That's an ordinance.
A flattening of the ground and building
cities on grids of roads laid parallel
and in precise right angles or as
in Washington DC, like spokes extending from a wheel.
As they're building the streets and cities are
mathematical constructs, it comes as no surprise
that our maps of them are.
The road map tells us that our destination lies at G8
and we read across.
And then down we identify the appropriate rectangle,
and we spot it.
If we give the activity a moment's thought,
we're simply grateful someone has taken the trouble to divide
the world up so neatly.
All right.
Here comes the argument, right.
A story is a kind of map.
The oldest extant terrestrial globe dating to 1492
was made by Martin Behaim, who lived in Nuremberg--
So he probably didn't pronounce his name that way--
called his globe Erdapfel, or Earth Apple,
although an Earth apple wasn't an apple.
An Earth apple was a potato.
So we've got metaphor after metaphor here.
Even in its roundness a terrestrial globe
is not so much a model of the Earth
as a metaphor for the Earth.
A map is at yet another remove.
The moral of a story is not merely the sum of all the words
we put on a page or on many pages.
When we talk about entering the world of a story as a reader,
we refer to things we picture or imagine
in responses we form to characters to events of which
are prompted by but not entirely encompassed by the words
on the page.
As writers we know that to be true.
At the moment I'm going to assume everybody in the room
is a writer.
If not, play along.
As writers we know that to be true because we
don't write everything out.
We trust the reader to understand
why a young American man might be
apprehensive to learn that his fiance's work will take her
to Libya--
we don't explain that.
We understand-- or what is implied
when a narrator says his family's ideal vacation is
a weekend at Dollywood.
When a character is making a joke
or when a line is intended to be sarcastic or ironic,
we want our tone to be clear.
But we resist explaining our intention in so many words
since to do so would be to defeat that intention.
We expect, we require the reader to understand
more than we spell out.
So the world of a story is a thing
we create or summon into being for which
the reader participates in creating and understanding.
A story or novel is a kind of map because like a map,
it is not a world.
But it evokes one or at least one for each reader.
All right.
So a story's like a map.
Maps are based on geometry and higher math.
Modern maps that mean to be scientifically accurate
are the product of a complex geometry.
The Earth is not perfectly round.
We can refer to it as an oblique spheroid.
But as anyone who has ever walked up a mountain
or fallen off one can attest, it's
an irregular oblique spheroid.
There is no way to plot points from the lumpy ball we call
Earth on a sheet of flat paper with a uniform degree
of accuracy.
There is unavoidably some degree of distortion.
The maps in our glove compartment,
the ones we bought for their accuracy and usefulness,
their clarity, and simplicity lie
on an invisible but essential bed of mathematics.
All right.
Form and fiction, here's a quote from Edgar Allan
Poe who wrote of "The Raven."
You know the poem.
The work preceded step by step to its completion
with the precision and rigid consequence
of a mathematical problem.
Form and fiction.
If a story is a kind of map and maps
are created through the use of projections or distortion
formulas, what are the analogous projections or distortion
formulas for fiction and on what sort of geometry are they
based?
Contemporary fiction is essentially
without defined forms.
We have the story, the novella, and the novel, the short short,
the long story, the novellete, and the novellini.
I think Bob used to have that cartoon on his door.
But those terms describe only length.
While the novella may once had been more fully defined,
right, it was originally a German form,
and it had thematic concerns and a much more narrow page length.
These days, it's really just a piece of fiction that's
almost impossible to publish.
All right.
It's some awkward length between 30 and 120 pages.
Essentially the forms of fiction are small, medium, and large.
A story can imitate other kinds of writing.
And so it can take the form we might
say of a letter, a myth, a condemned man's journal,
a scrapbook, an instruction manual for a photocopier.
I've read the stories that do all those things.
But such imitative forms are very loosely defined.
We don't talk about formal fiction versus free fiction
the way poets talk about free verse and forms.
