exercises
- Create a realist prose passage in which you construct a person-
in-action.Your text should be a detailed sketch, not a story. - Rewrite the previous passage in:
a) a surreal mode
b) a satirical mode. - Create a short poem (between four and 30 lines) on any subject.
Consider lineation, typography, metaphor, syntax, and also how
these technical features affect the meaning(s) of the poem.
PROSE CHANGES CLOTHES
The following sections help you construct a realist prose passage and then
rewrite, or ‘dress it up’, in surrealist and satirical modes. These modes are
not necessarily totally discontinuous from each other: rewriting the same
passage in different ways will show you how they interface.
A TOUCH OF REALISM
Realism can be powerfully used in writing to convey psychological and
social realities, and it is the mode with which you are likely to be most
familiar. Some of the techniques for writing realist prose we will explore
will probably be ones you already adopt in your writing automatically.
That does not mean that they are desirable for all types of writing, and
other genres and modes may require you to work against these principles.
In fact an important idea in this chapter is that realism is only one type
of writing amongst a range of alternatives. Realism is the dominant fic-
tional mode in our society, because it seems to mirror our world. It is
important to remember, however, that realism constitutes a set of conven-
tions which give the appearance of reality, it does not convey that reality
directly. Realism depends on maintaining an illusion of reality. As Cather-
ine Belsey says, ‘Realism is plausible not because it reflects the world, but
because it is constructed out of what is (discursively) familiar’ (2002,
p. 44). As a result, Belsey argues, realism is basically a conservative form:
The experience of reading a realistic text is ultimately reassuring, however
harrowing the events of the story, because the world evoked in the fiction,28 The Writing Experiment