Read this today in the first chapter of Techniques of the Selling Writer
, by Dwight V. Swain, a book published in the mid-60s but which, it seems, may prove my most valuable purchase re: the art of writing novels. Many references to the book can be found scattered about the ‘Net; and, the reviews on Amazon are extremely positive.
The first chapter in the book is titled “Fiction and You,” which, incidentally, may be peculiarly rich in metaphorical implications.
This section might be interesting for those who spend much time musing on the state of education, on contemplation of the implications of performativity, on exploring the state of our modern world and making leaps into futurism, as well as for those who are taking a stab at creating works of fiction.
There are two types of mind in this world…two approaches to the field of fiction.
One type is that of the objectivist, the man who sees everything analytically. Three things warp his orientation:
a. He depends on facts.
b. He distrusts feelings.
c. Therefore, he tries to write mechanically.
This man may have an inclination to create. But he’s the product of an educational system that focuses on facts the way a Mohammedan zeros in on Mecca; and, in his case, the education took.
Now there’s nothing wrong with facts as such. Educators of necessity seek a common ground on which to reach their students.
But one of the characteristics of a fact is that it has a record of past performance. That’s what makes it a fact: Phenomenon X behaved and/or existed in thus-and-such a manner yesterday, last week, last month, last year. So, we have reason to anticipate that it will behave and/or exist the same way tomorrow.
This means that to deal with facts, you must devote a great deal of attention to analysis of their track records. What did they do in previous encounters, and how did they do it? They’re like cases in law: Past history dominates. First, last, and always you check precedents.
If this were as far as the matter went, there wouldn’t be any real headache. But the educators refused to let it go at that. Facts were easy to present. Knowledge of them was easy to test. In many areas they were of great practical use. Centering attention on them obviated the complications that went with dealing with each student as an individual.
So, educators in the lead, an entire society plunged into wholesale fact-worship.
….
What happens when a man conditioned to such a mode of thinking decides he wants to create something?
Naturally enough, he approaches it as a problem in fact-finding.
That is, he looks to stories already written…studies them…attempts to dig out the common denominators that they share.
From this survey, he deduces rules. Then, he tries to write stories of his own that fit these regulations.
A story, thus, is for him an exercise in mechanics…a sort of juggling of bits and pieces; a putting together of a literary jigsaw puzzle. Seeing the product but not the process, viewing the end result rather than the dynamic, forward-moving forces that brought it into being, more often than not he ends up with something limp and inert.
….
Now this is a dangerous distortion of attitude in any circumstances, even though you still may be able to function satisfactorily enough in spite of it so long as your job is merely to saw boards or sew seams or mix premeasured chemicals.
In a creator, however, such a pattern looms as utter and complete disaster.
Why?
Because the creator automatically is doomed to failure if he assumes that past and precedent can provide him with certainty and guarantee of success.
By the way, I’m not sure I can so easily draw a straight line from standard education practices through to the macrodynamics of society and cultures at large, or even through to a description of how individuals tend to operate. For one, I suspect that fact-based cognitive strategies existed before modern education gained a foothold—even if, as has often been the case, the “facts” were not always facts. For another, even given an exacerbation of the type of assembly-line construction that a fact-based educational approach might promote, students seem far and away disinclined to take education very seriously: There may be a boiling-of-the-frog dynamic as students against their will are indoctrinated into fact-based cognitive strategies subtly over time, but most of the particulars are lost in time—if they are ever acquired in the first place—and in general students came into the formal education process already well-indoctrinated into fact-based cognition. In sum, I’m prone to believe that formal education as we know it is merely a symptom and not a cause.
Why?
Performativity is older, deeper than formal education. We might even say that it is primal education, or the basis of our ability to learn and know. Questions of nature vs.nurture regarding the origin of the importance of performativity seem to me to be largely moot—beyond the larger question of whether, and how, we might escape any of the traps that come with a performativity-based learning paradigm. If nature is the primary cause of this paradigm, and genetics resulting via evolution have led to our method of learning and knowing, then chances are very good that we will have to accept the workings of performativity, including the traps. If nurture plays a major role in establishing the performative learning strategy, we might be able to game the system or inoculate ourselves against the most pernicious traps that otherwise fall in our way. (I do not have any reason to believe that nurture alone is the cause of the existence of performativity; I find this proposition to be absurd; so, I am willing to accept only that nurture might play a significant role in determining how the natural paradigm is presented—in the way that all runners use the same physiological processes but some learn better strategies, or techniques, than others, but also have common limits.)
