On Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, literary sociology, totality, the systems novel, ‘real subsumption’, and the (good, actually) fiction of self-legislating form.
“You have to read books as if they’re alive. There is a fiction at the heart of fiction, not simply that the characters exist in some ‘fictional space’ or whatever; but that the story itself is alive—as its author was. The beauty that we look for in literature is the beauty of individuation, and we look for it because we need it—it’s a fiction that we need in order to speak, too. To speak to others we have to assume their aliveness. Literature emerges from that necessary fiction.”
reminded of a few words from Lyn Hejinian: "And we love detail, because every detail supersedes the universal."
“You have to read books as if they’re alive. There is a fiction at the heart of fiction, not simply that the characters exist in some ‘fictional space’ or whatever; but that the story itself is alive—as its author was. The beauty that we look for in literature is the beauty of individuation, and we look for it because we need it—it’s a fiction that we need in order to speak, too. To speak to others we have to assume their aliveness. Literature emerges from that necessary fiction.”
reminded of a few words from Lyn Hejinian: "And we love detail, because every detail supersedes the universal."