``What I want: a fiction as brave as a simple scene in a Michael Mann film; the camera's eye patiently settles on an LA street in the dead of night in such a way that the hidden things, the vastness, the adapted wildlife, the deep technological-ness of the place is made clear...'' .d. quoted by Dennis Claxton
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I've actually tried to write a little fictional scenes to get at something like the above---because that sentence helps focus on similar scenes.
There is real formal problem with putting together this kind of image and expanding it into a format larger than say a long poem. It depends on the evocative power of the writer to expand not just the analogies and metaphors, but also build up something like a larger scale allegory. All of these forms don't have a built-in dramatic quality as part of the structure. You have to be able to creat something like a dramatic feel through this extended lyricism. There are no built in characters or personal flaws, or potential conflicts to manipulate our dramatic expectations. And, you probably don't want any of that in the piece in the first place... these are like urban blues stories.
>From my attempts at something like this, what you get is an extended
lyrical passage, that has no larger turn. So it sets there like a nice
tone poem, but without that greater sense of scale that the best
novel's attempt.
There is a similiar problem with my most favorite art form, which is jazz, post WWII to about the nid-70s. There were only a few groups who could get that big scale thing going. Obviously Duke Ellington. Also lesser known, Oliver Nelson. In many ways Max Roach tried to build this kind of larger scale into the foundation through rythm, but he had mixed results.
Then Miles Davis pre-Bitches Brew. But the most consistant and best at this enlarged scale was John Coltrain. The way he did that comes straight out of his own and his own imagination---often re-working apparently silly musicals and turning them into some spiritual flight. And there were many ballads that had their melody opened up into extended pieces. After the Rains, Invitation, Alabama. Then A Love Supreme, of course. How do you do that?
Much of that later work, really depended on McCoy Tyner... he laid the foundation for Big John to stretch out...
Anyway, that's were I looked to find a way---well and my memories of LA as a kid, when the place looked so vast it was an entire world. Every time we moved, we moved to a new galaxy. ..
So, I see the problem as something of formal problem---something akin to something Camus once wrote about, asking was tragedy was still possible. Personally I don't think so, hence the apparent irrelevance of much current fiction. I want to think on that later tonight.
But I also relie on sci-fi for literary treats. I am reading a new collection of John Campbell, called New Dawn and it has all the classic Don Stuart stories...
Slow Friday...
CG