A Certain Zone of Consistency

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version

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k-punk said:
Great writers, genuine artists, can do nothing but repeat themselves. Or rather: becoming a genuine artist involves finding that which can only repeat through you. Eclecticism is the vice of the third rate, the mark of the author who wants to remain transcendent above his work. Ballard, like Lovecraft, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, can only write one book; that's why Deleuze is right, their production demonstrates the true function of the Proper Name, which is to designate a certain zone of consistency.
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version

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Difficult not to repeat yourself, although I get what he means about great artists designating a zone of consistency. You can see it in a lot of Dissensus favourites, Burroughs being the first to come to mind. He's often accused of having written the same book over and over.

Barty's innovation / intensification binary seems to operate as stages rather than opposites in this case, innovation followed by intensification: blow something up then spend a lifetime playing about with the wreckage.
 
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version

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Paul Schrader's been exploring the same character for decades. He's done other stuff too, but the thing that really makes Schrader Schrader is that specific character he keeps returning to, the Travis Bickle character alone in a room, penning a journal, teetering on the brink of violence.
 
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version

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Have to say, I'm struggling to think of anyone this applies to,

Eclecticism is the vice of the third rate, the mark of the author who wants to remain transcendent above his work
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. . . but then again, if eclecticists are third rate, maybe that's why I haven't heard of any.
 
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version

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Perhaps an example of k-punk setting up a hypothetical enemy when he could have just talked about what he wanted to talk about without one.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I have to admit when I started reading that quote the first author that came to mind was Kafka. I guess lots of authors feel that they have discovered one truth and they approach it from various points in various ways. Of course it's far too strong to say that they just write the same book again - but that's theory for you, it's never enough to say "they repeatedly explore one truth (or a group of related truths) in different ways" it has to be "they always literally write exactly the same thing" cos it sounds much more definitive and dramatic.
 
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version

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Ballard and Burroughs are the two I think come closest to 'writing the same book over and over'.
 
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version

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Has anyone deliberately done a sort of Rashomon thing over a series of books, i.e. made a point of writing several versions of the same story?
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
version said:
Has anyone deliberately done a sort of Rashomon thing over a series of books, i.e. made a point of writing several versions of the same story?
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They must have done... M John Harrison does something a bit like that with his Viriconium novels. Maybe it's not exactly the same story but he revisits the same place with the same characters - except the characters behave differently and the world is often different and so on.

But gimme a sec and I'm sure I will think of something with the same story written three times.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
An Instance of the Fingerpost is a bit like that... I think it's often compared to Rashomon.

A murder in 17th-century Oxford is related from the contradictory points of view of four of the characters, all of them unreliable narrators. The setting of the novel is 1663, just after the restoration of the monarchy following the English Civil War, when the authority of King Charles II is not yet settled, and conspiracies abound.
Most of the characters are historical figures. Two of the narrators are the mathematician John Wallis and the historian Anthony Wood. Other characters include the philosopher John Locke, the scientists Robert Boyle and Richard Lower, spymaster John Thurloe, inventor Samuel Morland and the Anglican cleric Thomas Ken, who was later Bishop of Bath and Wells. The plot is at first centred on the death of Robert Grove[1] but later takes in the conspiracies of John Mordaunt and William Compton (of Compton Wynyates), and the politics of Henry Bennet and Lord Clarendon. Furthermore, the characters that are fictional are nonetheless drawn from real events. The story of Sarah Blundy incorporates that of Anne Greene,[2] while Jack Prestcott is involved in events based on the life of Richard Willis (of the Sealed Knot).
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But there must be loads. Alain Robbe-Grillet does - again - something similar when events within a story are sometimes repeated several times from different viewpoints.
 
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version

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That's still one novel though. I'm talking about a series of novels recounting the same events from different perspectives.
 
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