Let me know what you think! — Moliere

So far, I can see it's in a different (better) universe to "Cat Person". The writing is light and jazzy and it functions to bustle us along almost against our will through some extremely heavy and disturbing imagery. Here (as with Von Trier) you've got conflicting layers of form and content that make you do some important cognitive work. And the play with cuts on top of that makes my head hurt. In a good way. Much here to digest. I like. :up:

"To Build a Fire" is great. I'll read "The Babysitter".

I pretty much adhere to the institutional theory of art. What makes a work of art a work of art is that it is part of an artworld -- which includes creators, audiences, histories of art, various and changing standards for evaluating said art as good or bad, and (in our case) institutions which showcase art. So the difference between a can of Campbell's soup in the grocery story and one in a museum is that the can of Cambell's soup in the museum is part of the artworld, whereas the one in the grocery story is not. — Moliere

Just to quickly note that I would agree with that, but the New Yorker is not the literary equivalent of a museum (even if it does have a historically good record). If that short story were to be taught in our top universities as art, I'd have to accept it as institutionally art, but I'd still evaluatively deny it was.

What do you think the goal of a work is? — Cavacava

To make us better people. To communicate quality.

Yes, it shows us he was a bad guy and that her fears were justified with a metaphorical sledgehammer in the form of a text message. I can think of a million more subtle ways to do a similar thing. But maybe the author felt the readership would need a sledgehammer to get it. And judging by the amount of shares, she may have been right. That to me is sad. Sorry, I mean SAD!!!

In the categorical sense I'd say that Cat Person certainly counts as art. I think what you mean by art is in the latter sense, though let me know if you disagree. — Moliere

I'm talking evaluatively, and my evaluation is that it's not art at all and therefore it's not good art either. Being published in the New Yorker doesn't make it art in the categorical sense you quote. The New Yorker is a business and despite having a good historical record can make commercial decisions that have little or nothing to do with considerations of artistic merit. As I said to Schope, just writing words on a page that follow the structure of a work of art doesn't make what you create a work of art. And as I suggested to TL, emotional impact alone is not enough because that can be got from texts other than the artistic. It's the interplay of form and content that counts.

I'd say Cat Person is more than a diary entry because it has a character which follows a progression from distinct uncertainty to certainty -- she undergoes a change of character, though not one that is exactly specified but more negative. It's not that she knows what she wants at the end, it's that she knows one particular she does not want. — Moliere

Maybe you've misunderstood me. I agree it is more than a diary entry or is intended to be (in terms of structure but doesn't offer more in general because it largely fails structurally and aesthetically). It does give us the standard character transformation, and the point would be to analyze that because it's relevant. I was arguing earlier that without bringing the form explicitly into the critique, no amount of discussion of its emotional impact would wrap up the question of its artistic value as a short story. (But I feel I've said something along those lines too many times now, so I should just let it be.)

So, sure, maybe it doesn't live up to some great work of literary fiction, but I'd still say that it's good, I think, in spite of being uncertain about all the qualities that make a short story good. — Moliere

And you are in the majority. I'm happy to remain in the minority in thinking that it's not of any artistic merit but is possibly useful as a conversation starter. Leaving that aside, as we're unlikely to agree and neither of us has a monopoly on artistic wisdom, what are a couple of short stories that do live up to being great works of literary fiction in your view?

That's F-ed up. NicK needs to pull his spousal socks up.

You haven't addressed my questions on specifics. Anyhow, if it helps to clarify...

I loved the story in the English Patient, by the way, so I am going to ask you again, if you suggested the author used a diary instead, how would that improve the content? — TimeLine

I haven't read it although I saw at least some of the movie a while back (I don't think I bothered finishing it). Anyway, I said this story would have had the same emotional impact and been analyzed similarly here if it were just a diary. You could have got just as much out of it on the level you are getting something out of it. Ergo, the form is superfluous to the commentary. But, the story qua short story can't be analyzed without reference to the short story form by definition. That doesn't mean it has to follow a standard form just that the form is necessarily relevant as a reference point.

But here again:

You seem to be confusing art with aesthetics here, because this structuralism is irrelevant in this particular story - as I have already iterated in our initial discussions — TimeLine

No, because I've consistently emphasized the importance of the interplay between form and content. And form is never irrelevant to a work of art qua art (As for "this structuralism", I don't know what you mean by that or how it relates to my general contention re form). Have you read my Von Trier example? Any comment?

What I'm saying is that this means the story fails as a short story because it offers nothing more than a straight diary account would while seemingly trying to follow the standard short story structure and failing to do so effectively, for example, in terms of the beginning and ending (which most here seem to agree with, so I'm not sure how anyone could can continue to contend it succeeds as a short story). But I don't want to be sound overly pedantic. I don't want to deny the work may have some value. That's a different question. Considering its effect on some people here, it seems that it does.