We may talk about the episodic novel.
The buildings remain the picaresque and so forth.
But those terms don't describe the shape or size
of a narrative in any kind of detail.
Yet writers from Aristotle to Flaubert to Flannery O'Connor
have argued that form is essential.
And fiction writers have no defined forms to choose from.
Woe is us.
Some fiction writers then invent forms.
One example is the Oulipo.
Do y'all know about the Oulipo, the French group?
Or the workshop of potential literature,
began in Europe in 1960.
Members of the Oulipo--
it still exists.
I have correspondence with them.
--are interested in investigating
scientific ways of generating poems, stories, and novels
or what they call, the systematic application of text
generating methods.
In his second manifesto, François Le Lionnais writes,
"the activity of the Oulipo and the mission it is entrusted
to itself raise the problem of the efficacy and the viability
of artificial and more generally artistic, literary structures."
The efficacy of a structure, that
is the extent to which it helps a writer,
depends primarily on the degree of difficulty
imposed by rules that are more or less constraining.
Most writers and readers feel or pretend
to feel that extremely constraining structures are
mere examples of acrobatics and deserve nothing more than a wry
grin since they could never help to engender
truly valid works of art.
At the other extreme, there's the refusal
of all constraint, shriek literature,
like the dada right.
Between these two poles exists a whole range
of more or less constraining structures
which have been the object of numerous experiments
since the invention of language, primarily in poetry but also
in song and other forms, certainly in drama.
The Oulipo holds very strongly to the conviction
that one might envision many, many more of these.
All right.
So if you don't know this, a few of the constraints that Oulipo
has yielded-- and they get together.
They have meetings, I think, twice a year.
They had a big meeting in New York.
And it was written up in the "Believer," a year
or two ago, very funny, an interesting article.
But they're primarily interested in creating
methods of generating text, not so much in generating texts.
It's a bunch of eccentric guys, scientists, writers, painters,
all kinds of people.
A few of the constraints that Oulipo has yielded
include the Belle Absente, a form of acrostic encoding
in which the letters of a given name
are the only letters not used in the text.
The cento, a text composed entirely
of passages from other texts.
Eye-rhymes, a poetic form in which the inner rhymes
are visual, not sonic, such as no and now
or Kansas and Arkansas.
They look like rhymes, but they don't sound like rhymes.
The heterogram, a text in which no letter is repeated,
short text, hey.
The lipogram a text in which a given letter does not appear
and various replacement formulae.
For instance, a poem might be created
by taking a currently existing poem
and replacing each word with, say, the 11th word following
the given word in a particular dictionary
or a cookbook or an auto repair manual.
They do these things.
You can read collections of work by the Oulipo,
well, if you dare.
The most famous lipogram is George Perec's novel "A Void."
Probably some of you have read that, a novel
famous for the fact that it avoids
the letter E, which would be the one most difficult to avoid.
Another product of the workshop, which I particularly enjoy,
is Italo Calvino's "On a winter's night, a traveler."
Calvino's essay about composing that book,
which is in one of the Oulipo primers,
includes a diagram of part of its structure.
And he had this diagram.
He wrote every other chapter to conform to it.
I personally cannot imagine such a thing, but there you go.
The writers in the Oulipo believe
constraints can inspire writers to be creative in new ways.
They believe constraints can lead to a kind of freedom.
They're joined by artists as diverse
as Igor Stravinsky who said, "the more constraints one
imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that
shackle the spirit.
The arbitrariness of the constraint only serves
to obtain precision of execution"
and Paul Valéry who said, "my delight is in precision.
I feel myself putting on chains to free myself,
taking my own form."
Poets continue to use forms hundreds even
thousands of years old and a discussion of Elizabeth
Bishop's revisions of One Art, that poem, Ellen Bryant Voigt
suggests how they provide artistic opportunity,
Ellen wrote in her essay on that poem.
