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a) I, as an author, having not an iota of inspiration (and, in |
addition, placing no faith at all in inspiration as a Platonic form!) |
was displaying in this book just as much imagination as a Ponson |
or a Paulhan; and (b) I was, most notably, and to my own total |
gratification, slaking a thirst as constant as it is callow (not to |
say childish): a soft spot on my part - what am I saying? a passion |
- for accumulation, saturation, imitation, quotation, translation |
and automatisation. |
And soon, my faith in my ability to carry it off growing day |
by day, I thought I might start giving my plotting a symbolic |
turn, so that, by following my book's story hand in hand until |
totally coinciding with it, it would point up, without blatantly |
divulging, that Law that was its inspiration, that Law from which |
it would draw, not without occasional friction, and not without |
occasional vulgarity, but also not without occasional humour, |
nor, I think, without brio, a rich, fruitful narration, honing my |
writing skills in unthought-of ways. |
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I was thus to grasp a significant fact: that, just as, say, Frank |
Lloyd Wright built his own working and living conditions, so |
was I fashioning, mutatis mutandis, a prototypical product which |
- spurning that paradigm of articulation, organisation and |
imagination dominant in today's fiction, abandoning for good |
that rampant psychologisation which, along with a bias towards |
mawkish moralising (in fact, not so much mawkish as downright |
mawk), is still for most critics a mainspring of our national gift for |
(or myth of?) "clarity" and "proportion" and "polish" - sought inspiration in a linguistic avant-gardism virtually unknown in this |
country, and for which no critic has a good word in so far as |
it's known at all, but which allows of a possibility of imitating, |
simulating and honouring a tradition that has brought forth a |
Gargantua and a Tristram Shandy and a Mathias Sandorf and a Locus Solus and (why not?) a Bijur or a Four bis, books for which I had sworn undying admiration, without daring to harbour any |
illusions that I might possibly attain in any of my own works |
such jubilation and such fanciful humour, by dint of irony and |
wit, paradox and prodigality, by dint, in short, of an imagination |
knowing just how far to go too far. |
So, as I think, in this work, for all that its origin was chaotic, |
I finally did satisfy most of my goals and obligations. Not only |
did I spin out a fairly straightforward story but I had a lot of fun |
with it (wasn't it Raymond Q. Knowall who said that it was |
hardly worth writing if it was simply as a soporific?), fun, princi- |
pally (by locating and disclosing that contradiction in which all |
syntactic, structural or symbolic signification is bound up), in my |
ambition of participating, of collaborating, in a common policy |
to adopt a radical, wilfully conflictual position vis-a-vis fiction, a |
position that, implicitly critical as it is of a Troyat, a Mauriac, a |
Blondin or a Cau, of any Quai Conti, Figaro or Prix Goncourt |
hack, might still chart a path along which fiction could again find |
an inspiration, a charm, a stimulus, in narrational virtuosity of a |
sort thought lost for good. |
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