The starkness of most stories aims at warding off excessive interpretative urges that would feed on the evocative powers of connotation, displacement and metaphor, forgetful of conceptual rigor. Wilson's stories are indeed "against interpretation" in ways that move radically beyond the implications of Susan Sontag's essay. His stories, it can be culled and collated from the texts, celebrate "moments when appearances and experience successfully survive the interpretations that would annihilate them".
Their purpose is not to describe, render, represent or imitate but to relive in language and logics the nature of the events told about. But by their very nature, not by what they supposedly "convey" The style in which the stories require to be read is the style in which experience is to be read, I taught myself to write in order to find the boundaries of my beliefs - to learn to read how I read existence Wilson is thus convinced 12 that "art does not inform us about its subject, but makes us live in it, as its maker first lived in it".
In effect, the surreal appears, in Wilson's terms, as a sheer diversion from the real, one where referential illusion is not vanquished but merely displaced:. You cannot look away from the fireplace to the window and see the flames reflected in the glass superimposed on the snowcovered trees outside and say, Oh the burning bush.
I ask you to resist the temptation to see through my words, to look past what I am saying. Each story is written in a foreign language, and the meaning of the story is in learning how to read it. Concordance, correspondence and coherence, logics in extremis can be the only - and very narrow - path towards some provisional truth. The stories will thus at best hope to be "a continuum of charged discontinuities" Perhaps you will use your skills as a Master of Arts in Literature to teach me what I have been trying to learn about myself by writing. I have quoted Polanyi's words to explain my writing: So much, my dear friends, for our own paltry activity; and three cheers for this most magnificent definition of a text that, in the profoundest sense, matters.
Wilson borrows this conviction from Whitehead and his "process philosophy": Wilson's semantic relativism must find comfort in Whitehead's concept of "concrescence" which involves temporalism, pluralism and the absolutizing of becoming. Since Cratylus we know that a philosophy of pure becoming is incompatible with the validity of language.
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The nomothete, you will recall, is drunk. As Bergson put it, closer to us, natural language was made to handle the static and cannot grasp the dynamic. All the same, process philosophy being an aesthetic philosophy 14 , Wilson relies upon it for his fictional purposes. The intrinsic order in experience, according to Whitehead, is aesthetic. Process signifies continuity, with both change and permanence. Whitehead's doctrine views actual entities as "a concrescence of prehensions, which have originated in its process of becoming" and, in Modes of Thought, he denounces "pseudoatomism", a criticism which is emphasized by what he calls "the fallacy of the perfect dictionary".
Wilson, permanently dissatisfied with definitions and fascinated by etymology naturally adheres to this view. But he uses techniques that keep reminding us that the process is the same in principle for both appreciation and creation Based on the manifestation of processes, art is thus described as the ground for some sort of "provisional realism" that bears no relation whatsoever with the realisms and naturalisms now holding sway over what is known as fiction.
This repudiation of static mimicry, coupled with his consciousness that Kafka and his two sidekicks with misleading; names of joy, "Freud" and "Joyce", have done away with the last possibility to believe in any ultimate unity, make him answer in the most eloquent fashion possible the obvious question posed by the interviewer on mimesis:. They are neither mirrors held up to nature, nor mirrors moving along a roadway, nor mirrors that reflect an infinite unity and then when smashed continue in each smallest fragment to reflect the same infinite unity. They are like shards of glass in a glazier's bin, the scraps that fall when a sheet of glass is cut to specifications.
That's why I don't write like Franz Kafka. Add to this that thematic fields and fields of activity are parts of the vernacular and one begins to see that it allows for all sorts of conversions The overlaps are thematized in "Motherhood" where we learn that field is also. Before morphogenetic regeneration, field was either a metaphor from magnetism with no satisfactory operational definition, illustrated by photographs of iron filings, or field was a concept used by mathematical physicists to get rid of infinities which they could not tolerate in their equations.
