A Story
Author — Kim Stanley RobinsonFinished — 2025-03-16
KSR on Wolfe, including a detour through Proust!
What I mean is that after Wolfe read Proust, he understood he was free, free to become himself in any way he wanted, to become, like Proust, one of the great Modernist writers, all of whom make their own tradition, style, subject matter, and reality. After you’ve read a novel that contains a 240-page garden party, why should you fear anything? You can’t. Anything is possible.
A genius in Wolfe: and if there are any fellow postmodern materialists reading this and groaning at the idea of there being anything unusual inside an artist or anyone else, anything beyond the workings of the brain, I will agree immediately, but point out that the latest news from brain science makes it clearer and clearer that saying “only the brain” is not much of a delimiting statement. The brain is not a clockwork, nor a steam engine, nor a binary or digital computer, nor any of the machines we conceptualize it to be with our simple metaphors based on our own feeble handiwork, as if the brain could only be as complex as something we ourselves could make. Very much not the case. The brain is a kind of pocket universe. The mind is huge, and consciousness a small part of it. The unconscious may well be inhabited by “subroutines,” as the computer people would have it, processes that may actually be more like characters. Maybe they are like Jungian archetypes—a shadow seems likely, perhaps an anima or animus—but who knows. Very probably the brain consists of organizations even stranger and more various than that. It may be a kind of library of stories all telling themselves at once. And by way of stories written down, one unconscious mind communicates with other unconscious minds.
His stories usually are not allegories but events in themselves, something like dreams or vases.