Because performativity is primal education, a system of recognizing, judging, and reacting to performance (the reaction being, of course, another performance, whether viewed by the performer internally—”the mind’s eye”—or viewed by others and the performer externally as it presents in action), is necessary. Facts are merely repetitive performance:
But one of the characteristics of a fact is that it has a record of past performance. That’s what makes it a fact.
With repetition comes learning and the ability to more easily recognize performances and make predictions on the basis of performances one recognizes. One may re-act, or perform on the basis of recognized facts, and have some comfortable assurance that one’s own performance in reaction will lead to expected iterations of future performance.
Yes, but importantly facts do not appear in isolation; they are context-based; facts appear in conglomerate in what might be called larger works of…fiction. Metaphorically at least (and perhaps more significantly) any appearance of a fact is also the appearance of a narrative structure, in which multiple facts present together. For instance, we have the fact of gravity, recognized long ago by prehistoric humans even though Newton hadn’t yet had the decency to be born. These prehistoric humans had no need of formal education for recognizing this fact; they could see the predator jumping down upon them or their own companion making an unfortunate fall from a high ledge in a mountain pass. When they threw a rock out of frustration, they had come to expect that the rock would not continue flying upward or outward forever. But if some advanced extraterrestrial explorers had taken one of these prehistoric humans, whisked him to their ship above the Earth, fitted him out in a space suit, opened their docking bay hatch, and held him at the edge of the hatch, you can imagine that the unfortunate party would be terrified of the long fall before him. Context.
Now this is a dangerous distortion of attitude in any circumstances, even though you still may be able to function satisfactorily enough in spite of it so long as your job is merely to saw boards or sew seams or mix premeasured chemicals.
When context is limited, prediction becomes safer. Unfortunately, many statisticians and pollsters like to invent absolutes and universals from statistics that are 0%>100%. We are told that 60% of an American state consistently votes for Republican candidates and that this means the state is 100% Republican; it is red. We are told that X% of those who eat fried bacon have Z% greater chance of dying at an earlier age than those who do not; but then what are we to make of the 1-X%; which group is my group or your group? That last question is made more difficult for constructing a lifestyle when you add other foods, other habits or activities, other geographical or environmental concerns—i.e., other context. In creating absolutes and universals, statisticians create false context or, at the very least, blurry context. They might as well say, “You live in the Universe and you are going to die.” But then they couldn’t benefit from the presentation of options which purport to elevate their audience’s ability to control future iterations of performance.
Alas, there will be future iterations of performance. This blurriness of context occurs as a consequence of the performative paradigm and ought to be considered its most vicious trap, one not always easily spotted. For instance, one often finds an assumption of repetition in those who study conflict and war: any new occasion for conflict automatically produces questions about what Sun Tzu or Carl von Clausewitz might have said on the matter, or of what the lessons of the Crimean War or the Vietnam War might mean for the new conflict. Never mind the fact that Clausewitz and Sun Tzu are not around in our present context and never had to conceive of war in our present context, or that prior wars happened in a prior context. How else are we to understand the present if not through the lens of prior performances? Currently, the GOP in America may be asking itself the very same question; certainly, the Romney marketing strategy seemed to have mistaken the present context for a past context. And yet, humans continue to need nutritious food, clean water, breathable air, and shelter; and that pesky fact of gravity weighs us down.
THE TRAP
This trap of performativity has a two-fold nature.
First, we may only recognize performance to the degree that it is familiar to us. We may evaluate it only insofar as we recognize it. Further, we may only conceive of, and conscientiously enact, a response to it if we recognize it. We depend on repetition.
Second, our own points of view are always, always limited in context. Consequently, we might say that each of us has a narrative, but that, to the degree that our individual contexts vary, our narratives diverge between us but also diverge from the Whole Narrative—i.e., the Whole Context.