Now field can be defined operationally and is a concept that a child could understand. In the world of matter as in the world of signs. Thus, in "Motherhood", the invitation is rather strong to read a text about dermatological operations as a metafictional speculation on the potential "face lifts"of fictional activity: Wilson uses the notion of field, cut off from infinities and unity presided over by some transcendent authority to question the Aristotelian vision of narrative as necessarily teleological; discussing Dreisch's views on morphogenetic regeneration, Wilson writes:.
Deterministic theories collapsed when it was shown that a cell could develop along any one of many paths.
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The morphogenetic field is the total of such paths. The landscape in which the cell grows determines the path that it takes [ We've just seen with "fields" that Wilson is tempted to rely more on "operational" than on static definitions. Catching the semantic essence of words, in other words, can only be done "in the act". All of his stories stage an operation of some kind, dramatize a situation in which meaning is going to be activated in ways that may make its analysis less futile, its nature somewhat less elusive, for its duration.
The mathematical and logical operation of "Love" takes place in three parts; "Marriage" is a matter of surgical grafting; "Men" proposes the dismantling of a man by "elective surgery" in order to isolate functions; "Women" develops verbatim an epigram by Toby Spiselman that reads "An operation in mathematics is anything that leaves a scar"; it links up with stray remarks here and there according to which "pain is information", "aging is a form of misinformation", or others still that trace "desire" back to its various stages in biological evolution.
Another potential cause for Wilson's fascination with the word "energy" may indeed lie in the fact that "for Aristotle, thinking is an energeia [ Activities linked with energy are thereby found to be conveniently described by the word "operation", as in the quotation by Simone Weil that opens "Desire":. When the two lovers launch into the logical discussion that constitutes "Love", they keep facing the question of the relevance of their feelings to the language that expresses it and the larger question that could be related to Godel's theorem on incompleteness: On the operating table, the protagonist of "the man who ends his story" intends to use as his only anaesthetic his "attention focusing on death as it enters a plane among other observables", while the five "rehearsals" of his dream of dismemberment interfere as would planes of shapes and colors.
In the story "America" p. Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables [ Rapport, Wilson knows, is correctly translated affinity or interrelation, but rapport is the word. Wilson's own texts also are. In the notion of rapport that follows from Wilson's limited concessions to metaphor when opting for field, operation and plane, lies yet another justification of his departure from and vituperation of realist aesthetics:.
At any rate, we know there is no sillier label than "abstract painting" which designates painting that embodies and makes concrete what can otherwise not be seized or grasped.
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In the end, "all art represents reality, there is no nonrepresentational art. It just depends on what the artist thinks is real, and on what he can prove to be real. Just as, commenting the works of painter Ray Johnson, he insists that "what is meaningful is not so much the content as the parallels and intersections of the style" 21 , he complains about - and tries in all his work to amend - the fact that.
Moments when forms reverse into feelings or feelings are seen to follow forms The energy 22 [ Language cannot seize any part of reality statically; meaning is quintessentially a dynamic notion; arrest means semantic entropy. By the same token, narrativity doesn't have to be teleological. Ironically bewailing the staunch opposition of "entelechists" to his work, Wilson insists on the permanent and necessary openness of narrative Incoming, reduces the proportional importance of the diegetic in short story writing.
His views of representation make him profoundly doubt the validity of literary mimesis; he demonstrates time and again in his stories than even the notion and reality of nature and "natural" feelings is mediated by linguistic operations. Reading "my heart is in your hands" brings one kind of tear to the eye of the romantic reader; entirely another when he realizes that the cardiac patient is addressing his surgeon.
Perry William Wilson | Biographical Memoirs: V | The National Academies Press
Such is one of the local effects of Wilson's debunking of metaphorical language. Metaphors are misleading and Wilson, reminding us of the constructed nature of all opinions and beliefs invites rereading of Whitehead or Rudolf Bultmann on the function of metaphors in religious thought. Everything is a question of "plane", of "field" and of "rapport". Talking of the naturalists and entelechists he detests, the narrator of "interim" declares: He wanted to join the world as it is, visually, without consolations or sentiments, without myths or metaphors, but he knew that to join it is to change it.
