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Showing posts with label <b>Fiction</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Fiction</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, December 10, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Dalkey Archive has always
been an interesting project. While its track record publishing poetry has been
more erratic than not &#8211; there is a book Cecil Giscombe, another by Gerald
Burns, but mostly it has printed books of poetry written by novelists, even if one
is by Harry Mathews &amp; another by his Oulipo colleague Jacques Roubaud &#8211; and
its record on critical writing even spottier &#8211; Viktor Shklovsky&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Theory of Prose </i>is one of the great
critical texts &#8211; Dalkey&#8217;s track record on publishing innovative fiction is
unassailable. It is flat out the best publisher of innovative fiction the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> has ever had.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">David Markson&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wittgenstein&#8217;s Mistress </i>is a novel, a booklength
monolog by a woman who might (or might not) be the only surviving person on the
planet. It&#8217;s an enjoyable book that I would happily encourage you to read. But
that&#8217;s not really my intent here at the moment. Rather, I want to look at what
a book like this tells me about writing &amp; thus about poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Fiction&#8217;s primary trick is
to convince a reader than the syntax of its sentences integrates up not just
grammatically or logically into an argument, but ultimately into an extra-linguistic
phenomenon: a character or narrated world. This leap, from syntax to &#8220;voice&#8221; &amp;
through it to &#8220;character,&#8221; a nebulous concept at best, is the displacement that
accounts for much of fiction&#8217;s reality effect. The power of grammar is thus transferred
and felt by a reader as the power of the world &#8220;coming through&#8221; the emptied
vessel of language. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wittgenstein&#8217;s Mistress </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">plays with these possibilities. For one thing, the
narrator suggests that the book is being composed, rather like a letter. She
announces the passage of days between paragraphs, many of which are only a
single sentence long. Also, right at the end, in ways that I won&#8217;t go into here
(so as to limit the number of &#8220;spoilers&#8221; I might inadvertently insert), Markson
(or the narrator) also plays around with the possibility of who she in fact is.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But what is most powerful
and telling about Markson&#8217;s book is that which goes palpably unsaid. In this way,
Markson is miles ahead of most other novelists who explicate way too many of
the details. Here Markson does just the opposite, raising other characters and
contexts that scream out for explication without ever offering any. It&#8217;s not
sloppy in the slightest &#8211; if <span class="GramE">anything,</span> his consistency
is an index of his meticulousness. The result gives Markson&#8217;s text the feel of
a real person to a degree almost unimaginable in fiction. It&#8217;s that old Zen
garden trick of making a circle of stones by pulling one out of position so
that the displacement forces the viewing mind to cognitively &#8220;make the circle.&#8221;
I&#8217;ve never seen it done better in a work of fiction than how Markson does it
here. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I bought <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wittgenstein&#8217;s Mistress </i>after reading
some extravagant review of one of Markson&#8217;s other novels, then let it sit for
awhile, put off I suspect by the idea of that title, given just how the entire
world knows Wittgenstein to have been gay. But the title works on multiple
levels &#8211; it is in fact explained in the narrative, but even more so alludes to
the narrator&#8217;s painful attempts to be exact with her language, not unlike
Wittgenstein&#8217;s own books of philosophy. But what for him is an investigative
method in a work of fiction becomes a series of extraordinary quirks. It&#8217;s
remarkable just how well this works. I have a friend back in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; not a part of the arts scene as such &#8211; who is a
great deal like this narrator &amp; I ended up hearing her voice throughout my
reading of the book. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading Markson&#8217;s novel made
me think of my late dear friend Kathy Acker &amp; how she used to worry during
the composition of her early books about such issues as the construction of
character. She was always clear in her own mind that character was just that &#8211;
a construction. Each chapter in her book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Adult Life of </i></span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Toulouse</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Lautrec, </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">presents a different conceptualization of truth &amp;
