Monthly Archives: January 2014

De Rigueur

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My piece on realism is referenced, rather dismissively, by J. W. Cormack in a question he puts to the excellent Jason Schwartz. Is it really contentious to claim that most people’s idea of a traditional novel — a “proper” novel — is (alas) one which can be loosely defined as “realist”?

J. W. Cormack, “Jason Schwartz,” BOMB 7 January 2014

Speaking of category, I read a fairly de rigueur article from The Guardian, one of those “end of fiction” pieces you see every few years — although this one seemed to be equating “traditional fiction” with “the realist novel.” Is this a mistake? Do you feel like the world needs a different fictive vocabulary than the purely representational one we’ve become accustomed to?

Worse Still

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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What is a Minor Literature?”, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure, 1975

Céline’s syntactic evolution: from Journey to Death on the Installment Plan to Guignol’s Band (following which, Céline had nothing more to say, except about his misfortunes, that is, he no longer wanted to write, he only needed money). And that is always the way it ends, lines of flight from language: the silence, the interrupted, the interminable, or still worse.

Like a Lighthouse

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Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, 1994

It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away [via].

[See William Gaddis, Vladimir Nabokov, and Dylan Nice.]