I thought that the form in The English Patient was awful and intended to promote an air of literary sophistication by making you read and re-read paragraphs as you try to figure out what he is attempting to convey, but is that literary snobbishness what made it win all those awards? If writing something that goes over my head and forces me to second-guess myself or try to interpret and read into what you are saying, is it verification of some supreme quality to be admired simply because it goes over my head? — TimeLine

No, did anything I say suggest this? The example I gave of a good short story by Joyce Carol Oates was about as direct as you can get. I can't imagine it going over anyone's head.

This falls under the category of short story form. It may further be considered a "slice of life" short story. Certainly both of these can be considered "art" in that it is literature that is readable and has a structure. — schopenhauer1

No. Or anyone could create art. They can't. That's what's valuable about it.

This is not an underdog story. This is about a person who does have ability to attract others and keep their interest- to the point of them being possessive. There is something not that interesting about those with a privileged perspective. A person who can get what they want (in this case in the dating world), but finds out they don't really want it, is just not that interesting to a lot of people, and hard to identify with unless you are someone who also falls into that demographic. — schopenhauer1

That's a perceptive point.

I am saying that the form is irrelevant. — TimeLine

Ok, that is the crux of our disagreement then. I'm saying form is always relevant along with content in assessing any text in terms of its artistic merit.

Why not stop for a moment and listen to me; it made me think about how vulnerable to self-deception I can be. You are telling me that it was a terrible story that undermines my - and clearly a number of other people' - experience with this particular piece. — TimeLine

I'm listening and I'm not trying to denigrate how anyone felt about the story. Emotional impact can be achieved as far as I'm concerned in many ways not just through art. It's not the story that fails, it's the story qua short story that does.

Ansari is a terrible comparative that you selected and have likely done so based on base similarities - sexual experiences and text messages - but that is biography and fails to elicit a similar effect fictional literature can in similar vein to the symbolic power of parables to moral reasoning. — TimeLine

Hang on, I thought that was my point about art and your point was that form doesn't matter? If form is irrelevant then the fact that the Ansari story is biography and not fictional literature is irrelevant.

It is these symbols within the fiction - and indeed in the case of Cat Person - that effects emotional responses. — TimeLine

What symbols? One thing I liked about @csalisbury's story in the creative writing discussion (not that he likely wants us to go into that here) was the use of the cat as a symbol. So, what is the important symbolism I'm missing here in "Cat Person"? (Maybe you mentioned it already somewhere and I missed it. If so, please direct me to the appropriate quote).

I feel you are taking some conventional approach to the meaning of art - as well as Bitter - that is indicative to the adapted tastes of the literary scene as though quality writing were contained within the limitations of particular features, and this only illustrates to me your dependence on definitions. — TimeLine

But how could this not be used as a defense of any kind of any badly written and/or kitschy story that just happened to be topical? If we're going to disagree about whether something is art or not, its features and the context in which they are set are all we've got beyond the bare plot. Besides, which "particular" features are you referring to? Which features do you think I'm missing in my analysis?

Kant called this: "[a] kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication,” which is exactly what this story did. It is not aesthetics, but art. — TimeLine

But you seem to be focusing on the content, the plot, and its relevance again. If that's all there is to it, then anybody can make socially important art. I contend that the form is a major failing with this piece, and you don't seem to be addressing that. So, to try to clarify: could you or could you not do an analysis on the level that you've been doing on the news article about Ansari, taking the main characters and their social context as the subject matter? If so, either you need to contend that that news article is art or that you need to go deeper into the form to determine whether or not this story can be considered art. If you could not do that, then tell me what this piece gives you beyond the events? Then we may get to the bottom of our disagreement. As I said earlier I'm open to learning more on why people like this story and consider it worthy.

I think you and Bitter may not have found any interest in the piece because there is no alignment or identification to the experiences and that severance to the nuances the author attempts to convey - i.e. authenticity and how we fool ourselves - is a shame, really. — TimeLine

Why do you presume that of me as opposed to the other males commenting here? I mean of course I don't identify with the young woman much, and that may make it more difficult for me to appreciate the story, but there's a man in it too. Anyway, it's not a defense of your opinion that it's good art to assert that the author wants to convey something about authenticity and how we fool ourselves. That's a major theme of a huge amount of stories; some do it well, others not so well. So, what is special about the way this author does this? What elements of form ally with what elements of content to make this good art? You tell me.

He's right in my view. The decision to publish was almost certainly commercial rather than artistic. Because as I keep contending, it's not art, it's just topical. That's it. You could do just as deep a critique as you guys are doing on the real Ansari story.

https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355

There you go. That's just some stuff that happened. It's not art. So, other than the fact that it's worth discussing sexual relations in our tech-commodified modern world, as they are complicated and confusing, the story itself qua short story is a big yawn.

I especially find it interesting when we overlook the first person narrative and somehow claim that Robert is thinking 'such and such' when no one can ever really know, as though verifying their own subjectivity in their analysis. Even a critique of the story is in itself a projection that validates guilt or sympathy or anger. It isn't a story anymore. It is an experience we are all having. We are angry for her for thinking he is ugly and fat. We are angry at him for his sexual failures. It is him. It is her. That is what a short story is supposed to do. — TimeLine

I'm none of those things. I'm unmoved except at the fact that it was published in a magazine that has a history of publishing good work in this genre.

Needs a bit of an edit here and there in my view, but it's a lot better than "Cat Person" :) . I interpret it as the cat being the narrators' "magic" or free self that can roam outside while he is one of the "broken vessels", "the wizened old man", stuck inside. The magic self, the scavenger, can still get something from society whereas to him there is nothing of substance left out there "the temples have crumbled". The magic self is able to "stoically" handle the problems of the cold social world, such as the fact that kids lose their identity and turn into their frustrated parents. The cat/magic self alone persists as everything else false falls apart. The narrator then gets to have his cake and eat it; he can stay locked away from the world and remain morally suitably perturbed by it whereas his magic self can explore it unperturbed, and heroically (like a "gunslinger in the wild west" ) traverse its painful landscape.

Cool. I expanded a bit in the next post above, which might give you more info on where I'm coming from including regarding the ending, and I don't disagree with you on much except the part about it being a good short story :D. Another thing is because I used to write fiction myself for quite a long time, I may be to an extent csal's monster in terms of critique. But I mean it at least.

There's a sense in which I think confusion is - or should be - the point. 'We' don't know, as a society, how to play amorous games very well; we're confused, right at the level of desire itself, whether our desires are themselves what we want. This is what accounts for the ambivalence of affect that seems to be exhibited by both Margot and Robert - they're both profoundly unsure about what they do/should be doing, even as they do it. So I guess I'm taking the sketchiness of the characters at face value: they're thinly drawn because they really are 'thin people', at least with respect to their romantic lives. — StreetlightX

Sure, and I get that's an understandable angle to take, but it's not just that characters are thinly drawn but how they're drawn thinly that matters. So, it comes down to figuring out the significance of how they're drawn with regard to other elements of the text in terms of it being a particular type of narrative, a short story, and trying to include the context that brings in looking at what the author's options were and what the rationale behind her choices were with regard to form and content. There are lots of ways to make the uninteresting, interesting (and, unfortunately, even more of making the interesting, uninteresting).

So, it may be as you said that she has deliberately made the characters somewhat unengaging and incoherent because they are so in relation to their romantic lives, and that's something we should reflect on. OK, fine. But given this is in The NewYorker, I'm looking for evidence in other aspects of the text that this is a consistent and strong feature rather than a bug or simple side-effect, and I'm not really finding much. In other words, what I'm seeing seems indistinguishable (apart from being a bit tighter) from a university creative-level writing attempt by a competent but undeveloped writer whose teacher for some reason has yet to hit her with the rule "No kitsch". And that's more or less the crux of my criticism, not that there's nothing at all to talk about here in terms of the plot, but that the story doesn't offer much, if anything, artistically.

To give an example to try to get more at what I'm on about (*warning—about to repeat something heard in YouTube video and back it up with a wiki quote*) Lars Von Trier, when he made the movie Breaking the Waves, was aware of the danger of emotional excess because of the subject matter of his movie. In order to avoid this, and actually offer something of artistic value, he had to play with the form. In his own words:

""What we did was take a style and lay it like a filter over the story. It’s like decoding a television signal when you pay to see a film. Here we encoded the film, and the audience has to decode it. The raw, documentary style that I imposed on the film, which actually dissolves and contradicts it, means that we can accept the story as it is"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Waves#Style

So what he's saying is something like the cognitive work the audience has to do in matching the form and content, the cheap documentary style imposed over the romantic-type narrative creates enough tension to offset the release the excess of emotional content might otherwise cause, and allows the film to offer something artistically that it otherwise couldn't.

