RARA-AVIS: Re: "The Long Goodbye" -- More heresy

From: Eric Chambers (nqexile@yahoo.com.au)
Date: 07 Nov 2010

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    Exactly, "no more logical than the way things happen in real life." Fiction is
    *supposed to be more logical than real life.

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    Wait a minute! Who made this rule?... and why didn't they tell Jim Thompson... or James Joyce?
    ............................................................................ Gonna throw my oar into the water here.  It seems to me that a writer creates a world that doesn't exist and then  works to persuade us that it does and make us care about the characters in that world. I don't believe that, in fact, the worlds of Chandler or Thompson are any more real than the world of Lord of the Rings.However to make us believe that they are, they have to conform to the logical patterns of everyday life. That they do. Or they don't work. I think Poe somewhere outlined the rules of short story writing and stated that everything in a story, since the both the readers and the writers time is limited, and since the writer must guide the readers attention to where he/she  wants it to go, must be there for a purpose.  Where storytelling grates is where there are elements that don't seem to serve an essential purpose (in the narrative) and give the impression that the writer didn't have total control of his material.   Personally, I prefer Chandler's short stories to his longer fiction for this reason.  Joyce? Joyce belongs in another league of fiction altogether. He's doing a lot more than just telling stories to entertain. I'm curious. Is this the first time James Joyce has been mentioned in the context of noir?!
       

    Eric

          

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