Biological/Genetic Keys. (Necessity) Some facts appear to be more key than others. For instance, the biological necessity of food and water for survival is a fact. Throughout time, when humans lacked either of these, they not only began to feel ill, but they eventually died; a repetition of these performances has made the necessity of food and water a fact. One can possibly imagine a far-future scenario in which this is not the case—genetic alterations which allow the absorption of required nutrients directly from the surrounding air, or direct absorption of ambient energy for sustenance—but for now, these facts seem key to the context of our daily lives, even when much else may change from year to year. Because this is a dependable fact, we have an ability to conceive of and conscientiously enact a response to the fact: we work jobs, apply for unemployment insurance, live at home with mom and dad, or steal from supermarkets and convenience stores. Some of us may even grow our own food exclusively—but facts have changed and many of us could no longer do that well enough to actually survive for long periods.
Environmental Keys. (Opportunity) Other facts become key only to the degree that they exhibit a strong influence on those primary facts. Having the technology to refrigerate food and drive to the supermarket, and the economic system that can distribute food across a society from nodes of production (along with technology allowing this) means having a set of facts, or narratives, that direct our own performances, or our activities. We can maintain a job, deposit weekly paychecks, use debit cards for purchasing food, and so forth: if those facts change, we can get handouts, borrow, or steal, as the need arises. Having the climate and geological requirements for, first, producing food in production nodes, and, second, for transporting that food, also leads to the creation of these narratives. One might imagine a future Earth in which the environment is so devastated that either humans have become extinct or else have been forced to engineer protected environments for the continued production of food supplies; or, future colonization on the Moon or Mars, with similar protected environments. Whatever the imagined future conditions, narratives will align with them: imagine waiting on your Moon colony for a delivery of foodstuffs from Earth that never comes; or, having all activity of the inhabitants centered around the maintenance and protection of localized nodes of food production on the Moon.
Sociological Keys. (Individual Performance) Yet other facts arise from the presence of and performance of other individuals. These others are also following a narrative shaped by biological necessity and environmental opportunity—but although their biological facts may be quite like your own, their environmental facts might diverge significantly. For instance, one man might live in an environment with plenty of job opportunities, of which he has availed himself, while another does not and is in fact homeless; the homeless man might be forced to beg or steal; and the two might have an unexpected meeting precisely when both happen to be very hungry. All individuals perform on the basis of their own facts, their own narrative. In some respects, these other individuals are a part of the environment any single individual inhabits—but more variable. While biological facts may remain relatively static, environmental facts and sociological facts interact and alter one another in ways that may occasionally become chaotic, particularly when individuals step out of their normal environment. Even for individuals in a common larger environment, smaller or more immediate environments may vary: Buffy and Martha live in the same small town, but one lives on the “right side of the tracks” and the other lives in a trailer park on the wrong side; or one lives in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and the other comes from an atheist libertine family of intellectuals living a few blocks away. To the degree that others within a larger environment are a part of the environment and a familiar part for all involved, the performances between them may become predictable: Buffy harasses Martha in school and Martha just takes it; the homeless man begs the employed man for some loose change and the employed man…..gives him some or walks away while averting his eyes. Unfortunately, individuals are not institutions, and unless there is daily interaction between them—i.e., they are not strangers to one another—one’s “facts” about them might be quite wrong. Even daily interaction does not guarantee a full understanding of the narratives of others. Martha brings a gun to school one day; the employed man is a murderous psychopath who preys upon the homeless.
The trap is sprung when we assume repetition in the absence of an understanding of the full context of any situation. The full context, as described above, is a conglomeration of performances; when that conglomeration is repetitive—those performances occur together, repeatedly—we may more easily recognize it, judge it, and react conscientiously to it. An alteration of the context, even a slight variation, may alter the relevance of any single performance that we discern within the conglomeration. Because we depend on a repetition of performance for recognition and judging, we might often focus unduly on what we recognize and assume that we are seeing clearly what we are not, missing the larger context. That homeless man on the street? He is really an actor filming a television special about how homeless people are treated. Buffy? She’s secretly in love with Martha but doesn’t know how to express it except through social harassment. (An interesting story idea: Published accounts of Buffy’s murder dig up her journals in which she’s writing about her crush on Martha; Martha, who is a lesbian and never knew that Buffy was also gay, and who had been terribly lonely, desperate in her life, reads of these journals, reads the sick innuendo the media gives to the story, and hangs herself in her cell. Sad, yes; but then many narratives are. Perhaps Martha misjudges her context—there is a guard nearby who rescues her just before she dies, holding her legs until someone can come to help.)
