Sandy Klein sent a link to an
article about novelist Martin Amis...Talking about the MA course, he said: "If
all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be, `Don't go with the crowd,
don't do anything for the crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd'.
"Place an enormous stress on individuality, don't use novelty phrases... Make it
fresh, make it your own,make it individual."
Instead of developing VN's concepts on singularity
and the importance of detail ( a "theme"), novelist Amis seems to be aiming
at the shelf of "self-help" in creative writing, as far as the extract from
this interview goes...
I was reminded of a sentence by
Novalis ( inspired by John Donne?): "Every Englishman is an island" -
which I, actually, only understand in the context
in which it was quoted: "... for the insular
character of the British made our selective task [ of representative
authors] a hard one because English literature, in contrast with the
French, is not constituted of literary schools but of
individuals..." ( the original sentence is in Spanish
and was written in an introduction by J.L.Borges and M.E.Vázquez
)
MA's "theme", in this light, seems to me to
be somehow emphatically redundant? Or...?