WO: Some explication of the paradox inherent in Eric's final sentence below would also help us to address it as an intelligible claim within "the space of reasons."
Eric wrote: "... in offense or resentment seen through art, the irrational is held in an extremely rational container."
My claim is not particularly unconventional. It is not unlike Rilke's beauty "that disdains to destroy us" or Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ journey.
I suppose the claim could be rendered thus. Narrative structure is a supremely rational mechanism. Whatever the medium of a narrative, it follows a rational pattern.
1. It elicits audience identification with its topic.2. It maintains audience interest by raising questions about that identification.
3. It delays the answers to those questions.To the extent that narrative structure is artful, it shows some aspects of completeness, identification, inevitability, surprise, and/or harmony in the handling of its topic. If it fails in all of these, it fails as art.
If you think of narrative structure by analogy to chord progressions in jazz, you notice that it provides a rational ground for the unexpected, for the intuitive and the productively counterintuitive, as well as offering an entryway into the audience's irrational personal associations.
For its creator, narrative structure provides a sort of syntax and semantics, a constraint that makes the narrative less than a vulgar dream. The jazz musician can always find his way out of an improvisation through the chord progression; the structure of the novel helps the novelist complete his work -- the delayed answer to the question posed by a narrative structure being there all along, the thread guiding him or her out of the labyrinth he or she designed.
Hence "the irrational held in an extremely rational container." How that fits into the metaphorical "space of reasons" is another narrative.
Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