&#8220;the real&#8221; might be in fiction, which also includes the concept of character. It&#8217;s
what <span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>would</span> have been if Joyce had actually
felt some commitment to any of the styles he employed in each chapter. Well, maybe
if Joyce had been committed to the idea that plagiarism plus porn equals
autobiography. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There is an entire stratum
of novels of course written with the idea that readers will identify with a
character. A second stratum of novels is written with the idea that the readers
will identify not with a character, but as readers &amp; will remain aware of
their own presence in front of the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t, as though in a conversation with the author.*
Finally, there is a tiny stratum of fiction written with the idea that readers
will in fact identify with the author, not as a character, but as author. I
tend to think that many of the books that I would characterize as fiction for
poets &#8211; which would include works by Acker, Jack Kerouac, Bill Burroughs, Samuel
R. <span class="SpellE">Delany</span>, Gilbert Sorrentino, Kevin Killian, Fee
Dawson, Sarah Schulman &amp; Harry Mathews &#8211; fall into this final category, or
at least waver between it &amp; the second. That border is also where someone
like Markson, or W.G. Sebald, seems to fit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">When I read a novel I&#8217;m
always think about how (or why) the author did this or that. Can Proust get the
Madeline into the cup of tea? Can Kerouac really imitate the tape in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody</i>? I found myself thinking
this way a lot with Markson, whom I&#8217;m not sure really expects that in the way
these other novelists-for-poets seem to, but for whom it&#8217;s a perfectly
reasonable &amp; rewarding approach. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of which made me think
of my conversation here on the blog with <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385425197">Daisy
Fried</a>. A lot of what I don&#8217;t care for in the school of quietude is that
presumption of readers falling principally, or only, into the first stratum when
it comes to poetry. Most post-avant writing falls into the second category &#8211; that&#8217;s
certainly where I would put Kelly &amp; O&#8217;Hara &amp; even Levertov. But much of
the writing that compels me most is that which falls into or nearest that third
stratum. And that&#8217;s where I would put Coolidge &amp; Watten &amp; Hejinian
&amp; Armantrout.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* I suspect
that Jonathan <span class="SpellE">Franzen&#8217;s</span> to do with Oprah <span class="GramE">had</span> very much to do with a concern on <span class="SpellE">Franzen&#8217;s</span>
part that his book not be confused with that first stratum of writing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, October 29, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At his reading Sunday with
Chris McCreary and <span class="SpellE">Rosmarie</span> Waldrop at the Painted Bride,
Lewis Warsh referred to the stories in his Singing Horse Press book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Touch of the Whip</i> as poems, then stopped
&amp; corrected himself. Perhaps he shouldn&#8217;t have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poets&#8217; prose is a glorious
&amp; little understood jumble. The genre(s) can be traced back through
Burroughs, Stein &amp; Joyce at the very least to Baudelaire &amp; Aloysius
Bertrand*, to the origin of the prose poem. I would invoke Melville&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby Dick</i> not only as a further
instance, but as a superb example of the ways in which poets&#8217; fiction almost
invariably move beyond the tidy constraints of what is normatively fictive
(which I might then trace back, at least in the U.S., to Twain). Let me map out
what I see as six distinct tributaries of this phenomenon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">First is the prose poem
itself. It by itself has multiple manifestations. One is the closed, one page
or less prose piece that can be traced back to Max Jacob, but which in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> comes heavily through the pernicious influence of
Robert <span class="SpellE">Bly&#8217;s</span> journal(s), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fifties </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sixties,</i>
abetted by George Hitchcock&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kayak</i>
and the numerous books of Russell <span class="SpellE">Edson</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The second, far more
interesting mode is the lengthier poet&#8217;s prose that remains clearly poetry,
which begins in American English with Stein &amp; then Williams&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kora in Hell</i>, but which really takes off
after John Ashbery&#8217;s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Three Poems, </i>Clark
Coolidge&#8217;s &#8220;Weathers&#8221; &amp; Robert Creeley&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mabel</i>. This tendency has important French cousins in the work of
