there I go with my nomothetic nattering

[meikuree]

been slow on replies due to thesis-writing struggles, but a quick post:

I've been meaning to write about the concept of inverse specificity. it's really a concept I've poached from Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon, specifically from his chapter about fossil fuels and the puzzling lack of a literary riposte to something that has dictated and underpinned the sociopolitical life of a major half of the century:

Why is it, as Amitav Ghosh has asked, that the oil encounter has failed to generate a literary response comparable in range and depth to that produced in earlier times by the spice trade? Moreover, one should note that Big Oil certainly hasn’t produced a literature equal in range or magnitude to that generated by its fossil fuel precursor, King Coal, which inspired Emile Zola, George Orwell, Sinclair, Clancey Segal, and D. H. Lawrence, to name but a few. Given the preeminence of oil in America’s destiny, it is startling that not since Sinclair’s California saga Oil! appeared in 1927 has any author hazarded writing the great American oil novel.

but he then points out that someone has in fact composed a Great Oil Novel, if not recognised as such: "Abdelrahman Munif [has] penned Cities of Salt, a sprawling quintet of novels that engages the broad geography and volatile history of the petroleum encounter. [... Munif] sought, on an unparalleled scale, to give transnational life to the forbidding subject of oil, a writer alive to oil’s lubrication of human greed, alive to oil’s bewitchments and its disenchanted states, both national and psychological." [73]

the concept of inverse specificity is mentioned here:

[...] his refusal to name a society that provided the setting for any novel, even when it was recognizably, say, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Iran—served a double purpose. On the one hand, it allowed him political deniability. But perhaps more significantly, it marked him as a resolutely regional writer in a transnational (rather than a Thomas Hardy) sense. Munif insisted that his region’s commonalities were more striking—and more politically consequentialthan its internal differences. He viewed the region as, among other things, one vast carceral state: “the political prison exists from the Atlantic to the Gulf,” he declared, a sentiment that found dramatic expression in his most famous novel, East of the Mediterranean, set in a typically unnamed despotic state. [...]

By not specifying the locations of his novels Munif sought to limit the risk that a nation-specific critique could be read as exculpating other equally heinous regimes in the region. His fiction works, as it were, through inverse specificity. By amassing sensory, cultural, geographical, and historical detail he writes against the forces of amnesia, censorship, and repression, creating the impression of whole societies that are, nonetheless, never reducible to themselves

the idea of 'inverse specificity' floating in my head only bears a passing resemblance to Munif's initial concept, but in my case -- I still need to tease it out and think some more -- I like the... magic that happens when writers or creators zoom in and strive at precision and incisiveness and end up with something greater than those parts. and when they end up with a somehow "universal" story, not universal because its message is diluted into generic statements, but because its commentary is damning enough, cutting enough to be timeless. simply the idea that in wanting to avoid tepid broad appeal you arrive at something like it but better. the bad example I've thought of in my personal life is my liking for Tori Amos's lyrics, which sometimes are nonsense, along with the fact that she's categorised as a "female empowerment" musician, which I actually disagree with. I don't like her music because it resonates with woo-woo mystical metaphysical feminine divine shit -- I like it because even her narratives about Being A Woman are, really, not just about that and transcend those markers.

Comments

[chocochipbiscuit]

I like the... magic that happens when writers or creators zoom in and strive at precision and incisiveness and end up with something greater than those parts. and when they end up with a somehow "universal" story, not universal because its message is diluted into generic statements, but because its commentary is damning enough, cutting enough to be timeless. simply the idea that in wanting to avoid tepid broad appeal you arrive at something like it but better.

Yessss I love this. It reminds me of the writing advice about "writing small," like you can't encompass the horrors of a war in vague generalities about violence being bad, but by writing about the child's abandoned shoe left on the road.

[meikuree]

yes! Word Painting has a nice section about this too, about a poem that zooms in on a girl trying to buy a button for a coat for her father's funeral -- the author makes the point that the resulting image and observant description says a lot more about grief than any number of words like "pain", "hollow", "grief" would.

I thought about this more, and I think that magic happens as well because -- in contrast to the idea that writing "small" is simplification or reduction and such -- zooming in can in fact be a technique of avoiding that simplification and reduction, of not letting your subject fall prey to homogeneity in writing, if that makes sense.