Pointillism Part Three

A Little Cultural Context

A Third False Start

In no specific order, let’s look at the following. The Pointillism stories — as defined by stories that consist of very specific details and/or anecdotes that are collaged together to give the overall impression of a vast story that must form in the reader’s mind — they seem to have come of age in the late 70s. Which was also the era that gave us?

Channel surfing. Think of it, with the advent of cable television viewers could sit and randomly click through snippets of moving images. You could create a collage of moments. Not just a slide show of still images, but a lineal series of moving images. You had little idea what was where, or when, so there was an element of chance and surprise. It was like throwing the I Ching coins. In fact, the writer Monica Drake’s favorite college drinking game, she call the “Dead Girl Drinking Game.”

To play, you hold a drink in one hand and the television remote in the other. Click random numbers, and each time the television pops up a young woman being murdered — or already dead, hence the game’s name — you have to drink your drink. Within minutes you’ll be shit-faced. Monica loved the politics of it, how it seemed to prove that entertainment thrived on menacing and slaughtering young women. My point is that pre-1976? there was no “Dead Girl Drinking Game” because there was no channel surfing.

And What Else Emerged About That Time?

If you said The Weird Nonnarrative Feature Film… You’re right! Sure, there were weird art house, cult films like El Topo, but they had a plot. With cable television came channel surfing, and the market seemed to recognize that an audience didn’t need so much hand holding. No longer was an audience tied to the Modernism rule that expository plot needed to lead the viewer by the nose with a plodding And then and then and then…

So, during my sophomore year at the University of Oregon, we got Koyaanisqatsi. Eighty-six minutes of moving images set to Philip Glass music. A giant nonnarrative, non-language series of images. Cut fast. Cut slow. Set in fast motion or slow motion. All of it calculated to bring you to an emotional message about the world: Technology Bad. And for the slow learners, there’s some translated Hopi prophecies tacked onto the end. I was not among the majority of my friends, meaning I loved it.¹

Koyaanisqatsi took channel surfing to the next level. As a nod to the same, the film even devolves into rapid-cut images taken from television, snippets of Ted Koppel reporting the news, Malt-O-Meal commercials, bombs exploding, and soap opera scenes. If you just want to check out the film’s trailer, here is it, and it’s decent. You’ll get the general idea.

Two sequels were to follow: Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. And hard on their heels the feature film Baraka.

To Review, Cable Television Gave Us Channel Surfing, Surfing gave us the Nonnarrative feature film, but what came next?

Would you believe it if I told you that television upped the stakes by created ready-made surfing sequences? Check it out. Like Bizarre Love Triangle. Not a lot of Hopi messaging, but you get the idea. We got How Soon Is Now which seems to draw from both the director Godfrey Reggio and from the Andy Warhol films. Still the nonnarrative envelope was being pushed up.

And Let’s Not Forget

“Brain mapping.” This was the jargony term for brainstorming in the 80s, the era of the whiteboard and the squeaky felt-tipped, dry erase marker. In every meeting, everywhere, about everything, the chair would write a central idea in the middle of the whiteboard. Those also present would shout out their associations to that idea, and the chair would jot each association on the board so they all eventually hovered around the original idea. A map of associations, so to speak.

The method was nonlinear and nonheirarchical. The resulting mess on the whiteboard simply showed many different ways to access the core idea. Can you see how this method could result in the Hansen story Wickedness?

And It’s Out of This Surfing Culture That Pointillism as a Style Seemed to Emerge

Think of mosaics. Think of collage and montage. Picture all of that Pop Art that used Ben-Day dots to suggest larger shapes within a composition. Why shouldn’t fiction writers adopt a similar Pointillist style? Beside the stories by Ron Hansen and Amy Hempel, there’s also the nonfiction memoir of Sandra Bernhard, Confessions of a Pretty Lady, her life story told in sharp anecdotes and brief memories, each separated on the page by a graphic device. This link isn’t the book but a documentary about the memoir.

This might be a reach, but Pointillism stories always struck me as a form of Phenomenology. From Britannica:

Phenomenology, a philosophical movement originating in the 20th century, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions.

Consider the story The Blind Men and the Elephant by James Baldwin:

There were once six blind men who stood by the road-side every day, and begged from the people who passed. They had often heard of elephants, but they had never seen one; for, being blind, how could they?

It so happened one morning that an elephant was driven down the road where they stood. When they were told that the great beast was before them, they asked the driver to let him stop so that they might see him.

Of course they could not see him with their eyes; but they thought that by touching him they could learn just what kind of animal he was.

The first one happened to put his hand on the elephant's side. "Well, well!" he said, "now I know all about this beast. He is exactly like a wall."

The second felt only of the elephant's tusk. "My brother," he said, "you are mistaken. He is not at all like a wall. He is round and smooth and sharp. He is more like a spear than anything else."

