The Vignettes: The Consolation of Kafka and Monet Unfinished

ISBN-13: 9781499631326 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 232 str.

Richard T. Beck

Opis

The Vignettes: The Consolation of Kafka and Monet Unfinished is a collection of sketches and short stories separated from each other by a date. The designated date is where the Kafka and Monet console the author. This consolation part of the work, mimicking Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, interrupts the reader giving the reader the impression that he/she is reading two books at one time, that is, the short story itself and the story inside the mind of the author while writing. It is unfinished, as the subtitle states, just as the conversation about the sketches should always be unfinished. The conversations give the reader a glimpse into the author's mind while writing the stories, giving the text, a more authentic, genuine, and personal tone. Not all of the dates include a conversation; this emphasizes the book's incompleteness and illustrates the struggle the author had in calling the sketches finished. The author contemplated increasing the volume of the sketches but he did not want to lose the fast readability effect of the stories; a readability that is adapted to a print media that is in constant flux and a postmodern audience swimming in a sea of instantaneous-ism that ontologically does not know the present tense but does feel comfortable in the instantaneous present progressive. The present as designated as a verb tense is a misnomer as the present constitutes past, present, and future events. The author wrote the sketches from many points-of-view: first and third, limited and omniscient. The themes range from socio-cultural, philosophical, economic, fantasy, historical, mythic, local color, allegorical, erotic, existential, spiritual, religious, futuristic, legal, journalistic, to prophetic with a spattering of surprise, wit, humor, irony, and horror. The author wishes readers to participate in the text by filling in the absent (Derrida) details (that longer stories might explicitly provide) with their own background knowledge. "Someone, then, should be guessing," Kafka suggested.] The style? The author makes no claims to a style although he does employ the 'Jamesian Surprise' to provoke his reader to moral, reasoned, or cognitive action. "Perhaps, that he has no style is what makes this work an important one," Monet confided. "Oh, he has a style but it has not yet been named and for that reason, he will continue to write," Kafka said. "If the book were a person, it would be described as reticent and inaccessible," I said.] The author resists postmodern representalism preferring the modernity's universalism that ascribes to the existential and pseudo-semantic ethos of Sartre and Hayakawa, Wittgenstein, Rawls, et. al.) that we all define Mankind by our thought (I am ergo I exist.) and action (I exist ergo I am.) and how we negotiate the difference is by use of our limited language tool. The ancient Greeks were right from the beginning to posit apriori that there was no duality of value between the soul and the body. By doing so, the negotiation was avoided until the 20th century when Wittgenstein said there are some things we can't talk about and Heidegger in response called for a new language of philosophy. For the Greeks poison the body and you have poisoned the soul. "And who said the body is the soul's tabernacle?" Monet asked.] Hence, art must have at least a thread of appeal even to the constructs and worldview of the most distant aborigine who has renounced the world just not a centrified group out to empower themselves a voice. That the author resists postmodern representalism, even when admitting that it a Sisyphean task to combat the centrification of Man and the balkanization of worldviews, puts him in the postmodern genre attested to by Slavoj i ek. Most of all, the author hopes the stories are entertaining and provoking. The author intended to publish his third book of poetry in 2014 but decided to postpone that publication in favor of publishing The Vignettes."

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