Scan barcode
jacob_wren's review
Ronald Sukenick writes:
There’s one of the ideas we have to get rid of: the Great Work. That’s one of the ways we have of strangling ourselves in our culture. We’ve got enough Great Works. Once a work becomes Great forget it. What we need is not Great Works but playful ones in whose sense of creative joy everyone can join. Play, after all, is the source of the learning instinct, that has been proved by indispensable scientific experiments. And what characterizes play? Freedom, spontaneity, pleasure. This is as distinguished from games, games are formalized play. I’ve always had a prejudice against games, I got stuck at some infantile pre-game stage. I like to make-up my own games. And anyway, what games are there today that you can play without a sense of camp, which is to say, without a sense of hollowness, meaninglessness, self-consciousness – a ploy against the abyss? And self-conscious pleasure is perverted pleasure, ultimately nihilistic. No, we have to invent new games – and then discard them and invent more. This, then, is the beginning of our literary re-education. A story is a game someone has played so that you can play it too, and having learned how to play it, throw it away.
There’s one of the ideas we have to get rid of: the Great Work. That’s one of the ways we have of strangling ourselves in our culture. We’ve got enough Great Works. Once a work becomes Great forget it. What we need is not Great Works but playful ones in whose sense of creative joy everyone can join. Play, after all, is the source of the learning instinct, that has been proved by indispensable scientific experiments. And what characterizes play? Freedom, spontaneity, pleasure. This is as distinguished from games, games are formalized play. I’ve always had a prejudice against games, I got stuck at some infantile pre-game stage. I like to make-up my own games. And anyway, what games are there today that you can play without a sense of camp, which is to say, without a sense of hollowness, meaninglessness, self-consciousness – a ploy against the abyss? And self-conscious pleasure is perverted pleasure, ultimately nihilistic. No, we have to invent new games – and then discard them and invent more. This, then, is the beginning of our literary re-education. A story is a game someone has played so that you can play it too, and having learned how to play it, throw it away.
More...