Twelve Digressions toward a Study of Composition

ORM is itself a metaphor and that of fiction is perhaps the most inclusive for our society. The form of the traditional novel is a metaphor for a society that no longer exists. Mario Praz has described the detective story as a bourgeois fairy tale, but one could apply the description as well to the novel of social realism. Its present function is to sustain a series of comforting illusions, among which one might include the feeling that the individual is the significant focus among the phenomena of reality (characterization); the sense that clock, or public time is finally the reigning form of duration for consciousness (historical narration); the notion that the locus of reality may be determined by empirical observation (description); the conviction that the world is logical and comprehensible (causal sequence, plot). The fairy tale of the realistic novel whispers its assurance that the world is not mysterious, that it is predictable-if not to the characters then to the author, that it is available to manipulation by the individual, that it is not only under control but that one can profit from this control. The key idea is verisimilitude: one can make an image of the real thing which, though not real, is such a persuasive likeness that it can represent our control reality. This is the voodoo at the heart of mimetic theory which helps account for its tenacity. Though such schizoid illusions are fostered by concepts of imitation, one cannot have control over that of which one is part, or even formulate it completely-one can only participate more deeply in it

Art · Composition (language) · Literature · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology

• Bruegel's parody of an Ovidian myth in Landschap, met Icarus' val

  Clive Cornew•de arte•1995

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