Bishop's biographers can't quite translate
for the general reader the extent
to which the working poet sees in initial drafts
a formal challenge.
The essential problems presented by this draft center on tone
and the high degree of repetition.
Bishop's response, the discipline
of an existing traditional form that converts reiteration
into refrain.
By the next draft, Bishop is committed
to the villanelle with a secure opening and recurrent line.
Now the work will have purpose and focus.
All of this may sound foreign to those who believe
in the essential role of impulse intuition, good fortune,
the muse, the subconscious, or whatever we call the source we
call on but cannot control.
Embracing form requires an appreciation
of the pure products of the mind an eye
for the beauty of, say, a mathematical proof.
So one of the tensions of our day
and much of the last century really
is that between realists who see all the material they'll ever
need in simulations and considerations of people's
lives and others modernists but also magical realists,
metafictionists, hypertextualists
who feel realism has done what it can do.
In his famous essay, the Literature Exhaustion.
Does anybody remember "64?"
It was in the '60s.
Barth wrote that anybody writing in the realistic tradition
was essentially writing 19th century fiction.
And then he backed up and wrote a reply
in the literature of replenishment.
But there are many people who believe
the same thing that to write--
I don't know.
For Rick Russo to write another Rick Russo novel
is for Rick Russo to be writing Dickens.
And in essence it's to be reworking the past.
The writers in the Oulipo and people
like them believe constraints can inspire writers
to be creative in new ways.
They believe constraints can lead to a kind of freedom.
They're joined as I said by artists as diverse
as Stravinsky and Paul Valéry, also people like Elizabeth
Bishop.
So there's a tension between realist and the postmodernist
and experimentalist.
Realists tend to say that work like this is cold
or is overdetermined, is lifeless, is too intellectual,
somehow not have emotional resonance.
And it's missing a lot of what they love in literature.
Art they say is reduced to idea.
A design is everything the debate between the two
is useful, I think, to the extent
that it helps us to recognize like minded fellow artists
and just as important to understand and consider
what other people are doing so that we can define and develop
our own practice or if we're reading
to try to understand why people are
doing these different things.
According to Milan Kundera, "two centuries," he says,
"of psychological realism have created some nearly inviolable
standards."
A writer must give the maximum amount of information
about a character, about his appearance, his way
of speaking and behaving.
He must let the reader know a character's past
because that's where all the motives of his behavior
are located.
And the character must have complete independence.
That is, the author with his own considerations
must disappear so as not to disturb the reader who
wants to give himself over to illusion
and take the fiction for reality.
But a character is not a simulation of a living being.
It's an imaginary being, an experimental self.
Understand me, I don't mean to scorn the reader in his desire,
as naive as it is legitimate, to be carried away
by the novel's imaginary world and to confuse it with reality.
But I don't see that technique as indispensable for that.
When we read a realistic novel, we make believe the characters
in places described to exist.
It isn't just that we can imagine the world created
through words, the power of tales
is that we want to enter their world.
We're engaging in an act similar to the one that
allows us to look at, say, a Monet painting
and see water lilies and not oil stains on a canvas.
While Kundera sees this as naive and others may call it
a romantic act of denial or self-deception,
the ability and inclination is essential
to imaginative understanding.
Post realistic work, which is what
I'm going to call all that other stuff,
work beyond or in response to realism in one way
or another simply asks us to imagine
other ways of imagining.
Some of it draws the reader's attention
to the artificial nature of its construction,
right, metafiction.
Jorge Luis Borges's stories, like Nabokov's
and Calvino's novels, are intricately mapped, as
carefully explored played and designed
as their metaphoric labyrinth chess
games and invisible cities.
At the same time, explicitly or implicitly post realism
takes as its subject our ability to imagine ourselves
in a world created entirely by the placement of ink on a page.
John Barth.
Lost in the funhouse provides a simple metaphorically potent
narrative.