Similarly, for Cat Person, the thinness of the characters could be offset somehow in the form, maybe with a stronger plot, for example, or a richer more evocative writing style, or a play with the narrative structure etc. Look at Oates and it's the opposite. She hardly even needed a plot she was so well-able to express the fear that drove the story, which as you said is "brutal" and there's the other point, the emotional payoff—in Cat Person it's as if the ending was the only thing the author had left to deliver the necessary wallop that would even make the short story worthy of being called a short story, and was willing to be kitschy just to suck that out of the work. But if it were any good to begin with...

Anyhow, the way I see the analysis so far is then that most here have more or less discounted the ending and are treating the rest of the story as if it's a list of events rather than a full narrative (which must have an ending), and so have sort of already given up on this being a credible short story and are viewing it more like it's a diary or a news story, and analyzing events in that way, which is fine as you can always get something from that as long as these types of things happen, which they do.

here's something 'everyday' about Cat Person, it means - I think - to capture a particular experience that (can be) resonant and I think did resonate with alot of people: that strange nexus of feelings/ambiguities that happen around bad dates and/or bad sex. — StreetlightX

And so, yes, the events resonate. I just wish they had been given a more effective vehicle from which to do so.

(1) youre a monster — csalisbury

So, this means you wanna date, right? :razz:

Gonna give the carol oates a read once I’m back home — csalisbury

:up:

As I said above, I'm going to try to unearth some of the value you, Street, TL and others see in this and respond more.

You are a tough grader. — Bitter Crank

Well, I should try to justify my criticism. I read it through again and I'll try to be more nuanced while still contending that it fails both in terms of form and content, aesthetically and narratively, in composition and in content. And, yes, I am holding it to high standards, at least partly because it was published in The New Yorker. You mentioned Cheever. The New Yorker published "The Swimmer". Enough said.

It fails aesthetically because it's poorly—if competently—written. It would be impressive as an actual diary scribbled down by a relatively well-educated young person similar in age and experience to the main character herself. But artistic renditions of the real thing are supposed to be aesthetic distillations not faithful copies. And I haven't heard a lot of argument in support of the writing anyway, so I'll take it as not particularly controversial at least that we're not dealing with the top-level here.

It fails narratively because there's a general lack of tension in the story:

1) It has a very stale and unengaging opening.

"Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines."

Nothing at all happens then until the mild sexual (mis)adventure and even that is not much of a something. We finish with Robert in loser mode writing a rude text to the woman who rejected him. And that's it. Again, I'm sure it resonates with young women who have had similar experiences, but there doesn't seem to be any attempt to go beyond that. Soap operas do the same thing. They resonate with experience. But at least they tend to have a variety of characters to appeal to a wider audience. The audience for this story seems not to extend much beyond millenial women.

2) The ending commits the cardinal sin of descending into kitsch, of providing an excess that detracts rather than adds to its value. We are told at the end who the villain is almost just in case we try to figure it out for ourselves.

Again, there seems to be a reasonable level of consensus on the bad ending, so I won't go on about it too much. Just to note though that if it were just that it copped out on the ending or went into excess mode somewhere in advance but before was authentically engaging, it might still pass in my book. The narrative of Breaking Bad, for example, had tension from the beginning but became unbearably kitschy with the religious metaphorical excess of the exploding plane and falling doll. And the first season of True Detective had a lot going for it until it descended into absolute kitsch with the happy/sad ending. Both were still reasonably good examples of narrative overall. This though never got going, so I suppose the ending was less of a disappointment in that respect.

2) The characters are poorly drawn (even for a short story where character development is necessarily limited by the nature of the genre).

One is a cardboard cutout "modern" villain where "modern" means emasculated and somewhat pathetic. The second is a pastiche of a typical young western woman, presumingly to appeal to as many millennial western women as possible (a bit like a horoscope is designed to say at least something somewhere that resonates with everyone who reads it). And in so far as we are defined by what we want, and the main characters' desires are the driving force of a narrative, what have we got here? Robert wants sex, and he got some, but apparently not enough. And Margot wants what? Love? excitement? better sex? more self-respect? better judgment? to be free of cognitive dissonance? confidence? all of the above? Who knows? She's confused; we're confused; and though we might more or less resonate with her experiences (depending on who we are), we're not deeply engaged with her desires (or fears) because they're not well-drawn. We don't know who she is any more than she does and we don't care all that much. Or I didn't anyway.

3) Ideology/message. So what's the underlying message here? What does the story bring to the table in terms of cultural criticism etc?

Hard to say. It seems you've got the usual normalizing discourse surrounding the empty lives of these two that revolve around consumerism and entertainment. They go to the cinema; they buy stuff at 7-11; they drink at bars; they text each other. That's it. That's life folks, and as long as you don't meet a villain like Robert, you'll be fine.

