From: ayre@SFU.CA
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.literary
Subject: Read me...
Date: 10 Sep 92 00:49:08 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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              92 1:17 pm


 I found this essay in a pamphlet on Stephen Rodefer
hiding behind a bunch of junk on this stand at this
writing school i help out at.  I hope everyone in this
discussioin group would read it, and learn from it.  It is
under copyright but i feel it is worth the risk.



...............................................................................
.................
PROLOGUE TO LANGUAGE DOUBLING
                     -by STEPHEN RODEFER

(this essay appeard in Jimmy & Lucy's House of
 Knowledge #4 - edited by Ben Friedlander and
 Andrew Schilling, June 1985)



Boris Pasternak (older than Mayakovsky and alive after the Allen
anthology [THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY edited by Donald M.
Allen ---my brakets]) speaks somewhere of the necessity for writers
to disregard the approval of their admirers, lest their writing be
tempted to repeat itself.  He speaks of the urge for perfection as the
mark of the imitator.  Writers of course can imitate their own original
maneuvers-what is practically an epidemic malady of the trade.
Pasternak offers that the real exploration of new territory is constantly
marked by abrupt change and barbaric intuitions, calling for still
another CONTRARY genius to appear, intuitively and without notice.
The thrust of the argumjent is that too much rationale can turn an
original idea into so much ration, a new form into simply format,
ignoring the richness yet to be mined.

Now, of course ALL art partakes of some usefulness of the artist as
recorder and transmitter of an external world or an internal one,
according to his or her idea of how best to do it.  Limits are what any
of us are inside of, find a form to accomodate the mess, etc.  There is
of course usually some motivating force in operation (what is called
an ideology or a moral belief, depending on which side of the sphere
you're on) which is ordinarily more than numerology or circumspection.
On the other hand an account of ALMOST EVERYTHING, inside or out,
in any given historical era, is hardly to small a goal for any art to
embrace.

        Perhaps embrace is just the point.  Passion, not compulsion,
is what is meant.  It seems to be the function precisely, say of the
Iliad or Canterbuy Tales, of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or of Melville---at
LEAST.  As generally the 'special' interests in such great writers
behave as PLUSES, rather than as focus, in the greater design.

        Who could care the archaeology in Homer or the eating habits
in Chaucer, for instance, the invective in Shakespeare, the manners
in Tolsoty, or the detail of the whaling industry in Moby Dick, or for
that matter the Fibonacci numerology of Ron Silliman's Tjanting or
the marginated presentation of Steve Benson's The Busses (making
marvellous internal white spaces that look like Illinois), were it not for
the greater force of the overall work -- a condition required of any
writing if it is to be more than an accumulatin of its parts.  What is
crucial is not the ingenuity of a verbal work, nor the relentlessness
of it, nor the verismilitude of it -- not the formal innovation, nor  the
meticulous care for detail, nor the working out of schema and intent,
however much these may contribute-- but something absolutely vital
no matter what else is present;  I mean that power to lift us out of
our seats AND keep us in them.  Perhaps that old churchy purpose
of literature to be UPLIFTING is not so far off in a varied sense.  To
disclose in short a design and a vision which impel us to greater
apprehension of where we are situated as inbhabitors of room on
this globe, larger than us and smaller than the universe.

        The world is full of writers whose main idea of what to do
with the act of writing is to sell it or get noticed -- verbal art as
commercial venture or job application.  But what good is it to
get caught up in some fix (as to idee), if there is not some more
urgent purpose inherent in the consciousness.  The question is
pertinent to Aeschylus or Shakespeare, to Ovid or Dante, to
Dickens or Dostoevsky, to Swift, Kokoshka, or to Kafka, as it
is certainly not least of all to current examples.  Then how that
detestable phrase POST-MODERN sounds the end by almost
bomb-like, assuming it.  And so we must fight against any
writing which prescribes or predicts any goal at all... except
what lies beyond.  In that sense it will remain the writer's
job to exist outside the mode of any centralizing discourse,
ESPECIALLY THAT ONE PROJECTED BY WRITING
ALREADY WRITTEN.

.....................................................................

I'd like to see some discussion on this if people are interested....



David Ayre
Vancouver B.C.
INTERNET:  ayre@sfu.ca
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU