Roasted hare of Nastya Melnychenko
A fiction writer Nastya Melnychenko is going to buy and roast a hare in order to achieve a better quality of her prose, in which she mentioned roasting a hare. That’s what positivism leads to!
She thinks that the quality of prose depends on how much it coincides with life. In fact, this is not the case. The coincidence of fiction and life is a variable. I have written about it many times and call it a gap — and this gap is regulated by the author himself, depending on needs. Unless, of course, the author is deliberately writing rather than reproducing social stereotypes. The logic of capitalism (market relations) requires that the gap always be zero: “for what one bought — for that one sold”. Otherwise, the buyer feels that he was deceived. This logic of capitalism is also called the “logic of common sense”, which is set out in Max Weber’s book “Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism.” If you want to make a lot of money — you need to rationalize your author’s mystical experience. Thus, mystical experience disappears from art altogether, and it becomes a copy of life.
Some artists cannot control their mystical experience, so their gap is approaching infinity. Exactly how to control the gap is unknown. This is a mystery of art, and everyone here has their own personal approach.
The USSR decided to simply kill or imprison all artists who arbitrarily increased the gap, so the USSR was a deeply bourgeois country. Bourgeois artists do not understand that they are reproducing not reality, but only their personal experience, which no one can reproduce with 100% accuracy, so in fact they produce illusions. A novel “Klavka” by Maryna Hrymych (about state controlled Writers’ Union in the USSR of 1950s) looks comical in this context: the modern author tries to convince us that she is passing on to us the experience of a person of the 1950s. But everyone believes her, because no one has such experience. You can pour beer and say that this is a Beaujolais nouveau — no one will be able to check.
No documentation and no eyewitness memories can reproduce reality, they only convey to us subjective impressions about it. This idea is close to solipsism, but in fact, the author can get closer to reality. To do this, he needs to stop perceiving it unambiguously as a constant value, because it is not. Everyone has their own ideas about reality, which change every second, and therefore the work of art must be constantly in a state of oscillation (flickering in sort of metamodern style), which convinces the audience in the variable and multiple state of reality.
