Gmail Chat With Cassandra Troyan
- me: i need to make a new blog post but idk what. and i think i'm going to sit down during winter break and just completely write my novel. right now i just have a couple scenes and specific images and lines i'd like to use.
- how do you feel about combining minimalism in terms of the concrete dialogue and actions and then postmodern 'jargon' in the setting up of landscape and interior motives and other narrator-related do-tells?
- Cassandra: that's fine.
- That's like Higg's novel
- Which I much orefer
- *prefer
- and how I prefer to write as well
- me: you haven't read it. i wouldn't call it a novel. at all really. i know that's the point but still, i would not use it as a model as to what i'm trying to do
- it's good
- but
- the narrative is the lack of one
- Cassandra: i have listened to the audio book
- which is the whole novel
- me: you listened to the whole thing?
- Cassandra: its hours long
- it made me feel a little crazy
- me: haha
- Cassandra: weird dreams
- me: how does he go about reading it?
- Cassandra: I would say their is a narrative
- weird ways
- it has found sounds, and performative elements
- *there
- me: cool.
- Cassandra: what is a narrative?
- who is that not a narrative?
- *how
- me: it's a narrative in a unintentional, fictional biographical way. its diversions and I guess antics makes me say it isn't a novel in the traditional sense. and i know you're going to disagree. i don't think it matters what it's classified as.
- Cassandra: To me, "the narrative" is where the meat is
- And is the meat is in the tangents, then that is where the narrative is.
- me: "where the meat is" hahaha that reminds me of that movie who's afraid of virginia woolf that i watched the other night. and every written piece of work has "meat," it's the general point of the work. is my textbook a narrative? and then by association, a novel?
- Cassandra: where is the meat?
- Facts are not meat
- me: no, but the assertions that the facts are supporting are
- meat
- Cassandra: But meat doesn't have to do with narrative.
- me: you're contradicting yourself
- Cassandra: Your textbook can be meat, but that doesn't make it a narrative
- no, i'm not
- read carefully
- me: "To me, "the narrative" is where the meat is"
- Cassandra: the narrative can be where the meat is
- me: that's not definitive then
- that doesn't help out anything
- Cassandra: "the narrative" and "a narrative"
- are different
- me: alright
- Cassandra: Your textbook has meat that has "a narrative"
- But its not "the narrative"
- me: because it encompasses too much? that's not very nice to the textbook.
- Cassandra: Because its claiming truth. Its "non-fiction"
- me: i think every novel is trying to claim a truth
- Cassandra: Which is absurd, because even all written history is subjective
- me: yeah
- Cassandra: Before facts were "facts" they were to some degree subjective.
- And change according to perceptions.
- me: is the line between non-fiction and fiction the claiming of "the truth" and a claiming of "a truth"?
- Cassandra: Maybe, but claiming any sort of "truth" is a trajectory towards death, a desire for "the end" and into transcendence
- which is a no no
- me: that's not true
- Cassandra: Yes, there is no truth
- me: there is no absolute truth. there are accepted truths. which don't necessarily point towards death or any other unknown. they are accepted truths because they are as true as 'possible' in our current way of distinguishing them. wait. what.
- god
- idk what i'm saying
- if no truths are inherent truths then everything has the right to claim truth, and thus become truths, in your limited sense of the word
- by dismantling the idea of truth you're creating more sub-truths
- or not necessarily dismantling, but interpreting "truth" in its most literal (and solely absolute) sense
- Cassandra: I'm talking about transcendent death
- me: where the hell did that come from
- this was metafiction
- Cassandra: we should publish this
