Fine. It's not my intention to try anybody's patience.
Just a final thought or two, then: it is possible, surely,
that some crime novelists -- British or otherwise -- are,
indeed, hacks. I've certainly described myself as such on
many occasions. It's possible, too, that I don't write
literature (wouldn't be the first time I've heard that and
I'm sure it won't be the last). I write because I enjoy
telling stories and entertaining people (hopefully), not
because I have something to say or because there's something
I want to discover (other than fundamentals, such as what
character X is going to do next, why he's going to do it, and
how he feels about it). My real-life worldview is extremely
grim, depressing, negative; I did write a novel like that
between my second and third books and I completely take the
'blame' for the worldview in that book for the simple reason
that it's mine. Unsurprisingly, everybody who read it hated
that particular effort with a passion so it'll never be
published. As a result, I now try to write books tha
t have at least a remote chance of selling a few
copies, so even if there is some kind of fictional authorial
worldview in one of my character-specific narratives (I'm
always happy to admit that I could be wrong -- an opinion is
neither right or wrong by definition and I'm merely
expressing mine), it's a lot different to the real-life
authorial worldview.
'Nuff from me.
Al
----- Original Message -----
From: John Williams
To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 4:39 PM
Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Hardboiled and
Marxism
Allan Guthrie wrote:
I don't really think of books as having a single
worldview unless
they're written from a single point of
view.
**************
I don't necessarily associate the worldview of a
book with the views of
a first person narrator.
miker
Exactly right. I'm afraid I haven't got a lot of
patience with this
school of anti-marxist, anti-intellectual
literary theory as often
practised by crime novelists generally, and
British ones in particular,
that basically sums up as 'don't blame me I only
work here'.
Of course, as a writer myself, I create
characters who are not me and
they say things I wouldn't say and do things I
wouldn't do, and of
course some of those things they say and do
aren't things I'd planned
for them to say and do. But taken as a whole I'm
quite sure my books
reflect my world view. I do have some idea of
what territory I'm heading
into, and inevitably that's territory I want to
head into, otherwise I'm
not sure why I would bother do it.
Or, at least, the only reason I can see to go
into territory that
doesn't speak to your personal
obsessions/interests/world view is if
you're writing purely in the hope of pleasing a
market, in which case
you're a hack (there are of course plenty of very
good hacks who cater
for a market very skilfully - they're just not in
the business of
writing literature). And most of Al's example of
writing without a world
view are examples of hack work. Thus I 'd suggest
that You Play The
Black... is a work of literature that reflects
Hallass's world view,
while Lassie is hackwork that doesn't
In general I think the process of writing a
non-hack novel for a writer
is one of self discovery. You start with a sense
that there's an aspect
of life you want to know more about, you write a
book that gets in
there, and some time, maybe years later, you can
look at that book and
kind of see that that-there-on-the-page is your
world view.
What grabs me in a writer's work is that same
sense that the writer is
stretching themselves - taking their world view
into territory that
interests them, and seeing what results.
John, wondering whether his horse isn't a bit
high.
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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