Thursday, November 18, 2010
Exciting Visit From Don Lepan
I was so excited to have the chance to discuss Animals with its writer Don Lepan in class today. He wrote a spectacular book and I wanted to know what went in into the process of its creation and gain a better perspective of its land ethic. I was extremely surprised that a lot of the environmental messages were non-intentional and purely coincidental. Its almost unbelievable because I found the novel's agenda to be very broad and carefully constructed. The word chattle is so similar to cattle. The concept of assigning value based on differences that are often inconsequential and from a specific human perspective and the idea that something like this could happen to us one day seem to have been very deliberate. I have concluded that these brilliantly subtle messages were delivered subconsciously out of an inner awareness of the bleakness of our environmental situation.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I found this post very interesting—and the other ones I’ve read too. And I greatly enjoyed the class; you really are a very lively and engaged and intelligent group.
ReplyDeleteI entirely agree that the unconscious can play a surprisingly large role in successful writing. Whether it amounts to 40 per cent or more I don’t know, but I do think it’s large—not less than 40 per cent, I would wager.
In the other direction, I suspect that writers who cultivate a conscious—and especially a self-conscious, detached, ironic, style—tend to cut themselves off from an awful lot of what can make creative works work. I suspect that one of the many things I did wrong when I first tried to write fiction was to try to control my own psyche, to exercise craft before there was good raw material to be crafted.
When I paint now, I always think of the water as a collaborator. In the unruly style of watercolor I work in, you never know quite what the water and the paint will do; there’s always another force partly responsible for the creative result. It may be that the water collaborates with the unconscious as it moves on the paper. At any rate, I completely accept that the unconscious plays a huge role in the sort of creative work that I do, writing or painting.
In the case of Animals, I also think a lot of the reason why there seem to be so many interesting strands of thought arising from the book—very largely, it seems, strands that the author was not conscious of—has to do with the subject matter. The way that non-human animals are treated in today’s world, tragically, connects with many, many other environmental issues and also—less tragically but no less interestingly—connects with a wide range of philosophical notions. That’s just there in the subject matter, regardless of the psyche of any author taking on that subject matter.
One more thought: I think I lucked out when it came to that particular thread of story material coming to me. Some stories just naturally connect with (and spin off) a lot of different but connected ideas. Regardless of what the author has done with them, such stories just work in a lot of different ways. The story of Frankenstein does that, as does the story Lord of the Flies; I think I was very lucky in that 30 seconds when the story of Animals came to me.
Thanks again to you all for your interest; it was really, really good to see you.
Hope you decide to give Animals to all your friends and relatives for Christmas, Hannukah, birthdays—along with something lighter and funner, or course!
I really enjoyed your visit. I will be thinking a lot more about unconscious thoughts and how they contribute to great art and literature. I am very used to over analyzing and assuming there is an answer to everything. It is probably more interesting when the answers are not so obvious or identifiable and when a story can be related to on many different levels. I really did love Animals and I thank you for talking to us.
ReplyDelete