Muttering about mimesis and anti-mimesis
Art imitates life or life imitates art?
Apparently, Aristotle suggested that art imitates life – the mimetic. That what we have in our everyday, concrete must-get-bananas-at-Tesco world is instinctively reconfigured in the mind and perhaps then on paper (drawings, text, notation etc).
Wilde intimated the opposite – life imitates art (anti-mimetic). In a crude example, the Taylor Swift red lipped classic spreads like a bush-fire. Or, perhaps more scarily, how the Slenderman urban myth could create actual terror.
Why the waffle?
The novel I’m writing is funny. It’s fucking miserable actually, but with hopeful glittery bits of humour. I had been planning to write an adjacent story to the recent documentary, The Man on the Bridge. I’d found one woman’s story interesting – not the ‘main narrator’s’, though it was also intriguing. The woman had lost her brother to suicide and he hadn’t left a note. I thought, that’s an interesting story – all the whys and wherefores – opportunities for plotting, how to progress. And then my own brother, who had been ill for a couple of years, died. You’re not supposed to say passed away. ‘Died’ is clear and actual. (This line is in the book and is, I suppose, a little fist of the mimetic and anti mimetic and takes me back to the idea of how narrative can tell us a lot about the nature of life. But that was the PhD and I can’t be bothered to go there).
I’ve found myself though writing through my own grief in the novel and the two blur strangely and, I think, helpfully. The other ‘funny’ – proper hilarious, like – thing, is that my brother had wanted us to do a pub quiz at his funeral. To keep his memory alive by us meeting all the other people he knew. And so I’ve been talking to people and finding out things, like the detention he just shrugged his shoulders about and never turned up for. (not in the novel). Also something, the main character does in my novel – in a sort of detective-like manner.
I can’t work out whether this is mimetic or anti-mimetic, the writing, but it’s working at the moment and you can’t mutter darkly about that.