The third happened to take hold of the elephant's trunk. "Both of you are wrong," he said. "Anybody who knows anything can see that this elephant is like a snake."

The fourth reached out his arms, and grasped one of the elephant's legs. "Oh, how blind you are!" he said. "It is very plain to me that he is round and tall like a tree."

The fifth was a very tall man, and he chanced to take hold of the elephant's ear. "The blindest man ought to know that this beast is not like any of the things that you name," he said. "He is exactly like a huge fan."

The sixth was very blind indeed, and it was some time before he could find the elephant at all. At last he seized the animal's tail. "O foolish fellows!" he cried. "You surely have lost your senses. This elephant is not like a wall, or a spear, or a snake, or a tree; neither is he like a fan. But any man with a par-ti-cle of sense can see that he is exactly like a rope."

Then the elephant moved on, and the six blind men sat by the roadside all day, and quarreled about him. Each believed that he knew just how the animal looked; and each called the others hard names because they did not agree with him. People who have eyes sometimes act as foolishly.

Doesn’t that multiple-POV story remind you of the Hansen story?

Recently on a Flight

While on book tour last summer I sat watching a documentary. A young man seated beside me leaned over and said, “I love that documentary. Always have.” What made the moment a lasting memory was the man — young, Brooks Brother shirt, button-down collar, business class bruh, good hair cut. And the film in question was Paris is Burning.

This stranger and I both appreciated the scattershot way the film approached the subject of ballroom culture. It introduced characters, and each gave a different take on the subject. Yes, like brain mapping. We’re walking into a fully formed world. It would be tedious to begin from the beginning. Instead, we approach the subject like the blind men. Such an approach gives us specific moments to remember — “I want to be a rich, white woman” — yet allows the subject of the ballroom culture to fully exist without being explained away. Without being dominated by our gaze and dismissed.

But, Chuck Where Have You Done This Pointillism?

The original short story Fight Club — which became Chapter Six in the novel — was loosely based on the filmmaker’s approach in Paris is Burning. Avoid being linear. Show us sticky moments. Tackle the subculture from many different angles.

Such an approach allows the subject to have some breathing room, thus the subject seems alive. It’s not fully knowable. The reader/viewer isn’t left with a conceit of falsely understanding so much they can dismiss the subject.

And For the Writer?

For the writer, approaching a story or book with Pointillism is good and bad. It’s good because you don’t have to juggle the zillion-page, incomplete thing in your head while you work you job and tend your kids and maintain a household. With Pointillism, you just need to focus on the elephant’s tail. You can dwell on that tail for days. You can get that one small thing perfect before you move on to another small thing you can perfect. It is a joy to write Pointillism.

Besides the Fight Club story, I used this style in the “household hints” chapter of Survivor and the sex addict scene in Choke.

The downside? Less-bright editors won’t grasp what you’re doing. Despite the obvious power of a story like Wickedness or In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried, editors often can’t see past what academia has trained them to consider a “good short story.” God bless Alice Turner. For decades she was the fiction editor for Playboy, where they paid top dollar for short stories.

From Locus:

Born 1939, Turner was the legendary fiction editor at Playboy, one of the most prestigious and highest-paying markets for short fiction, from 1980-2000. During her tenure, Turner published work by Terry Bisson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, and Dan Simmons, among other notable SF writers. Turner also helped nurture new writers, teaching at both Clarion and Clarion West.

If memory serves, the top price for a short story at Playboy was $17K in the mid 90s. I submitted a chapter from Choke and Turner bought it, but only for $9K. At the time, she reasoned, “I’ll pay you top dollar when you write me a real story.” Granted, that was decades ago, but editors are still hidebound when it comes to accepting Pointillism.

That’s not to say all Pointillism works. Each small sequence has to have its own pay-off. With a laugh or shock. Think of each as a potato chip, and you always want the reader to reach into the bag and eat another chip. This is how you get your book read in a single sitting.

Done Right, Pointillism is the Most-Easily Consumed Type of Story

Consider the way you’ll scroll through a long, long list of memes. Or the way you’ll linger on TikTok, consuming each small post. The irregular reward schedule is such that you’ll keep scrolling. Each post requires such a small investment of time and attention that you’ll always risk reading another. The risk/reward is stacked in the reader’s favor in a Pointillism story.

As the writers for Mst3k used to reason: If we pack enough jokes into every minute and the viewer only laughs at one, the viewers are still laughing so much they think the entire program is funny.

Or shocking or sad or profound. In a world where attention spans seem to be getting shorter, maybe the Pointillism style is worth a try.

Write just one, perfect aspect of your project today. Only a paragraph or two. The elephant’s ear, for example. Then call it a perfect day’s work.

1. I have to apologize for the Liberty Mutual Insurance ads that pop up on this YouTube version. Those ads seem to underscore the horrors of modern society.