"Meaning" partially or totally converted into "use" is the secret behind the widespread strategy of literalness, a major development of the aesthetics of silence. A variant on this: hidden literality, exemplified by such different writers as Kafka and Beckett. The narratives of Kafka and Beckett seem puzzling because they appear to invite the reader to ascribe high-powered symbolic and allegorical meanings to them and, at the same time, repel such ascriptions. Yet, when the narrative is examined, it discloses no more than what it literally means. The power of their language derives precisely from the fact that the meaning is so bare.
The effect of such bareness is often a kind of anxiety -- like the anxiety produced when familiar things aren't in their place or playing their accustomed role. One may be made as anxious by unexpected literalness as by the Surrealists' "disturbing" objects and unexpected scale and condition of objects conjoined in an imaginary landscape. Whatever is wholly mysterious is at once both psychically relieving and anxiety-producing. (A perfect machine for agitating this pair of contrary emotions: the Bosch drawing in a Dutch museum that shows trees furnished with ears at the sides of their trunks, as if they were listening to the forest, while the forest floor is strewn with eyes.) Before a fully conscious work of art, one feels something like the mixture of anxiety, detachment, pruriency, and relief that a physically sound person feels when he glimpses an amputee.
"The Aesthetics of Silence" (1967)
in Styles of Radical Will
01 September 2005
Sontag Quote for the Day
To initiate the quoting of Sontag and Kael, here's something I sent to Jeff VanderMeer after he alerted me to this discussion of "whether the critical approach and the interpretation which criticism necessitated means that the naievety is lost" in SF and fantasy. It's not exactly about the same thing, but it's interesting nonetheless: