Category: Literature/critical
Revolutionary Narrative
Revolutionary Narrative… what makes a story that does more than rearrange the conventions we use to reinforce our assumptions about the world? How do we find our way to stories that refuse to confirm our expectations–but rather, shatter them with the unexpected–not simply of ‘incident’… of what ‘happens,’ but of the very structures of reality?
Someone I once knew challenged the merit of Joyce’s Ulysses because it doesn’t exist as a completed whole. His argument went something like this: in the thousands of minor and some not so minor differences in the existing manuscripts and proofs, there is no way to decide what a definitive, authorial edition would look like. What we have, then—is a collective assemblage representing no single aesthetic vision, and therefore, does not exist as a unity. Setting aside arguments for how collective, even accidental productions, might come together as unified systems—which is how I would have responded at the time—the more basic, and unexamined assumption here, is the idea of unity itself—that there can ever be such a thing as a ‘whole.’
There is no such thing as ‘a’ novel. Or poem. Or story or… as a single, aesthetically (or otherwise) coherent, systematically organized structure or system, such that every part relates to every other to create a unified, and unifying whole. And it is this, not because there are as many readings as readers, or because every possible interpretive translation (all interpretations are translations) is necessarily limited, that we can never comprehend a literary production as a whole—as convincing as these arguments might be—but because there is no such thing. It does not exist. That is not to say, Joyce’s Ulysses doesn’t exist. It does. In different versions, and each version is made of parts that are always greater than any hypothetical, always inconceivable whole. I say ‘inconceivable,’ not that we can’t conceive of the possibility of an aesthetic whole—but that it will be impossible to point to what that might actually be. Sort of like the way we talk about God. Imaginable in general, but inconceivable in the particular. Or for that matter, how we think of collectives of power… of the State…which has more than a little in common with the way we think of God.
The End of the Genre Wars — Please!
Moebius
The Last Holdouts of the Genre Wars: on Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Misuse of Labels
Ari Figue’s Cat: pre-order from Smashwords
My novel can now be pre-ordered from Smashwords.
Last Stages
of what became Ari Figue’s Cat.
from March, 2010
I have a work-in-progress. Fiction. Working title: Found Things. Closing in on 100,000 words, so by volume, I guess it’s a novel. Or would be if I could stop rewriting draft after draft and finish it. I began work on it a month or so after finishing my first novel—in 2001. Nine years and counting. My last run at it was going pretty well, but I wanted to get back to poetry. I would start to write and find myself scribbling out notes for poems. The notes began to turn into poems Sometime in November I put the novel aside. Have written almost 100 new poems since—and happy for it. How could I not be? Never been so productive in my life. But I can’t say I’ve stopped looking back, stopped thinking about the unfinished novel.
It’s more than leaving something undone. I’ve abandoned cartloads of stories and poems without a moment’s regret. This is different. it tugs at me, nags; I go to sleep thinking about it and wake up ready to to dive back into it. Then I write another poem, and realize that, as much as I’d like to resolve this, I don’t want to put the poetry aside.
A few days ago I realized that if and when I did get back to it, I would have to do a major revision, right from the beginning. The main character is way too passive. I’ve been holding something back, I thought. As though I was courting sympathy on his behalf, as though I wanted readers to like him! This was a deeply satisfying idea—to make him driven (he already is, but so far, with no clear object or motive). Driven, manipulative, self deceived.
Now I’m thinking that’s still not enough. Yes, I want to finish it. No, I don’t want to write a ‘novel.’
I really don’t.
Not anymore. Not the sort of novel this keeps turning into. And playing with the characters isn’t going to change that.
Why not write it over. As poetry? Something no less radical.
It’s how it began
There are chapters now that read like conventional short fiction. I meant them to stand in contrast to their surrounding context. They do, but the difference is not stark enough. The contrasts are superficial, stylistic, fail to penetrate to the level of language itself, fail to push at the boundaries of poetry and prose. most disturbing of all, fail to challenge the hegemonic authority of narrative, its power to harness every other element–space and time itself–to the task of fulfilling the mimetic desires of the reader.
What is the pleasure—or the point—of limiting our efforts to what we know we can do?
Finished now. Proofs waiting for release of this book, May 25. Did I do it? How far did it fall short? Will there be another?
PDF and Mobi-(for Kindle) digital prepublication copies available at SMASHWORDS.
The Critical Task
from January 2010
One can only hope for readers who notice the cracks you’ve left, and the light that shines through from the other side.
