Re: The New Yorker Snubs Catcher
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@hotpop.com)
Fri, 17 Sep 1999 19:31:43 +1000
Jason wrote:
> The other day a fellow writer and I were talking about the value of
> workshopping different pieces. Inevitablly you get people saying, "this
> character is unbelievable" "I don't believe this could happen."
"there's
> no way Seymour coul really be like that." "The Glasses are too bright."
> etc etc and so on. We were looking at the Denis Johnson book "Jesus'
Son"
> and though there was no way any of that was making it past a workshop.
> Sometimes the plot is so fractured you have no idea what you just read.
> However, it's great stuff.
> I think the point of this is that often the people who "know"
> literature are blinded by the rules they've aquired. And "there is no
> accounting for taste."
True, true. I've often wondered how - if Salinger was the sort of writer to
take very much suggestion, which I doubt - Salinger's fiction would have
been altered by an intermediatary, not to mention what changes may have
already been made in his magazine work. I wonder if the virtues of his
untouched writings would outweigh the benefit of disciplining that writing.
I'm not saying JDS isn't a disciplined writer, it's just that the
experiments and bending of the limits of the restrictive
magazine-short-story format have tended to impress and intrigue me more
than his more digressive, less reined-in outpourings. I admire people who
can do new things with the rules. But as you point out, the writer is the
one who tends to know his or her work best, and it's sometimes only once
you learn the nature of their rules that you can be impressed by the way
they have used them.
Camille
verona_beach@hotpop.com