All right, so as writers of course,
we can decide to fill in the blanks.
We can write genre fiction, write stories
for children that include all the answers,
or we can withhold a great deal more.
But I'm going to skip over my example of that,
and instead, show you for just a minute some fractals.
Everybody here know fractals?
Mathematicians in the audience?
Some people, yeah.
Just in case you don't know, say for instance,
we were starting with a line segment up at the very top.
And say we decided to replace every line
segment in our drawing with the thing labeled first iteration.
And so that's the example of the first iteration.
The second iteration, you take every line segment
in that drawing, and you replace it with that same thing.
Then, the third time, you're still doing the same thing.
You just see it gets more intricate.
And that would be the fourth, and you could go
on and on and on and on and on.
And some of you by now--
I mean, probably all of us somewhere
have seen fractal art.
We might not have been aware of what it was
and how it was working.
What's interesting about that work
and about fractals is that it can start-- in fractal math
can start to replicate shapes in nature
even though it starts off as it seems
a purely mathematical and maybe even arbitrary construct.
If you think about this shape right here, for instance,
as the image of a shoreline, of a lake, of a pond,
of a glass of water--
it wouldn't be a shoreline, but the line
around a glass of water-- and you
kept doing the same thing, kept looking more and more closely,
you realize that in some way, that circumference is infinite.
You can keep looking more and more closely.
You can keep finding more and more detail.
And so, among other things, that's
my argument for why realism is inexhaustible.
You can keep looking.
You can keep finding more.
But a fractal landscape, which can look like a kind of map,
is made by similar replacements.
Here's a rectangle divided into four.
You can apply to it a formula which
would tilt the four parts of the rectangle.
And you can keep doing it.
And so eventually, you get to what
looks like a topographical map.
And it starts to look like an arbitrary form, although it's
created by certain repetitions.
You can also use fractals to imitate forms found in nature.
So there's a fractal fern.
That fractal is not a fern, obviously,
and it's not identical to any particular fern.
But by being patient with the math,
you can imitate a different kind of fern,
or you can even try to imitate some particular fern.
While Euclidean geometry describes man-made objects,
fractals are more useful for describing
shapes found in nature.
The lesson for writers of realism
is that the representation of natural shapes
is achieved not by abandoning geometry necessarily,
but sometimes, by embracing a more rigorous geometry.
So back to Chuck Jones.
I can't believe that thing disappeared.
I wonder what happened.
But anyway, you're still imagining a river.
Chuck Jones was a fan of the work done by the Disney studio
when he was young.
And say, Sleeping Beauty, imagine
Sleeping Beauty, or Beauty and the Beast,
the dance scene in Beauty and the Beast, which you've got
actually, two actors dancing.
And then you move back, and you generate
by computer in Beauty and the Beast
the cartoon image of the characters dancing.
Well, Chuck Jones was a fan of that early Disney work,
but he grew to believe--
and this is a crucial point for a fiction writer,
I think-- that believability was more important than realism.
Inspired by that landscape of Arches National Monument--
some of you have probably been there,
and that's why the backgrounds of Roadrunner cartoons
often looks like the arches in Arches National Monument.
He pushed further and further into a stylized American
Southwest until it became otherworldly.
His trains and trucks had no human drivers.
His coyote looked like a hobo.
His Roadrunner was impossibly clever.
Yet Wile E. Coyote retained some of the physical characteristics
and apparent desperation of actual coyotes.
And Roadrunner is based on an actual running bird.
The challenge in the cartoons was
to strike a balance between the two worlds.
Hugh Kenner says, "Jones works close to the mysterious zone,
where we viewers connect pen and ink artifice
with the world we inhabit."
In some way or another, all writing connects ink artifice
with the world we inhabit.
When we read that Barth story, Lost in the Funhouse or Lolita,
if we aren't persuaded to think of the characters
in those narratives as people, if we aren't
repulsed by Humbert Humbert and occasionally amused by him,
the fiction fails.
