Abstract Writing | David Stromberg

As a child immigrant, growing up on the ethnic and cultural margins of Los Angeles, I found myself pushed toward the sciences. Despite wanting to be a writer and entering UCLA as an English major, my existential fear led me, within a few weeks, to change my degree to mathematics and finance instead. Still, I kept writing and, almost despite myself, managed to produce two cartoon books as an undergraduate. After college, I did get a job with my math major, as the junior accountant of a German publishing company. But I also kept writing and even published a third cartoon book. As the job became increasingly demanding, I saw that I did not want, like my boss, to become the business director of an international publisher. I wanted to be a writer – and it became clear that, to do so, I would have to actively decide to pursue such a life. The only problem was that I had a degree in math and had worked as an accountant – none of which really prepared me for a master’s program in a literature department.

I needed writing a program that was, like my background, unorthodox in its approach. Seeking advice, I called Morgan Fisher, a mentor with whom I’d studied photography at UCLA. He said that for someone like me, who was interested in both the literary and visual arts, the CalArts School of Critical Studies was just the right place: it was where painters taught writing and writers taught painting. The program didn’t have any genre breakdowns, and you didn’t study fiction or nonfiction or poetry. You studied writing. But the idea of studying literature at an art school concerned me. I knew that studying art – or, for that matter, mathematics – was not following the common path to becoming a writer. But I had found that art studies offered me something that was lacking in the study of literature and writing – at least as I had experienced it at UCLA. I might have found a different approach had I gone to college elsewhere. But as an immigrant who had no clue about how to navigate the cultural nuances of American higher education, I was lucky to have gone to any college, and was in no position to choose the best home for my personal and artistic development. So, at that time, given what I’d experienced, CalArts was the only place it made sense for me to pursue the craft of writing. Thanks in part to my cartoons, I even managed to get accepted.

And it was there, in an art school, that I began to formulate my challenge as a writer: exploring my attraction to visual art forms and translating them into an approach toward literary fiction.

Just about the only thing I knew about art going into college was that there was an artist named Picasso and that he was supposed to be one of the greatest. Once I began to study modern art, and the work of artists other than Picasso, I found myself drawn to the work of Ed Ruscha, who had moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles to study art. Ruscha drafted the landscape he found there in clear lines, photographed simple settings, and gave words an equal status to images. But it wasn’t the choice of represented objects that fascinated me about his work. It was something about his rigor.

Rigor is a word that’s used more often in theoretical mathematics than in the creative arts. It has to do with the process of proving something as seemingly simple as the idea that 1 + 1 = 2. In math, one and one cannot be presumed to equal two – or twenty or a hundred or infinity – unless it is proven using rigor. Doing so depends on defining the parameters of each element, defining the parameters of the operation, and then showing that, in a realm functioning according to these definitions, elements that are operated upon in this particular way preserve their integrity. This, in short, is rigor in mathematics.

Rigor in art, like mathematical rigor, also deals with integrity. When I refer to looking at the world with rigor, I mean in a way that preserves a kind of integrity that critiques the experienced world without denying its value. Art that’s rigorous, I find, binds its critical perspective on reality with its aesthetic approach. In mathematical terms, we might say that, in art, the elements we perceive from our life-experience undergo operations that maintain their integrity even after they are turned into aesthetic elements. Just as the operation + deployed on the numbers 1 and 1 results in 2, which retains its nature as a whole number, so operating on our experience through an artist medium should preserve the integrity of the experience itself – even as it produces a new aesthetic object that is different from the original experience.

The important issue here is the integrity of the elements and the integrity of the operation – and, at least for me, that operation is critical. It should critique, without necessarily criticizing, something about our experienced world and the way we operate in that world as people trying to both understand what’s happening around us and also to act and react in real-time. The gaps between what we know, what we think, what we want, what we need, what we feel – this is where the world’s reality and its extension into our inner world, which we call our life, come into contact and conflict. This is reality’s operation on us as human beings. And this operation of reality, in which our inner life meets our outer life and erupts as events, is one I try to preserve in my “aesthetic operation” of writing fiction. Since fiction is conveyed through narrative voice, the path to preserving the integrity of the operation is to imitate the operation of received speech in fictional form. That would mean writing in a way that preserves the form in which we tell a story to someone else. And so, before writing can even begin, we have to have in mind the person to whom the story is being told.

Literary theory calls this person the addressee – a translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Russian word obrashcheniy – who is, in more literal terms, the person toward whom we turn. A writer’s idea of this person will necessarily influence the form of the text: its tone, its level of detail, its ability to be vulnerable. Addressees are central to any literary undertaking because they define, before the writing has even begun, the contours of the operation being conducted on elements from life, and their translation into aesthetic elements. Our awareness of the fact that a literary work will be received by an other also influences the form of that work. And our notions about what does or does not need to be said to the addressee will guide what we do or do not represent in our text. A literary work is addressed to a person whom it means to reach, and in fiction, that person is not identical to the reader in the real world. This is where the slippage occurs – marking the beginning of abstract writing.

