One Grand Conceit

Ptim Callan: Occasionally we will see a postmodern author who will start with a single huge, crazy, wild idea and will lovingly and rigorously realize it in a fictional form. And this is what I call one grand conceit. Where the author just says, I'm just gonna start with something that's just mind-blowing and wack-a-doodle. And I'm gonna use that as my foundation, and then I'm gonna tell a very stayed, rigorous, ⁓ you know, a calm, understated story with the basis of this just crazy starting point. And When this is done well, it is a marvelous effect. So I'm gonna share some of these with you today. So the first one we can't talk about this idea without talking about a pre-modern story. This is by Gogol, and it is called The Nose. And it's a short story, and the nose is so far ahead of its time. It feels Postmodern. ⁓ what happens is the nose starts that ⁓ a barber gets up in the morning, a man gets up and it's it's morning and he takes his baked bun that he's gonna eat for his morning breakfast hot out of the oven, and as he's breaking open to eat in it, he finds in there a nose. Somebody's nose. And he recognizes the nose. He knows who it is. And he Out of fear that he's gonna be blamed for having somehow cut off this nose, he basically goes out on the street and after various challenges manages to get rid of it. He throws it in the river. We then change scenes. And we go to the person who's missing his nose. And he wakes up and he doesn't have his nose and he's very upset. And there's just a flat patch of space on his on his on his face. And he goes out in the world to try to find his nose. And he's covering his face because he doesn't want anyone to see he doesn't have a nose. But then this is where the this is where Gogol takes it to this new place, which is the man spots his nose, dressed. in the uniform of a certain member of government wearing a sword, getting out of a carriage, and going into a place of business to conduct business. But it's still his nose. It's the same nose that's this big that was in that loaf of bread. It's both things at the same time, even though that's impossible. And in my mind, I can't help myself, what happens in my mind is I see a giant man-sized nose with a coat on. Walking around with little boots coming out the bottom. But of course, that isn't what it can be, because my mind can't do it. Like you can't visualize this. And this was the stroke of genius that Gogol had way back in the 1830s to say, I'm gonna write this thing that Ultimately is impossible with these irreconcilable things and you can't visualize them. And then I'm just gonna tell the story. And then he just tells the story of the guy trying to get the nose and the nose trying to not get got. And he just tells the story. But it's based on this fundamental, impossible, mind-blowing moment and concept that. Forces us for the for the rest of the the story to to kind of do this mental switch back and forth because it is a nose and it's also a thing that walks around and does business and wears a sword and pretends to be a member of the government. It's both. And how can it be both? And that is the conceit that Gogol gives us. And it's this grand conceit, and it's absolutely wonderful. Okay. Example number two: Talo Calvino. one of the Ten Titans of Postmodernism in his book Cosmo Comics, which is a sheer series of short stories, but they're very thematically related and they clearly are all written together and meant to be together. The very first one of these is called The Distance of the Moon. And it starts with a quote by somebody or other that basically is saying that the moon used to be closer to the Earth and because of the energy of the tides, it has pushed the moon further away. I don't think that's true. I think that's pseudoscience, but whatever. He starts with this quote. And so then he turns around and he starts talking about back in the days. When the moon was very close, what we used to do is we used to get in a boat and row out into the ocean, and the tides were much higher then. And we would prop up a ladder and we would climb up onto the moon. And then he's telling about what happened with these people in the story. And there's this whole story and unrequited love, and this woman gets lost on the moon. And he tells this whole story, right? And it's a story about people and emotions, and it's very well written because Calvino's very good at this kind of thing. But it starts with this fundamentally impossible idea that the moon is close enough to the earth. earth that you can go out with a ladder and climb up onto it, right? And then from there, from that impossible concept, he just tells his story. Right? And you just have to deal. You have to deal with the impossibility of this idea and somehow reconcile it and put it together. And he's just going to make you do that. Another of my ten titans, Robert Coover, gives us whatever happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears and how Coover describes it. So Coover before this had written a book called The Public Burning. And the Public Burning very prominently featured Richard Nixon. And it had he had done a vast amount of research about Richard Nixon to write The Public Burning. And as he said, ⁓ As I was researching Nixon, I realized that Nixon was really great at everything he ever tried to do except two things. There were two things that Richard was no good that Nixon was no good at. And one of them was football, and the other one was women. And so I said to myself, what if Richard Nixon was good at football and women? And what we get is. Whatever happened gloomy guss at the Chicago Bears, where Richard Dixon is a professional football player with the nickname Iron Butt on the Chicago Bears. He's never a politician, he's never president. And so this is a book about all of these, and he's not even the main character. He's like a side character. And this is a book about all of these people. You know, back in like the the forties and fifties, they're they're ⁓ kind of boho types, they're artists and communists and beatniks hanging around with their artists and communists and beatnik friends, one of whom is Richard Nixon, gloomy gus. And it's just a story about them and what they do, and one of the characters there happens to be one of the presidents of the United States who didn't turn out to be presidents of the United States, because instead he's really good at football. So there we are, right? One grand