But then others like @csalisbury see value at a more meta level, which is fine if it was intended but I don't really see that, so far anyway, though I'm open to being wrong here. I mean, the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space" arguably has meta value too. In this case, it was bad to the point of genius, a great, if perverse, example of the Hollywood dream. (And spawned a decent biography narrative / Johnny Depp vehicle about the director.) Point being, if you go meta enough you can probably find value in just about anything. But it may be that you're putting it there much more than retrieving it.

I think that the New Yorker story is passed along because it resonates with people's experience. — Moliere

Agreed. But that's pretty much all there is to it in my view.

I see some similarities between the two, but I felt the New Yorker short story was something that could happen, where the Oates story has this quasi-magical feel to it. — Moliere

The Oates story is engaging from the start; it doesn't try to be ambiguous and then tell you what to feel at the end in case you didn't feel the right thing. It has a simple goal, which is to paint the fear of an adolescent girl, embodied in Arnold Friend, in a way that anyone (though maybe especially adolescent girls) can relate to. The desire is strong on both sides; his desire to take her, and her desire to escape him, and that keeps the engine of the story running on high octane throughout. Plus, it's brilliantly written. So, I'd say in terms of villainy, Oates gives you the best of homemade meat and potatoes, whereas Roupenian gives you a Starbucks Decaf Mochalatte.

But I'll continue to read other contributors here with an open mind. It's always possible I'm missing something.

Edit: that somehow turned into a link to the void - how appropriate. — unenlightened

:)

That was my hot take @csalisbury. And I don't want to sound like I'm being contemptuous for the sake of it. I am serious in my view that this is bad writing, and its success, such that it is, is reflective of something negative about the way we live now. Maybe come back with some cold reflections later.

I recommend anyone try this exercise. Read "Cat Person". Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.

https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf

It reads to me like one of those stories told to a therapist to avoid confronting the real issues. — unenlightened

And not much more well-formed. But of course it's clever. In a commercial way. It's Mills & Boon for millenials.

"So Margot, why did you manipulate your flatmate into taking responsibility for ending the relationship, why did you manipulate your friends into treating Robert as some kind of threat, and why did you contrive to get him to lose his temper with you? You made up that last bit, didn't you? I'm seeing a pattern here." — unenlightened

Be careful. You might have the basis for an interesting story there...

Robert looks like 'Robert from Margot's perspective', — fdrake

"Robert" looks like Margot cut him from an empty cornflakes' box and stuck him on her wall.

I'd give it an F. It's badly-written, boring, and painfully contrived. And like one of the more popular episodes of a soap opera that resonates with the most obvious, surface-level concerns of the young and restless, was destined to go viral.



It's not art anyway, that's for sure.

Although that line could be an excuse because I'd rather be editing the pictures I took today. There's some ethical element to it that isn't there with cleverness, intelligence etc. A sense of humility. Some kind of extra weight. That's enough for me.

I don't know. When you talk about it, it kind of runs away.

Bet you're fun around the dinner table.

Vaga's mum: "Can you pass the salt, please?"
Vaga: *Consults "The Prince". Schemes furiously over next move.*

almost all of conversation is just a way to try to be ok with being in the presence of the other person — csalisbury

:up: One reason we don't like being in lifts with strangers. We almost have to talk and not talk to them at the same time.

:victory:

Not sure about architecture per se, but I like man-made structures that appear in context in interesting patterns like below:

Yes, you've got it backwards. The community here offered a place for you to come and spread your ideas for free. Part of that deal is that you accept moderation. If you're not happy with that set-up, sure, go elsewhere.

Well, the mod team were split on it. But if you were totally serious, there is a reasonable argument to be made that it contravened the guidelines. Anyhow, I accept your intentions were not malicious here and wish you the best whether you choose to stay around or not.

OK, given your consent, I'm going to close it.

Fair enough. It depends on the discussion. I already said by PM before I even posted here that it was fine to start this one.

Damn... :scream:

I was just going to add that you did contact me first. I was speaking generally.

Anyone can start a Feedback discussion any time they want. A little patience would be helpful sometimes as it may be possible to solve the problem without a big unnecessary hooha.

Not just saying this, but TL is one of the more restrained of us in the mod forum.

(Admittedly, I slept through most of the controversy, so I got the timing right for a change. ;) )

Appreciate your understanding. :up:

Hanover looks good with a baton.

The farts thing was deleted because fart was a multiple sockpuppet btw. If a regular non-sockpuppet poster had posted that it most likely would have been left there.

I agree with your take personally but another mod saw fit to delete the discussion, presumably because it had deteriorated due to the level of polarization there. Waiting for an explanation to give you all.