Abstraction in writing isn’t as easy to describe as it is in painting. You can play with words or letters to abstract language, but that doesn’t reflect the kind of conceptual abstraction that you find in a painting like Ruscha’s The Music from the Balconies (1984). Ruscha had painted words, which evoke a loud and violent cityscape, over a sunset scene with a pink-blue sky, a dark mountainside in the background, and light wheat-stalks. And, doing so, he challenged viewers to consider the mental image created by the words – intimating a building in a city where our removal from the streets protects us from events we hear down below – alongside the mental image imprinted onto the mind of a pastoral scene of beauty, peace, and plenty. It doesn’t matter that he took these words from a novel by J. G. Ballard. What he did was to abstract the words he found in a novel, taking them out of context, and, at the same time, also abstract the image of the pastoral landscape by overlaying it with words. He succeeds in putting two contrasting images on top of each other by presenting them in different media – one as words and one as a picture. He created abstraction without resorting to shapes – preserving the operation of perception in the real world, processed as words or images, while executing an aesthetic operation that preserves his critical integrity.

This kind of operation, which preserves not only the material element of a medium but also its illusion as image, is harder to detect as abstraction – which is conceptual rather than pictorial. It is also less readily executable in the medium of language alone.

Conceptual abstraction – one that preserves the pictorial aspect of artistic expression – requires special application in literature. Art, after all, is based on illusory image-making. It uses some sort of medium to invoke an image in the mind of viewers or readers by imitating some aspect of how they perceive the world: pictures in the case of painting and language in the case of literature. But it is difficult for an artist who has lived through any part of the twentieth century, to treat the illusory aspect of art innocently. Critics point to the horrors of two world wars as impetus for this radical shift in aesthetics. Some point to photography and cinema, too, which brought an influx of still and moving images, pressuring media such as writing and painting to distill those elements that had cultural and artistic value. Both are probably true and both only partly reflect the story. The twentieth century was devastating for humanity, but its portents were felt long before, and, with all due respect to this most horrible epoch, human history does not lack for violence and depravity. We, in the post–twentieth-century world, are probably not as special as we’d like to believe. Yet our art, like our history, is ours alone.

All artists take up the work and legacy of creative expression from their own observation of the world. I found myself drawn to the question of who is being addressed in a fictional work, and especially to the differences between how we tell stories in real life and how we tell them in literature. Increasingly, I reflected on the circumstances involved in personal storytelling, and noticed that, when we tell stories, we usually tell them to someone we know. The addressee, the person to whom we turn, is someone with whom we are familiar and who knows things about us, our past, and our perspective on reality. We do not necessarily state these things explicitly unless they are part of the story. Many literary texts, on the other hand, are addressed to unknown persons, either to general readers or to a fictional unknown personage who acts as a stand-in for general readers. There’s a genre of literature in which readers are addressed in the second person – but that reader is still unknown to the narrator. Even the approach that deals with “natural” storytelling, which focuses on how we tell stories in real life, tends to focus on stories told to people who are strangers. What attracted me, I saw, was how storytelling is shaped by the fact that the person to whom we’re speaking is someone we know. And this person to whom we’re speaking, even as the story’s recipient, is still an active part of the storytelling. They are present as listeners.

In my own writing, as I began to abstract this specific relation between storyteller and listener, it had quite concrete effects. When you speak to someone you know, you don’t have time to go into every detail involved in a story, because you know your time with them is limited. If I’m going to tell you a story about how I met someone for tea, I’m not going to go into a prolonged meditation on the cookie I ate – unless, as in Proust, that fact is necessary to explain how I began recalling the vague and clouded elements of my past. When I meet a friend for a coffee, and I want to tell that person about something that happened, I know I can’t pursue every interesting thread of what I’m telling – even if the story has enough threads to fill a novel. I’m rarely going to have the time to speak a novel to someone I know. It can happen – perhaps over a long series of meetings – but most of the time, I’m going to try and get a novel’s worth of events to you in what more or less resembles the form of a short story. And that short story is going to appear rather abstract to someone whom I don’t know and who is listening into my telling – like a fiction reader does.

This kind of abstraction in literature is challenging for several reasons. First, it goes against the grain of how we are used to reading fiction, which almost always features a narrator that’s conscious of the fact that the reader is a stranger. When I’m telling a story to a friend, though, I want to get across only those details that contributed to the events, and only talk about what if felt like if this feeling is crucial to how those events unfolded. I don’t “set the mood” for someone with whom I’m sitting and drinking coffee.

This kind of abstraction requires readers to place themselves in the shoes of someone they are not – a person who knows the narrator – and to interpolate themselves into the fictional world. They need to be active readers who use their imagination not to receive images but to create them – filling out the second half of the story by imagining themselves listening to the narrator. This all challenges readers to enter into a dialogue with the fictional narrative, and to continue it in their own lives. Abstract writing preserves the integrity of real-world storytelling within the linguistic medium – and aims to do so while executing it with critical rigor. I cannot ignore the fact that creating an image is actively participating in a lie – in deception. But this begs a question about the necessary good. And, for me, the good involves bringing readers into the creative process as active participants. They are not for me, as they were for Coleridge, willing suspenders of disbelief for the sake of poetic faith. They are partners in a fiction that turns them into creative producers – as listeners – exploring, in their own time and on their own terms, what fiction means to us in the world and how it becomes part of our reality.

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and scholar whose work has appeared in The American Scholar, Smart Set, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His recent books include Old Truths and New Clichés, an edited collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s essays, and a speculative nonfiction novella, A Short Inquiry into the End of the World. His new essay, “The Eternal Hope of the Wandering Jew,” appears in The Hedgehog Review. See more at www.davidstromberg.com.