AVOIDING ONE TRAP (INTO ANOTHER?)
A story, thus, is for him an exercise in mechanics…a sort of juggling of bits and pieces; a putting together of a literary jigsaw puzzle. Seeing the product but not the process, viewing the end result rather than the dynamic, forward-moving forces that brought it into being, more often than not he ends up with something limp and inert.
Swain’s broader point, expressed elsewhere, is that the analytic writer of fiction, who focuses on past performance as guide for the narrative he is about to create, is merely recreating the past. It is almost as if he is transcribing a novel or novels that have already been written. The names may have been changed, the overt plot may seem different in particulars, but he is essentially creating a mathematical equation through repetitive performance: That way leads to cliché, predictability, and so forth. Other novels have already been written; now, write your own.
Brought into the everyday world, we might consider two clichés of our own:
“Fighting yesterday’s war” / “Preparing for yesterday’s war”
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The latter is particularly interesting if we consider our present context of narrative and fact. If you are conscientiously choosing your own performances based on fact, or on witnessed repetitive performances, and you consider that method of choosing action to be the most rational method possible, then expecting some kind of entirely new iteration of performances following your own would be rather insane. The old familiar performances, which lead you to react in the old familiar ways, would lead to the old familiar results.
This interpretation need not be the whole story, however. Given each person’s limited narrative—i.e., limited awareness of context—there is always room for hope that you might be wrong, that context is other than you perceive it to be or may well change at some future date, and that indeed surprise results might ensue—someday. But acting from such a viewpoint couldn’t be called conscientious acting, I think.
Used in the context of novel writing, however, the latter would mean: Don’t expect your novel to be novel if you are merely stringing together past performances you’ve gleaned from a study of “what works” from previous works of fiction. Don’t think that you are about to create Something New and Wonderful by repeating the same things that have been repeated endlessly before in previous works. Similarly, the first quote would mean that you should avoid mimicking the winning strategies from past wars (novels) because your current effort has novel requirements.
Swain cleverly addresses this, after the passage quoted at the head of this blog post, by focusing onto the issue of feelings: It is an ambiguous, troublesome word for approaching this subject analytically, but that’s the point. An author first must have authentic feelings about what he wants to write—and he always does—but importantly his efforts must focus on transmitting those feelings to readers so that they feel as he does about all that happens within the novel. From a pragmatic point of view, the term feelings signifies the way in which a novel may become novel: The author’s subjective world, or his evaluation of and attachment to what he writes, takes on an objective nature presentable to others. The performance they see, although peripherally objective, is his subjectivity; and, it may become subjective for them as well. It is the transmission of a personal narrative—limited though it be, limited as it must necessarily be—through the medium of a novel.
For example: The town in which both Buffy and Martha live may be an objective fact, in which case it is some vague Midwestern town in America; but what the author chooses to have them do within that town—Buffy’s and Martha’s recognition of performances, evaluation of performances, and reactions to performances—how an array of other characters in that town witness and react to events, and the final results of all and sundry, are the author’s own. The whole thing together is the author’s town, distinguished from some vague, objective Midwestern town, and no one else’s. If he does it right.
The trap is sprung when we assume repetition in the absence of an understanding of the full context of any situation.
In the case of the jigsaw-puzzle-writing novelist, the attempt to create something new via repetition of successes gleaned from a careful study of other successes is a sign of having fallen into The Trap. He has failed to understand the full context of his novel; he has not grasped the fact that unique characters by their uniqueness create a unique context for his novel, that unique circumstances of the environment create unique contexts. No, they can just be plugged into a Standard Format with a Standard Strategy utilizing the Standard Methods and all will work out to create Something New; the standard development will be received by the reading public in the standard way, “Wow!”