St.-John <span class="SpellE">Perse</span> and Francis Ponge. This is where I
would put Lyn Hejinian&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Life,</i> or
Beverly Dahlen&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Reading</i> or even
Jack Spicer&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heads of the Town Up to the
<span class="SpellE">Aether</span>. </i>Questions of the serial poem and the epic
will eventually expand this category even further.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">After the prose poem comes a
mode of poetic fiction that would include Warsh&#8217;s marvelous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Touch of the Whip, </i>much of the writing
by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Carla Harryman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Creeley&#8217;s stories, the short fiction of Gil <span class="SpellE">Ott</span>, the narratives of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. <span class="GramE">And Samuel Beckett most of all.</span> These are all writers
clearly interested in the traditions and devices of fiction itself, but written
with a poet&#8217;s sense of literary value. There are few (if any) moments where,
say, character or <span class="GramE">plot, which may in fact be both present
&amp; pertinent, are</span> more important than the pleasures &amp;
problematics of the words immediately on the page in front of the reader. I
think that these may be the most difficult works of all for people to gauge,
because they truly transcend either of their source genres. Where I think you
can test my own work as poetry, and, say, Paul <span class="SpellE">Auster&#8217;s</span>
as fiction, these writers clearly are <span class="GramE">on their own</span>.
This thus may be the bravest prose of all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A close cousin to this
intergenre prose is more truly what I would call poet&#8217;s fiction, works by poets
that genuinely aim for the goals of fiction, but often employing many of the
devices (&amp; pleasures) of their home form: Gilbert Sorrentino &amp; Toby
Olson would be good examples. So would almost all the writing of the so-called
new narrative: Dodie Bellamy, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Kevin Killian</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
Robert <span class="SpellE">Gluck</span>, Bruce Boone, <span class="GramE">Michael</span>
<span class="SpellE">Amnasan</span>. I would place Harry Mathews here, although
I&#8217;d put the bulk of <span class="SpellE">Oulipo</span> fiction into the next
category.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">These would be those fiction
writers who clearly identify as such, but who write as though their readers
were going to be, if not poets per se, at least the readers of poetry. This is
where Burroughs &amp; Kerouac fit in (&amp; Melville at his best also). Kathy
Acker, Walter <span class="SpellE">Abish</span>, Lydia Davis, Sarah Schulman,
Samuel R. <span class="SpellE">Delany</span>, Julio <span class="SpellE">Cortázar</span>,
<span class="SpellE">Italo</span> <span class="SpellE">Calvino</span>, <span class="GramE">Joyce</span> of course; one could make a case for W.G. Sebald, as
for Carole <span class="SpellE">Maso</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Finally there are poets who
work hard to make a transition all the way to the values of fiction &#8211; the
problematics of plot-centric narrative, for example &#8211; but whose prose still
retains some surface features of their past as poets. Auster fits <span class="GramE">here,</span> as I think does the later work Michael Ondaatje (tho
his first works fit closer to the poet&#8217;s fiction category). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are of course many
other kinds of creative prose &amp; fiction. These are merely the types that
touch on poetry as a genre &amp; tradition. None of this has to do with quality
per se, but I do think that it has to do with certain questions of literary
judgment. It&#8217;s a mistake, for example, to compare the prose of Lewis Warsh with
the novels, say, of Paul Auster, or with the prose poetry of Clark Coolidge.
Rather I suspect that over time, as we have more readers &amp; writers and more
works in each of these tributaries of excellence, we will eventually have a
cleaving between the various categories far more decisively than we have today.
In 2002, it is still possible to call <span class="GramE">both Russell</span> <span class="SpellE">Edson</span> &amp; Lyn Hejinian prose poets, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Carla Harryman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; Michael Ondaatje fiction writers. Fifty years
from now, such clusterings will simply seem like nonsense.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* When is
somebody going to publish Merrill <span class="SpellE">Gilfillan&#8217;s</span> superb
collection of translations from Bertrand&#8217;s <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gaspard</i></span></span><span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>de</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> la <span class="SpellE">Nuit</span></i>? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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