The process is analogous to that of a filmmaker who takes a mixture of
long shots of a scene, where we see the action in its entirety, and then
close-ups, where we see only one aspect in detail. You will obtain the best
results by mixing your shots, shooting from different angles, and moving
between parts and wholes. And you are engaging here with a complex
amalgam of part and whole: of the person, of their actions, and the envi-
ronment in which, or on which, they are acting.
SURREALISM STRIKES OUT
Exercise 2 explores ways of writing which deviate from realist conventions,
and which construct reality rather differently. One of the paradoxes of
writing is that you can say a great deal about social and psychological real-
ities when not writing in a wholly realist vein. One way of deviating from
realism is to adopt a mode which is either surreal or satirical. While
realism constructs modes of being which are usually more familiar to us,
surrealism defamiliarises the world, that is, makes us see it as if for the first
time. So try now to write a surreal text (see Exercise 2a) by rewriting your
previous text. You may find, if you rewrite your piece, that the person-
in-action becomes a person who is acted upon.
A surrealist writer is normally less interested in representing the exter-
nal world than in conveying psychological and social reality by presenting
the world in an abnormal way. A surrealist text usually creates a physically
impossible situation, it transgresses normal physical laws: it conjures up a
situation that doesn’t exist in reality.
For example, the well-known story by Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis,
deals with the transformation of a person into an insect. This situation is
physically impossible, but it obviously has a lot of far-reaching psycholog-
ical ramifications (for example, fears of transgressing boundaries).
Similarly, the extract from a short story by American writer Donald
Barthelme, in Example 2.9 below, describes an expanding balloon: this
grows and grows, and eventually covers a vast expanse of the city. Again
this is an image which defies physical reality:
Example 2.9
The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact
location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night,
while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There, I
stopped it; at dawn the northernmost edges lay over the Plaza; the
free-hanging motion was frivolous and gentle. But experiencing a
faint irritation at stopping, even to protect the trees, and seeing no34 The Writing Experiment