I’ve been thinking about the Trace. As through a cloud chamber an energized particle passes, ionizing the cloud medium, marking the path of the particle–a trace that is not itself the moving particle that made it, but its sign. So a poem, a work of art. What is left on the page, the canvas, resonating in our hearing: the Trace of the encounter that is its meaning. An absence marked, or mark of what is absent.
The critical task, both necessary and impossible, is to evoke through a second level encounter with the Trace (the Thing left to mark the Absence… the Lacanian Real ?) — the shape of the relationship between the remnant and that which is no longer there and cannot be reclaimed, renamed, recounted. A second Trace, a second Absence.
Maddie Crum reviews Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
Satin Island
by Tom McCarthy
Knopf, $24.00
Published Feb. 17, 2015
“Last year Tom McCarthy wrote thoughtfully and passionately against the merits of Realism — that is, the mode of writing that prefers to describe events straightforwardly, under the pretense that such a style conveys truth more accurately than, say, stories about magicians or time travel. He dismisses the latest crop of Realists lauded by critics, namely Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose My Struggle is said to weave the epic and the quotidian together in the space of a single paragraph. Instead, McCarthy praises writers such as William S. Burroughs, whose photography keenly shows the approach he takes in his writing. Burroughs cuts up photos of city streets and reassembles them, forming fragmented images and explaining, “Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up.”
Read her review on the Huffington Post.
Orphans in the Storm
Journal, February 17, 2015
I should go retire soon. Up early tomorrow, figure drawing at Fleisher’s. One of those days when I don’t want to let go. That feeling that I haven’t done enough. That the day isn’t finished–but I’ve run out of time and too tired to do anything more. Read till I get sleepy? The best I can manage.
I got in drawing time. I finished a painting. Finished readiing a book Went shopping. Posted on my blog… why does it feel like, not enough? Not enough. Not enough. Never enough?
It comes back to me… a young child, wanting to go on playing even when I was falling asleep on my feet. Only now I’m not particularly sleepy–but I think it comes from the same place. Playing… but what is the power of that play?
It’s been a long time since I’ve taken as much pleasure in a book as I did with Josipovici’s Hotel Andromeda. I feel such a kinship with Joseph Cornell–though I share little of his traumatic alienation. It’s the way Josipovici, through Helena, speaks of how he made his boxes—it touches me so.
Makes me think again, another dimension of what it means to be ‘recognized.’ One makes art out of oneself—to please oneself—and no one else. There’s no other way to do it, not and stay honest. But there’s an emptiness at the end that’s inescapable. What one makes as an artist–once completed, as much as that ever happens, no longer belongs to you. An artist is a person is compelled–obsessed would not be too strong a work–with creating orphans.
There was that, too, in Josipovici’s novel, wasn’t there? How did he get so many layers, so right? The orphans in Chechnya, who Helena’s sister was committed to caring for–an impossible task. Survivors of such trauma–they were feral, wild things. Untamable and violent. Who would ever want them? Accept them for what they are. So like the work of the artist, Joseph Cornell, she reflected. So like us all.
Found things. Take them up, put them together, because no one else will. And then—let them go. To be lost again. But bearing your imprint… indecipherable code inscribed.
Who will ever know how to read it?
Surrealism War & Language
from December, 2009
A person walks down a city street. Everything seen, heard or felt is passed through the language appropriating, symbol generating and sorting process of the mind–some of this conscious, much of it not. The very act of naming things and events as they move through the perceptual field is a form of continual classification, assigning every ‘name’ its place in relation to the imaginative hologram (mis)taken for ‘reality.’ Nothing is encountered as raw material. Everything has already been ‘cooked,’ manufactured and set in motion as a part in that world–fabricated to perpetuate a self-generating cultural process… what, with a completely unjustified lack of irony… we reorganize and narrate afterwards as ‘history.’
A quote from Barrett Watten’s War=Language.The critique of the language is the first place to begin to attempt remove the veil to perception that has been imposed on us and to see things as they are. Pseudo-rationality based on lack of evidence or supporting argument: “It is difficult to conceive the volume of supplies required for a large combat force or the difficulty of delivering them where they are needed in a timely fashion.” We need to take the mechanized hardware of the language of war apart—by locating alternate evidence in multiple media, by questioning the pseudo-objectivity of its delusional conclusions, by unpacking its embedded metaphors and narrative frames, by thinking otherwise. [ … ]To dismantle this war, in its causes and consequences, we must begin with language itself.
Read at a Day of Reflection on the War on Iraq, Wayne State University, 26 March 2003.