But if we're only impatient in Barth's story
because it seems we'll never get to the beach,
or we feel exasperated in the Kundera novel
because the narrator keeps interrupting the story--
if we only feel, we're missing the opportunity
provided by fiction that means to engage
our mind in other ways.
Some of the work referred to as postmodern
is difficult to access even for dedicated readers.
Some of it reads like calculus.
Such work is probably more a tangent
than the next prevailing tradition.
Nevertheless, a visit with the old poets
and other post-realists is likely to be
provocative and inspiring even to writers
who have no intention of creating
new methods of text generation.
John Barth used the phrase of Borges
to describe Borges' own stories.
He said, "they combine the algebra and the fire."
Right, the math and the emotion, the analytical and the felt.
Borges himself said, "I think cleverness is a hindrance.
I don't think a writer should be clever,
or clever in a mechanical way."
And even though Nabokov called his characters galley slaves
of the locations [? for ?] [? scene ?] sets he
constructed, he said, "for me a work of fiction exists only
insofar as it affords me what I so bluntly call aesthetic
bliss, a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other
states of being where art is the norm."
I think Nabokov's definition of art
would surprise those who find him overtly intellectual.
Elsewhere, he said famously, "you read an artist's book
not with your heart.
The heart is a stupid reader.
And not with your brain, but with your brain
and your spine."
Ladies and gentlemen, the tingle in your spine
tells you what the author felt and wished you to feel.
And again and again, the most famous post-realists
say something similar.
Kundera says that, "Cervantes and other early novelists
were not looking to simulate reality.
They were looking to amaze, astonish, and enchant.
They were playful.
The great European novel started out as entertainment.
And all real novelists are nostalgic for it."
If you hang out in a fiction workshop for very long,
you'll meet at least two or three fiction writers
who really want to write mysteries,
or who want to write a book with the appeal of a detective
novel but a literary novel.
We want the fun of those novels married to the ideas
or the emotions of literary fiction, or.
What we tend to call literary fiction.
John Barth said, "if I believed my writing was
no more than formal fun and games,
I'd take up some other line of work."
The subject of literature according to Aristotle
was human life, its happiness and its misery.
I agree with Aristotle.
What we want is passionate virtuosity.
If these pieces aren't also moving,
the experiment is unsuccessful.
Calvino's own fiction demonstrates his interest
in the devices and experiments of the Oulipo.
But his work, I'll argue, is also
full of wit and compassion, a fundamental interest
in human emotion and desire, including, but not limited to,
the desire for new ideas.
His work demonstrates the victory of mental order
over the chaos of the world.
And that's a humane victory.
It's a celebration, rather than a denial of humanity.
In his essay on Galileo, Calvino wrote that for the Renaissance
astronomer, "the geometric or mathematical alphabet
of the Book of Nature will be the weapon
which, because of its capacity to be broken down
into minimal elements and represent all forms of movement
and change, will abolish the opposition
between the unchanging heavens and the elements of the Earth."
And I think somewhere in here is one Galileo's drawings,
his diagram of the moon.
Half a century before, Gerardus Mercator,
who published the first book called
Atlas, invoked Atlas the myth for his book,
thinking not of the character doomed to bear
the weight of the world--
the guy struggling under the globe--
but of the one in other versions of the myth,
a mortal elevated by the gods for deriving
the science of astrology, and so discovering
the arrangement of the stars.
In that version of the story, Atlas
is less the literal holder of the world on his shoulders
than the beholder of it.
He alone among mortals, can contemplate the divine
and take measure of the cosmos because
of what he's understood.
Mercator, a religious man, believed
that careful observation coupled with divine mathematics
would allow us something approaching the immortals'
view of the universe.
In a similar way, fiction's geometry
is what allows us to build ladders
from the world we live in to the worlds we imagine.
I have one last thing to look at.
It's a drawing by [? the ?] [? name ?] Charles Ritchie.
It's Pegasus, the constellation above our house,
with its myriad of geometries.
Anyway, there are a bunch of strange ideas
about fiction, realism, the other stuff, cartoons,
things like that.
If anybody has arguments, ideas, questions, maybe,
I'd be happy to field them.
Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]