Less Is Better, Vol. 3: Literature
In our continuing quest for design inspirado, DLB is always pleased to present you with some of our favorite examples of doing less to get better results. In this installment: The art of less literature.
Published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1766, Laurence Sterne’s comic masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman employs a number of techniques to call attention to the materiality of the text. Here, a blank page is offered to the reader for the purpose of composing his or her own description of Widow Wadman’s beauty.
The many literary techniques employed by Sterne (this particular blank page being among the most famous) have been understood to anticipate strategies employed over an incredible expanse of forthcoming novelistic enterprise, forerunning elements in stream of consciousness novels, techniques of post-modernism, and even presaging elements of the Hypertext novel.
Much lesser known, the poem below is called River/sandbank, and it was written by Seiichi Niikuni. I have a great deal of personal sentimental attachment to this poem; I was smitten with it from a very young age, and it remains to my mind one of the great exemplars of poetic restraint.
The character 川 (Kawa) means "river", and 州 (Shū) means "sandbank".
Really rather brilliant isn’t it?