The problem isn’t confined to language about war–and I imagiine Watten would agree; but to the whole language constructed cultural universe within which war is but one set. Deconstructing the distortions of propaganda is like trying to rid the house of an investation of roaches by stepping on the ones you can see; they will just go on breeding behind the walls. The language of war is not generated by a misuse of language about war; the misuse of language about war is a reactive need to hide the more obvious deficiencies of the whole self-generating network of economic, political, social (read, CLASS) activities by which we sustain ourselves. We overvalue the symbolic if we ignore the way the habitual structures of economic and social life become themselves both generators of those symbolic representions requiered to sustain them (neoliberal ideology), and active conditioners appropriating for its service all language and symbols felt to be alien to its aims.
This is why reason and evidence–when used to critique and expose the fundamental presuppositions of the culture, and even more, when perceived to attack or alter habitual structures of activity, have so little impact. The harshest, the most rigorous critique, as long as the object of the critique retains the appearance of its culturally constructed representation, is merely reinterpreted in terms which support the continuing adaptive evolution of the system.
To return to Watten’s assertion that “To dismantle this war, in its causes and consequences, we must begin with language itself;” besides broadening the concern to encompass, not only war, but the whole destructive historical, cultural cul-de-sac we’ve been heading down, I would add that we must begin below the level of language–that before we can alter the constructions, we must come as close as possible to reducing them again to raw materials… that is, by learning, or relearning… how to play.
Play is not recreation… it is re-creation. We cannot magically wish away the symbolic configurations of our received world, stripping away the names with which we dress our perceptions. But we can play with them, and in play, serious or whimsical, named things regain their plasticity, loosen their attachments to the assigned order. In a sense, what is most fulfilling in any human relationship–friendship, love, the companionship of work–is a kind of play, unfixing the other from the conditioned; if there is any meaning to ‘freedom,’ it would be this. In language, too–we can either rehab the old structures, repairing and rebuilding–or make new. And yes, we can ‘make new,’ by unfixing the parts, razing the building, turning bricks to clay and glass to sand and fire. When poets pry loose the joints of syntax, and novelists refuse to follow the established maps of narrative–this too, is play, play that makes us free, and while poets cannot themselves remake a better world, they can make it easier to imagine how it might be done by unlocking our vision from the received conditions of the terrible hologram, this script we’ve been following to our untimely end. I see this as an endorsement of both the surrealist project(s) of the last century, though not neccesarily of (their take on them) the psychoanalytic theories they used to defend it), and of poetic movements like LangPo and Flarf–and of the least entertainment driven Rapp and Performance poets (Ursula Rucker) “I didn’t come here to make you feel good… “). Less than that–and we, as poets and artists, will again and again find ourselves, against every intention, having our work, at best, serve to comfort and reinforce believers in the Hologram… and at worst, transformed into propaganda to fuel the endless cycle of war and economic exploitation.
Georges Bataille, The Impossibility of Literature
(from the Barking Dog, November, 2008) The essays in the beginning of Georges Bataille’s THE ABSENCE OF MYTH, Writings on Surrealism. are primarily of interest for the light they shed on Bataille’s early conflicts and later reconciliation with André Breton and on the history of surrealism: its flowering between the wars and transformation and reemergence after the liberation. The later essays deserve consideration in their own right, quite apart from their place in the history of a literary movement.
I would single out “War and the Philosophy of the Sacred, “Poetry and the Temptation of the End of the World,” and “Surrealism and God,” but those on Jacques Prévert, (From the Stone Age to Jacques Prévert), René Char (René Char and the Force of Poetry), Camus’ (The Rebel (The Age of Revolt), and his critique of Blanchot on Sade (Happiness, Eroticism and Literature) represent aesthetic critical thinking above and beyond.
Begin with the impossible. And never back off.
If you want to think about, to write about “literature” (I am more and more estranged from this word… let’s go back in time and call it all poetry… and what doesn’t come up to poetry (or merely aspires to it without overwriting all earlier attempts to define it, is merely “literature.” What we called the glossy hand-outs at the auto show when I was a kid in the 50’s).
“…poetry is…literature which is no longer literary, which escapes from the rut in which literature is generally entrapped. For us, ‘poetic’ cannot have a set value in the same way as an Anjou wine or a piece of fine fabric–if you want to think about poetry, there’s no where else to begin.
… but with the impossible.
You have volunteered to be shackled to two draft horses. They are pulling, one to the north, one to the south. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to never give way to one side or the other, even as they tear you, body and soul, asunder.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 