would claim that he is a great lover of film just not Hollywood drivel, but another of his vices as a critic is hiding behind the sanctity of artistic achievement, which allows him to sneer at lesser writers, forms, works.  This is just the last straw for me.