by uzwi
I think I might just repeat this once a year now–
Don’t fauxthenticate. Don’t make a text that begs, “Believe in this, please believe in this.” Rationale is the sound of the stuffing falling out, the sound of the failure of imaginative intensity. This doesn’t build a world: it acts by being present. Whatever is in it is not rationally excused or cognitively substantiated: it is present to the viewer, it is itself.
the m john harrison blog 
Happy new year M John Harrison. Before 2014 ended I had read the light trilogy and Climbers which I had to order in. For Christmas I recieved The Course of the Heart, Signs of Life and The Centauri Device. I wish I had Climbers beside me now so I could pin point those incredible moments that suddenly slipped out infront of me, but I’m sure you’re probably sick to fuck of hearing about it. Looking forward to the Centauri Device the most I think at the moment, I hear it’s considered your worst piece which is not only great for someone struggling towards the end of finishing their own first novel but also really fun to read. Writers dross is sometimes really informative to read if you’ve read their good stuff first I find.
Thanks for the link to L’Ange du Foyeur – not seen it before – wonderful…
This led me to ponder: where does one draw the fauxthentication line with visual art? How sharply need the clouds have been painted to seem to be trying too hard? If the shading on a cheekbone is exactly right, considering the placement of the light source, isn’t that begging?
Imaginative intensity in drawing is very much a gestural thing; the ‘just so’ and ‘just there’ of the right pen-stroke, and a single mo(ve)ment can be rather decisive and definitive; i don’t suppose that holds true for the act of writing?
It does seem that the Ernst painting is somewhat enabled to be itself by its legitimization as an Ernst painting, rationally excused by its accompanying art-historical narrative (world-building?)…
Enjoyable ironies. I’m ruefully amused at being inveigled into the analysis of something which I believe not just to be unanalyzable, but which actually operates through its unanalyzability. But I remain confident that L’Ange is not trying to sell the viewer on the sustainable reality of a world. We are not to assume the entity is an entity or could, in some facile faked-up system, “exist”. L’Ange acts on the viewer by being there as an image, unsupported the way the creatures of a f/sf novel are supported, by overfed descriptions of the environment which might give rise to or sustain it. & its impact on all but the most professionalised & sophisticated user of art is, I suspect, immediate & imagistic. I thoroughly enjoy your offer of art-historical perspective as a kind of worldbuilding which occurs extra to the work itself: but then, I suppose, I’d have to say that a novel such as The Lord of the Rings benefits equally from that process.
Of course, i agree. & If i meant to inveigle you into anything, it would be into making a case for that unanalyzability; i have not ze words, you see. Painting by its very nature does not have words as readily at its disposal the way your profession has ( except as worldbuilding accretion). This can lend it an aura of unaccountability which i find it is sometimes useful to pierce: “what am i doing, here, exactly?” But my thinking about my practice is always in a language alien to the thing itself. At least when you write about writing, it’s still writing.
The image succeeds or fails based on (sometimes accidental) deployment of real world material (including the physical substances of its media), the psychic throw weight of its imaginative elements and the resultant friction. Somewhere beyond the mystery is a pretty prosaic formula for the sublime.
Ibrahim: I take your point about the unfairness of your having to ask these questions in words. I think, anyway, you do have ze words and deploy them very effectively here–
http://ibrahimrineke.blogspot.nl/p/der-prozess.html
My cri de coeur, addressed to obsessive secondary-world builders, is really just: “Stop wasting time and effort on over-establishing a ‘world’ when all your fiction requires is a mis-en-scene. Or if you’re determined to fauxthenticate, at least do us the honour of not describing the result as ‘fantastic’ when it’s actually prosaic.”