The gimick. Or: How "great literary events" arn't so great.

Zoombie

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This is a rant about "The Assignment" by Friedrich Durrenmatt, or as I call him, Some Swiss Guy, an author that is an example of how many literature has a major problem, one that I am trying to show in this post, a problem that many people might have seen, a problem that many people seem to twist, and change, and shift, and warp until it becomes, in their minds at least, an actual literary point, and what is this problem I hear you ask, well, you may be able to guess from this sentence, for, if you were to imagin this going on for four entire gorramn pages, it would get kinda old, don't you think?

Yes, every chapter of "The Assignment" is a run on sentence. These are chapters ranging from two to five pages in length.

And I could go on and on about other problems in this book. The complete lack of character. No setting, really...its all talking heads. The fraggling tangents. These sentences jump all over the places, making them nearly impossible to follow!

Now, see, this is just an example of my biggest problem with lots of literature they force down our throats at school.

The GIMMICK.

Ah yes. The Gimmick. Sometimes, it seems that lots of literature has to have a gimmick just to be considered literature. Anyone think that gimicks detract from the message, becuase...because, isn't it hard to get a message across when ALMOST NO ONE CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT THE HELL YOUR BOOK IS SAYING!?

I think its time we take a step back and notice that books like the Assignment are, well...crap. Bad grammer. Bad formatting. Bad plot, characterization, setting and...writing, in general.

And, to make things even worse, the message its trying to push into my brain isn't that bad. Its interesting and something you should probebly think about. But its hard to think around the voice screaming, "Where are the periods! Where are the names! Where are the quotation marks! Where is the action, the characters! Why is this nothing but talking heads in a vauge, pointless fog, vaugely refeering things that don't matter in context or out of context?"

Fortunately, I have just found that the Assignment is only *recommended* reading.

I recommend you try it. Who knows, maybe I'm just a philistine.

But, I personally think that lierature needs to not just have a good message. It needs to be a good goddamn book too, or I'm going to just return it.
 

Claudia Gray

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You haven't provided me with enough information, or the right kind of information, to judge The Assignment. Can long run-on sentences be maddening? Yes. They can also be Faulkner's long run-on sentences, which I consider brilliant. I don't know what message you liked or why you thought it failed. I don't know to what extent the fact that this novel is probably translated into English from another language plays in its style. I realize you offered a rant here and not a critique, but I'm not writing a book off as "bad" based on a rant alone.
 

IceCreamEmpress

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Duerrenmatt (sorry, I got no diacritics here) wasn't striving for "characterization" or "action", though. The point of his novels was that they were philosophical and linguistic meditations, not realistic evocative books about actual people.

Experimental fiction isn't likely to meet the same expectations as mainstream fiction. I myself prefer traditional, mainstream novels for that reason--I like characters and action and all that other good stuff.
 

josephwise

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There's a difference between gimick and experimentation, but it's a subjective issue.

Experimentation does serve a purpose, especially to the writer and other writers. There's much to be learned from it. Ulysses didn't need to be written the way it was written, but there are some very interesting things happening in the prose.

Gimicks typically have no purpose or benefit, other than to draw readers into the tale. It usually backfires, as unique does not equate to substantial. Bright Lights, Big City could have been written in the first or third person without affecting the novel in any way.

As a writer, it's really just a matter of whether you learn what can be done, or what shouldn't be done.
 

CaroGirl

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Experimental literature isn't for everyone and it's especially not for people looking for a standard story. But without experimentation, we wouldn't have stream of consciousness (Virginia Woolf) or absurdism (Waiting for Godot); just two techniques that have come to enhance much of our contemporary, even mainstream, literature.

Proust and Joyce are occasionally impossible to read but they were brave writers who experimented with techniques that have inspired creativity in other authors.

Oh, and the word is spelled "gimmick".