Too Many Revelations...

I e-mailed my master's thesis to my committee last night.   The stories were done, in the sense that I was tired of looking at them and could come up with no further corrections.  Or maybe it was the fact that each change I was making didn't seem to improve them, or maybe even that each change I made improved them immeasurably but required me to make further changes throughout, so that the sense of it all was lost.  Anyway, I was tired of looking at the damned thing.

The stories gave me less difficulty than the critical introduction.  I had to display what I had learned in the MSU writing program.  This was not made easier by the fact that I had completed my coursework for the degree almost twenty years ago.

Each time I sat down to work on my critical introduction, I had a new revelation about my work.  The best thing to do would have been to seamlessly interweave those revelations into the introduction to produce a coherent whole, but apparently that was not to be.  My revelations at times conflicted, or at the very least were not complementary.

For example, last night's revelation was that plot is an artificial structure in a story.  What is real is character. In order to achieve pure mimesis, a story should not have a plot.  This, of course, seems absurd on the face of it.  Plot is one of the essential elements to story.  That lead me to the further thought that plot is created by the reader, just as meaning is created by the participant in life.  So meaning in life is an artificial construct.  Of course, the fact that it is artificial does not lesson its importance.  We must create our own meaning in life.  It is what is to be human.

So a good story for me allows the reader to create meaning, and construct plot and purpose.  This would allow a story to better achieve mimesis.  And the meaning created may be the same for many people, because we are all shaped by relatively similar influences.  But the meaning will vary for some.  And a writer's job is to give meaning to those who want it, and put in the possibility of various meanings.  In order to achieve this, stories must be left to some extent open ended and full of possibility.

So anyway, I have brilliant leaps of logic like this (often spurred by a paradoxical consideration of Stephen Crane poetry and Douglas Adams tomfoolery).  Then I try to explain it, and then tomorrow I could reread that or listen to something else that would set off a new train of thought and I'd be gone on that again.

Thinking is fun.  Everyone should do it, but maybe moderation in thought is as important as moderation in everything else.