conceit. You take that grand conceit, you take that big what-if idea, and then you blow it out. into in this case a whole book a whole novel something that isn't a whole novel but is a wonderful version I think of the same thing is Terry Bisson's ⁓ short story which is also the title of this collection of short stories Bears Discover Fire. So Terry Bisson who is a science fiction writer but he wanders off the kind of the the classic beaten path of science fiction sometimes and gives us other things that are kind of speculative. In this case, Bears discover fire. Bears discover fire. Like, so it starts out there's this guy, and he's driving with his brother and his nephew, and he has a flat tire, and he has to pull over onto the median, and he and his brother have kind of a little bit of a rivalry and some tension, and they're not, you know, quite comfortable, and the nephew's there, and the nephew picks up on some of it, but not others, and he doesn't like some of the way that the brother's kind of trying to point the nephew and guide the nephew and he's also trying to provide his own guidance and that presates some tension too. And all this is going on while they're changing this tire. And then after a couple pages of this, they realize there's some light coming from over there. Look and there's some bears there and they've got some some some like torches and they're holding the torches and they're looking at them. And the guys all get in the car and they leave and his brother says, Hey, it looks like bears discovered fire. And it's just real kind of calm and quiet. And then we go on with the story, and it's got like news reports about, hey, the bears have fires now. And you know, people go to the they go to the they go back to the woods and they see the fires from the bears and they see some bears. But, you know, it doesn't have the kind of the ⁓ my god quality that it would really have in real life if it turns out that suddenly bears had realized how to make fires. And It's just sort of in there and it's very flat. It's very calm. And it's almost a backdrop for the story that's about people and relationships and the complicated relationships between brothers. Like that's the stuff of the story. And then and and mothers who are dying. And then in all of that also the bears discovered fire, right? So one grand conceit. And it's a marvelous marvelous story. Marvelous story. ⁓ I'm gonna End with two let's do this one next. Great apes by Will Self. Great Apes by Will Self is ⁓ set in the here and now. It's a modern contemporary story about life in I think it's London and people with jobs and things. Except that we're all chimpanzees. We're all bonabot chimpanzees and we still, as you can see, wear suits and and glasses and ride mass transit and have jobs like lawyers and table waiters and stuff. But also we're bonabo san chimpanzees and we live in gametes the way the chimpan chimpanzees do and we determine our pecking order the way the chimpanzees do and all of that. So we're chimpanzees and we're modern people and we're kind of It the same type, Mr. Reader, you get to deal with it. Deal with it. And then a different layer he puts on top of this is that the the motivating action behind the story here is that the main character One morning he wakes up and realizes that we're all on chimpanzees and he's a chimpanzee and we're not humans anymore and he's not a human. And ultimately, this character gets institutionalized. And at the end of the book, he comes through a full recovery, which is that he realizes. the delusional nature of his belief that we used to be human beings because after all he and we have always been chimpanzees. And he's healthy now. And he's released back into society as a healthy, a mentally healthy chimpanzee. So it's wonderful, right? It's a wonderful conceit. It's a wonderful concept. ⁓ the last one I'm gonna give you is China Meaville. China Meaville Again, is a speculative fiction writer. Would call him a science fiction writer, I guess. He's a little genre crossing. ⁓ and so science fiction kind of by its nature has these conceits. This one in particular, I just love so much. ⁓ the city and the city. And what we get in the city and the city is that there are these two cities. That exist, I gotta remember their names. it's ⁓ Bay Basil and And Ulkoma. And they both are in a region of the world that seems to be like maybe the Levantine region so eastern, southeastern Europe, something where you could have kind of a a Slavic sounding name for it and kind of a you know an Arabic sounding name for it, and they'd be sort of at the same place. And ⁓ what happens is both of these cities kind of both coexist in the same physical place. And depending how you enter this physical space, you might be in Basil or you might be in Ocoma. But it's not like the different names for the same things with the same buildings and the same streets. They're different cities. They've got different people and different structures and different stuff. But they're both there in the same physical place. And sometimes they physically interact with each other. And there's a specific way that you can go from one to the other. And this becomes the the story of this and the the the the the the gist of this book is that there's a police detective in basil who has to solve a mystery and it involves something that happened that crossed over between basil and ilcoma. And so he has to or Ilcoma. And so he has to deal with both. And we're introduced to this idea that these two cities that are completely separate from each other, that literally have different buildings and different streets and different people, are both physically existing in the same space. And, you know, no explanation for it. It's just what it is. Right? And there's no sort of, well, here's the science behind it happened or a weird event, and there was an eclipse or any of that stuff. It's just. This is how it is and everybody knows how it is and this is what we're doing. And so it's this wonderful he starts with this wonderful, crazy, over-the-top grand conceit, and then he tells a police procedural story in this environment. And again, when this kind of thing is done well, it is great, it is mind-blowing, it is delightful. And certainly all of these are examples of that. And so we'll see other ones. We'll run into more of this. This is a thing that you see ⁓ sometimes in postmodernists can enjoy doing this. And I have called it one grand conceit. Thank you.