He tried to paint without illusions or unearned inferences. The abstract nature of his texts, the foregrounding in them of artifice in choice of theme and form ranging from philosophical aside to Socratic dialogue and didactical allegory naturally prompts the question: Why [write] fiction [and not essay]? Because the language pulls toward false and consoling generalizations and universale that must be purged, and fiction can be idiosyncratic and opaque, or no more than translucent, with the contingencies of the available language fully visible, while essays tend to the condition of Latin as transparent and universal hence I quote fero ferre tuli latus in Birthplace for patchwork, cognate with metaphor.
I am interested in what failures prove as when I fail to purge myth and essence You asked'why fiction'and as I wrote a short essay on Alberto Moravia I saw that my meanings are in my sentence structure and syntax and that I don't in an essay have the courage of my dippy sentences which I want to be incapable of selling anything, especially an idea Not essay because in an essay the beginning is an introduction not for its own sake, so it is used, and use flattens implications, as one if focused past champagne on a purpose doesn't taste it it might as well be flat.
Essay puts a burden on the end to be a conclusion and tempts toward universals. Then in our beginning is our end and in our end is our beginning: But I write essays: In "Interim", the protagonist's wife tells him: By fictional I mean twisted to fit an assumption". After making his confession, Wilson commits suicide by jumping from the tower of "Palazzo della Ragione", but when seen his corpse is transfixed by the same dagger. He agrees to work on a film, to be shot in Rome, for which he will be given a brand new Ferrari as a bonus incentive.
Dammit begins to have unexpected visions of a macabre girl with a white ball. While at a film award ceremony, he gets drunk and appears to be slowly losing his mind. A stunning woman Antonia Pietrosi comforts him, saying she will always be at his side if he chooses. Dammit is forced to make a speech, then leaves and takes delivery of his promised Ferrari. He races around the city, where he sees what appear to be fake people in the streets.
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Lost outside of Rome, Dammit eventually crashes into a work zone and comes to a stop before the site of a collapsed bridge. Across the ravine, he sees a vision of the little girl with a ball whom he has earlier identified, in a TV interview, as his idea of the Devil. He gets into his car and speeds toward the void. The Ferrari disappears, and we then see a view of roadway with a thick wire across it, dripping with blood, suggesting Dammit has been decapitated.
The girl from his vision picks up his severed head and the sun rises. Omnibus films were popular in Europe in the s so producers Alberto Grimaldi and Raymond Eger developed the idea of film anthology influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
William Wilson [French Version]
Welles withdrew in September and was replaced by Fellini. Roger Vadim's segment "Metzengerstein" was filmed just after Vadim had completed shooting on his previous movie Barbarella , which also starred Jane Fonda. Scriptwriter and novelist Terry Southern , who had worked on the screenplay for Barbarella , travelled to Rome with Vadim and according to Southern's biographer Lee Hill, it was during the making of this segment that Peter Fonda told Southern of his idea to make a 'modern Western' movie.
Southern was enthusiastic about the idea and agreed to work on the project, which eventually became the renowned independent film Easy Rider. Louis Malle accepted the job of directing the segment "William Wilson" in order to raise money for his next film Murmur of the Heart.
The financial process of raising money for Murmur took him three years after completing "William Wilson" and in the meantime he shot two documentaries about India. Malle stated that he did not consider his collaboration in Histoires Extraordinaires a very personal one and that he agreed to make some compromises with the producer, Raymond Eger , in order to make the film more attractive to mainstream spectators.
The most important changes were: He wanted Florinda Bolkan for the female lead but the producers insisted on someone more well known, like Bardot. Bardot agreed to make the film; Malle thought she was miscast. Lending a "pedophiliac slant" [11] to Toby's character, Fellini explained that "a man with a black cape and a beard was the wrong kind of devil for a drugged, hipped actor. His devil must be his own immaturity, hence, a child. Spirits of the Dead opened in Paris in June A year later the producers had not been able to find another buyer so when Arkoff made the same offer they took it.
The film received a mixed critical reception, with the Fellini segment widely regarded as the best of the three. The Vadim is as overdecorated and shrill as a drag ball, but still quite fun, and the Malle, based on one of Poe's best stories, is simply tedious. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other senses of this term, see Ghost. French film poster for Spirits of the Dead.