Great Throughts Treasury

"Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story?s unfolding."

"Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can?t tell all the stories ? certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence ? in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story)."

"In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always ... an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution ? which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our media-disseminated glut of unending stories."

"Everybody in our debauched culture invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom. There is a great deal of wisdom in Nadine Gordimer?s work. She has articulated an admirably complex view of the human heart and the contradictions inherent in living in literature and in history."

"Hypertext ? or should I say the ideology of hypertext? ? is ultrademocratic and so entirely in harmony with the demagogic appeals to cultural democracy that accompany (and distract one?s attention from) the ever-tightening grip of plutocratic capitalism."

"I?m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: ?Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.?"

"Most notions about literature are reactive ? in the hands of lesser talents, merely reactive."

"Literature tells stories. Television gives information."

"Literature involves. It is the re-creation of human solidarity. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances ? immures us in our own indifference."

"The greatest offense now, in matters both of the arts and of culture generally, not to mention political life, is to seem to be upholding some better, more exigent standard, which is attacked, both from the left and the right, as either na‹ve or (a new banner for the philistines) ?elitist.?"

"Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer?s virtue. For instance: ?Be serious.? By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesn?t preclude being funny."

"Still, even now, even now, literature remains one of our principal modes of understanding."

"Television gives us, in an extremely debased and untruthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. (?Time exists in order that it doesn?t happen all at once... space exists so that it doesn?t all happen to you.?)"

"The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention ? a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched."

"Obviously, I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent... This doesn?t entail moralizing in any direct or crude sense. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate ? and, therefore, improve ? our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment."

"The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.) They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or ?interesting?), that all stories are endless ? or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story."

"The work of the novelist is to enliven time, as it is to animate space."

"The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. And an ending that satisfies is one that excludes. Whatever fails to connect with the story?s closing pattern of illumination the writer assumes can be safely left out of the account."

"The primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) ... Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature ? the matchless storyteller."

"Time exists in order that everything doesn?t happen all at once ? and space exists so that it doesn?t all happen to you."

"To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention."

"To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path."

"There is an essential ... distinction between stories, on the one hand, which have, as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary."

"To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal. (Not a common experience these days?) Literature, I would argue, is knowledge ? albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge."

"When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is moreimportant than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world."

"A genuine emptiness, a pure silence is not feasible ? either conceptually or in fact. If only because the artwork exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue."

"An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he acknowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence."

""Silence" never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence: just as there can't be "up" without "down" or "left" without "right," so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence."

"Art is no longer understood as consciousness expressing and therefore, implicitly, affirming itself. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote ? evolved from within consciousness itself."

"But it is also a contradictory form of participation in the ideal of silence. It is contradictory not only because the artist continues making works of art, but also because the isolation of the work from its audience never lasts... Goethe accused Kleist of having written his plays for an ?invisible theatre.? But eventually the invisible theatre becomes ?visible.? The ugly and discordant and senseless become ?beautiful.? The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions."

"Art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention... Once the artist?s task seemed to be simply that of opening up new areas and objects of attention. That task is still acknowledged, but it has become problematic. The very faculty of attention has come into question, and been subjected to more rigorous standards..."

"Every era has to reinvent the project of ?spirituality? for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.)"

"Silence doesn?t exist in a literal sense, however, as the experience of an audience. It would mean that the spectator was aware of no stimulus or that he was unable to make a response... As long as audiences, by definition, consist of sentient beings in a ?situation,? it is impossible for them to have no response at all."

"Perhaps the quality of the attention one brings to bear on something will be better (less contaminated, less distracted), the less one is offered. Furnished with impoverished art, purged by silence, one might then be able to begin to transcend the frustrating selectivity of attention, with its inevitable distortions of experience. Ideally, one should be able to pay attention to everything."

"Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject... In principle, the audience may not even add its thought. All objects, rightly perceived, are already full."

"Committed to the idea that the power of art is located in its power to negate, the ultimate weapon in the artist?s inconsistent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer to silence."

"Modern art?s chronic habit of displeasing, provoking, or frustrating its audience can be regarded as a limited, vicarious participation in the ideal of silence which has been elevated as a major standard of ?seriousness? in contemporary aesthetics."

"The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that."

"So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience... Silence is the artist?s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work."

"The exemplary modern artist?s choice of silence is rarely carried to this point of final simplification, so that he becomes literally silent. More typically, he continues speaking, but in a manner that his audience can?t hear..."

"The efficacious artwork leaves silence in its wake. Silence, administered by the artist, is part of a program of perceptual and cultural therapy, often on the model of shock therapy rather than of persuasion. Even if the artist?s medium is words, he can share in this task: language can be employed to check language, to express muteness... Art must mount a full-scale attack on language itself, by means of language and its surrogates, on behalf of the standard of silence."

"There is no neutral surface, no neutral discourse, no neutral theme, no neutral form. Something is neutral only with respect to something else ? like an intention or an expectation. As a property of the work of art itself, silence can exist only in a cooked or non-literal sense. (Put otherwise: if a work exists at all, its silence is only one element in it.) Instead of raw or achieved silence, one finds various moves in the direction of an ever receding horizon of silence ? moves which, by definition, can never be fully consummated."

"Why has there been no new international style in 50 years? Because the new ideas, the new needs are not yet clear. (Hence, we content ourselves with variations + refinements on Art Deco and, for refreshment + fusions, parodistic ? ?pop? ? revivals of older styles.)"

"Could get a new art movement every month just by reading Scientific American."

"Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit)."

"Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon the concept of ?beauty.? As if art were ?about? beauty?as science is ?about? truth!"

"A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine? The writer?s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ? and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences."

"I don?t believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern."

"If literature itself, this great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for nearly three millennia, embodies a wisdom ? and I think it does and is at the heart of the importance we give to literature ? it is by demonstrating the multiple nature of our private and our communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish."

"Information will never replace illumination? Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a difficult responsibility. Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change."