A boy's trip to a boardwalk amusement park
as the spines to which are attached countless asides
discussing the techniques and conventions of fiction
and so engages us both in the world of the story, the story
of that guy going to the boardwalk and that
of a playful essay or even better in some new world one
that includes them both as well as the space in between.
"Let's pretend to believe in that," the work says to us.
But let's remember we're pretending,
which is a stance that John Barth has
again and again in his work.
Right, he's always talking to us about the fiction
and then trying to re-engage us in the fiction.
Kundera puts it this way, "a novel examines
not reality but existence."
And existence isn't what has occurred.
Existence is the realm of human possibility,
everything that man can become, everything he's capable.
Novelists draw up the map of existence
by discovering this or that human possibility.
The Kafkan world, Franz Kafka.
The Kafkan world does not resemble any known reality.
It's an extreme and unrealized possibility of the human world.
All right, an example.
Have many of you read "Arctic Dreams," the Barry Lopez book?
There's a striking illustration in that book.
And it's an illustration of part of the coastline of Alaska.
And it's drawn by a fisherman who had never been
in a helicopter or a plane.
And he puts it next to a map made
of the coast line of Alaska.
And the remarkable thing is how similar
the two are although, obviously, the fisherman had never
had that view, instead he had to project imaginatively
that perspective onto the page.
And he was able to do it fairly successfully.
"The map presents us with the reality we know,"
Denis Wood says, "as differentiated from the reality
we see and hear and feel.
Similarly as writers, were able to,
we need to project ourselves so we can recreate what
we may have never actually seen or experienced
but can imagine."
That's what science fiction is all about, among other things.
I could have been cruel.
And so that's what romance novels are all about.
But no, that's what science fiction's all about.
Kafka presents readers with the reality he knew.
And readers recognize it.
Something similar happened when Calvino read Borges.
Calvino said, "the major reason for my affinity with him
is my recognizing in Borges of an idea of literature
as a world constructed and governed by the intellect.
This is an idea that goes against the grain
of the main run of world literature
in this century, which means in the opposite direction, aiming
to provide us with the equivalent of the chaotic flow
of existence and language.
But there is also a tendency in 20th century literature,
a minority tendency which champions
the victory of mental order over the chaos of the world.
The discovery of Borges was for me
like seeing a potentiality that had always
been toyed with now being realized, seeing a world being
formed in the image and shape of the spaces of the intellect
and inhabited by a constellation of signs
that obey a rigorous geometry, Calvino on Borges."
Calvina also read Galileo and wrote
about the astronomer's notion of a mathematical alphabet,
the Renaissance key to unlocking the universe.
The goal of post-realistic work is not
to reduce the universe any more than Galileo
wanted to reduce it.
Rather like that astronomer, it aims
to find a way to understand it.
All right.
So back to the sticking point.
Maybe some of this is true.
But what if you just don't enjoy reading that fiction?
What if you don't enjoy thinking that way.
What if you don't enjoy that level of abstraction.
Well, if you don't enjoy it, I mean, you don't enjoy it.
There's nothing to be said about it.
But it is interesting to consider that all of us
operate in the world of that sort of abstraction
in different ways and sometimes without being the least
bit aware of.
This is the board for the game, Risk, which
I assume some of you played.
Or at least you've been in a house
where somebody or some six guys were playing it at length.
And this is a map of the world although it's a strange world.
You notice the United States is divided in half, East and West.
And there are all sorts of oddities about the Risk board
and what countries you know because you
played Risk and the strange shape the world takes.
But if you look at that, certainly you
understand it as a map of the world.
And you know you're playing for world domination.
And you can make sense of it.
You can get right to your fun.
This is a game that's probably played by even more people,
I'm guessing.
But I assume by even more people,
but the map is even stranger.
I mean, the game board for Monopoly
is a map of Atlantic City.
Hardly anybody thinks of it as a map of Atlantic City
because it's so idealized.
It's so abstracted.
But when you sit down to play and you think,
OK, I'm in a city.