So much for standards.
It should be obvious that the transmission of subjectivity requires narrative consistency. The conglomerate of performances within a novel must a) remain internally coherent, and b) remain subjective, or unique.
On “a” I will point to the “Keys” outlined above as a broad sketch. In creating a fictional world, nonetheless the individual parts must fit within the narrative structure.
One of my problems with some modern science fiction in the cinema is the fact that some one or a few key scientific novelties will be presented but no effort (or very little effort) is made to show how those novelties affect the societies in which they appear. Presumably, these amazing advances have no effect beyond merely existing. For example, the movie Surrogates adds a technology to our current world, the ability to live our lives through surrogate robots — our minds in those robots; they are our surrogate bodies — that go about the world doing all the things we would do; but one wonders why no one in that world chooses to go about as a hobbit, a dragon, a car, a giant — something that presumably would happen, given the state of our culture and the human imagination. Furthermore, this ability to go around inside of robots seemingly has little effect on the types of jobs that exist, the political and government systems, and so forth.
Perhaps an even worse example might be from a fantasy novel I recently read, in which the protagonist goes about handing out “gold pieces” to servants as tips or to merchants even though the author also mentions that new gold deposits were only recently discovered in nearby hills and smugglers are arrested and sentenced to bond-slavery for smuggling even a tiny bit of this presumably scarce resource. In that same book, the main character learns that he has only one year to be with his new love before a wizard takes his lover away—but on the very day that’s going to happen, the character is busy doing something else until a secondary character causes him to suddenly remember that OMG It’s Today!!!! As if he wouldn’t have had that fear in his head for months and have been making plans for it already. (The entire narrative structure of the short book, from at least the 2/3 mark on, would have had to be altered to account for adding this emotional and psychological consistency, including a long series of responses, or actions, by the main character as he planned their escape, which is why I presume the author said to hell with it…..)
Internal coherence within the novel means: The performance of the key facts affects the performance of the other key facts within the novel, and these effect the novel.
On “b” I will say, see “a.” If one has built up a credible world, with internal narrative coherence, chances are very good that the result will be uniquely subjective. However, a caveat: One can build coherence by repeating back to an audience what it already expects. I.e., an obsessive paint-by-numbers strategy might actually fill in all the numbers with the appropriate colors, but this does not make the work particularly novel, just a preformed coherence that is performed for an audience. See for example the enchanting little book The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel
for a lengthy alphabetical list of fantasy clichés that most readers of fantasy novels will recognize immediately. The fact that one can recognize these outside the narrative of any novel should be a clue. The fact that I have used right-side-of-the-tracks Buffy and trailer-park Martha, and schoolyard bullying, as an example in this blog post may be a clue; or, not.
First, we may only recognize performance to the degree that it is familiar to us. We may evaluate it only insofar as we recognize it. Further, we may only conceive of, and conscientiously enact, a response to it if we recognize it. We depend on repetition.
The second spring of the trap is triggered when, fearing cliché, the performer chooses incoherence as a performative strategy. Hamlet used this strategy rather well, but even Polonius, one of his victims, remarked to himself and the audience,
[Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method
in 't.
Readers must have facts, repeating performances that they recognize, in order to evaluate what they read and to react to it. Hamlet used the reactions of his victims to plot out their habit of interpretation and thus to trick out their characters for his own evaluation; also, to verify what he already suspected of them. Even though there was an obvious incoherence in his performances, there were niggling coherences as well for his audience members. Authors have stretched the limits of coherence from time to time; but if the goal is a transmission of a subjective narrative, the possibility of transmission introduces a new level of coherence for consideration. Authors do not need to trick out the characters of their audience members for evaluation; indeed, authors for the most part will never see the play-by-play reactions of their readers. However fantastical the key elements of an author’s novel might be, or however novel, they must be recognizable. To some degree, the author can make this happen through detailed development of the inner coherence of his novel; but every reader will bring to a novel a long history of facts, a memory of prior performances, with which the author will have to contend.
, one of my included pieces (copy-pasted from an older blog post) included in its conclusion that, 
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