Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Maltby
Hmm... are you a speech writer, perhaps?
I can't conceive of anyone that I could call a hack, much less a "great writer" that would hold such an opinion. The whole point of writing anything is to communicate some coherent idea. If you consider incoherent speech, written down or otherwise, to be of value you might have a future in the "music" business, but I have no idea where you are finding these "Great Writers". Is this a New York City thing?
Luck;
Ken
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The problem is that you're privileging plot as the only possibly mode of narrative coherence. Works to which that idea doesn't really apply include
The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett,
Quarantine, by Juan Goytisolo,
Replacement, by Tor Ulven,
Concrete, by Thomas Bernhard,
The Lime Twig, by John Hawkes, and the list goes on.
You could, of course, do the obvious and facile thing: Look for synopses of those novels and then claim that story was the primary concern. But that would be missing the method and focus of those novels, which actually have to be read for their point of emphasis to be understood.
John Hawkes was famously disinterested in continuity to the point that I think his carefree discarding of plotlines is a defect. But that he felt that way about conventional ideas of story form is common knowledge.
Does anyone who manages to read Robbes-Grillet actually proceed due to involvement with the story?