Thank you for these thoughts, Katy! I read Wild Orchid last year on an Undset deep-dive, along with Jenny, Madame Dorthea, Ida Elisabeth, and the beginning of Burning Bush-- hoping to turn it into more substantive writing that just never had a chance to get going. I appreciate your thoughts on Wild Orchid, as I felt the narrative dragged a bit, especially compared to Ida E (same category of modern day post-conversion novels). I did read through it fairly quickly, so I need to go revisit it with your thoughts in mind!
Seth, whatever you're doing is a thing I want to read more of, so sure, yes, absolutely! I'd want to draw a distinction, though, between your principled choice to refrain from spending time on characters' interiority in self-examining terms--while continuing to depict the action of characters who, though they say little about it, do HAVE a real interiority which, however, is fully enough expressed in their action--vs. totally prescinding from the idea that characters have inner lives that mean anything or correspond meaningfully to anything in the external world, and just flattening out character to infinitesimal degrees of surface-level action. The latter is what I want to resist; I think you can do a contemplative realism that does the former (and I think you *are* doing it) but ... maybe I am not accurately getting at where I think the distinction rests.
I was reading about some Dutch realist painters (Jacob van Ruisdael). It's a different medium, but the critic called it a "selective naturalism." That phrase has stuck with me, and when the term contemplative realist started being batted around, that is the phrase I immediately linked it to.
Seth, this is wonderful; I particularly appreciate where Walford calls attention to how depiction always reveals a way of valuing what is depicted. This also links in to the discussion of "painterly" language in fiction, which Undset does a lot of and which I also particularly admire in your work.
Thank you for these thoughts, Katy! I read Wild Orchid last year on an Undset deep-dive, along with Jenny, Madame Dorthea, Ida Elisabeth, and the beginning of Burning Bush-- hoping to turn it into more substantive writing that just never had a chance to get going. I appreciate your thoughts on Wild Orchid, as I felt the narrative dragged a bit, especially compared to Ida E (same category of modern day post-conversion novels). I did read through it fairly quickly, so I need to go revisit it with your thoughts in mind!
Katy, I...I think I'm a naturalist. Can one be a contemplative naturalist?
Seth, whatever you're doing is a thing I want to read more of, so sure, yes, absolutely! I'd want to draw a distinction, though, between your principled choice to refrain from spending time on characters' interiority in self-examining terms--while continuing to depict the action of characters who, though they say little about it, do HAVE a real interiority which, however, is fully enough expressed in their action--vs. totally prescinding from the idea that characters have inner lives that mean anything or correspond meaningfully to anything in the external world, and just flattening out character to infinitesimal degrees of surface-level action. The latter is what I want to resist; I think you can do a contemplative realism that does the former (and I think you *are* doing it) but ... maybe I am not accurately getting at where I think the distinction rests.
I was reading about some Dutch realist painters (Jacob van Ruisdael). It's a different medium, but the critic called it a "selective naturalism." That phrase has stuck with me, and when the term contemplative realist started being batted around, that is the phrase I immediately linked it to.
https://www.sethwieck.com/commonplace/selective-naturalism/
Seth, this is wonderful; I particularly appreciate where Walford calls attention to how depiction always reveals a way of valuing what is depicted. This also links in to the discussion of "painterly" language in fiction, which Undset does a lot of and which I also particularly admire in your work.