I mean, there are other versions of the game.
But the tradition is Atlantic City.
I'm in the city.
I'm buying streets.
I'm buying real estate.
I'm building houses.
I can buy water works.
You can think of it as a city.
You can move around it and grasp the strange rules
of moving around the city.
And the board, I mean, there probably
are not very many games in the 20th century that have been
more successful than Monopoly.
There's probably a University of Arizonopoly.
It's everywhere.
So it's a game virtually everybody
can understand and play even though that's
a very strange map.
This would be a terrible map for a tourist in Atlantic City
even in the year the game was made.
But it's a tremendously useful map
for this particular movement around an idealized city.
All right, stranger still more abstract.
Let's say for a moment that that's a chessboard.
Remember a chessboard is the territory
of two equal kingdoms, two equal kingdoms at war.
And their people are represented by these odd tokens, a night,
a rook, a pawn, all that, which are
given different power, which kind of equate to what
they're worth might.
Interesting, of course, that the queen
is more valuable than the King, but that's another discussion.
But this is an abstraction of two kingdoms at war.
And if you think of this as a checkers board,
it's even more abstract because checkers,
all the pieces are identical.
The only differentiation is when you
king somebody, when you move them up to royalty,
when they get to the other side of the board--
and it's quite easy to forget that you're actually
looking at a representation of territory being fought over.
It's all reduced to the grid.
So even children-- I don't know when you first played checkers.
I can't remember when I first played checkers.
But certainly you don't have to be six.
You can be pretty young to give checkers a shot.
And even children can understand what's at stake
and how the game is played even though this doesn't look
like any place, even though the pieces don't look like anybody
fighting over anything.
They're just circles.
You can play with anything, blots on a board.
Some people feel fiction based on constraints,
fiction that doesn't pretend to be real
seems false or lifeless.
And some of it does.
Far from celebrating the results of every experiment,
members of the Oulipo themselves are
quick to acknowledge many of the poems created by replacement
strategies are tedious.
If you read one of their primers,
if you're inspired to look at their work,
if you haven't, a lot of it is very funny
because the only way to get through a lot of this stuff
is for it to be very funny because the constraints of they
place on themselves are ridiculous.
But we all use constraints.
And we all not only tolerate but work at a very high level
of abstraction.
We even played at a high level of abstraction.
If we've abandoned board games for television,
the evidence is just as strong.
The constraints on the script of a network situation comedy
are as naughty as a sustinance.
The most popular fiction of our day on screens large and small
and in genre novels is by far the most rigid.
So a writer for say, "MASH," if anybody is old enough
to remember "MASH--
But a writer for "MASH" was working
under far more constraints than the typical fiction
writer in the program here at U of A.
You've got 26, 27 minutes for the episode.
You've got certain beats you have to hit.
Certain times commercials have to come in.
You have three storylines.
This applies to almost any network situation comedy.
HBO has changed the rules.
But you would have three storylines.
You'd have one that serves as a frame.
Radar loses his Teddy bear.
Radar finds his Teddy bear.
And there's some joke about it in between.
And then there's usually two storylines
that cover the duration of the show,
one more serious, one different tonally, one more comic.
And they focus on different characters.
The template was very strong.
And there are a lot of constraints
placed on the people who try to write for any
of those shows, [INAUDIBLE].
So it's not as if work that's less brainy
is necessarily simpler to write.
In fact, it will be much more complicated if you
think of this is complicated.
One more example.
And if there any musicians or any songwriters,
you know [? this ?] all the time.
You walk around with a certain song forms in your head.
If you write the blues, you have blues chords in your head.
And you work within them.
You don't lose when you restrict.
No, you gain.
That's true of all art.
"What killed off the theater, the glory of which
was Shakespeare, had been, TS Eliot
postulated, its limitless appetite for realism,"
So says Hugh Kenner in his biography of animator
extraordinaire, Chuck Jones.