modernists get away with some crazy shit
I’m embarking on draft three of a novel I’ve been working on for quite a while. Conventional wisdom says that I should tighten things up, cut some pages and solidify the main character’s arc.
But now I’m contemplating Gertrude Stein’s strategy in The Making of Americans, a 925-page book that I haven’t read (but I’m almost a third of the way through a 16-page New Yorker article about it!). Apparently some of those pages are devoted to a fairly traditional novel. Others are not. Here’s a passage:
Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be me always my receiver…. This that I write down for you a little each day here on my scraps of paper for you is not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversatiosn to amuse you, but a record of a decent family’s progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers, and our grand-fathers, and grand-mothers, and this is by me carefully a little each day to be written down here…. And so listen while I tell you all about us, and wait while I hasten slowly forwards, and love, please, this history of this decent family’s progress.
I want to stop, mid-novel, and explain to my readers that, even though my characters might seem boring or unrealistic, they’re in fact really good folks and I'm a hardworking writer, so my readers should be nice to me and just hang in there. I’m thinking that about 500 pages of this would be about right.
But now I’m contemplating Gertrude Stein’s strategy in The Making of Americans, a 925-page book that I haven’t read (but I’m almost a third of the way through a 16-page New Yorker article about it!). Apparently some of those pages are devoted to a fairly traditional novel. Others are not. Here’s a passage:
Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be me always my receiver…. This that I write down for you a little each day here on my scraps of paper for you is not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversatiosn to amuse you, but a record of a decent family’s progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers, and our grand-fathers, and grand-mothers, and this is by me carefully a little each day to be written down here…. And so listen while I tell you all about us, and wait while I hasten slowly forwards, and love, please, this history of this decent family’s progress.
I want to stop, mid-novel, and explain to my readers that, even though my characters might seem boring or unrealistic, they’re in fact really good folks and I'm a hardworking writer, so my readers should be nice to me and just hang in there. I’m thinking that about 500 pages of this would be about right.
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