William Shakespeare, Richard III II, 2
I’ll join with black despair against my soul, / And to myself become an enemy.
Author Archives: andrew gallix
She Was the Poem
William Gaddis, The Recognitions, 1955
It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now, beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem.
[See Dylan Nice and Vladimir Nabokov.]
The Time of its Being Furthered
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, 2011: 90-91
I put down the book and began to think: this strange experience of reading, the sense of harmony between the rhythms of a reproduction and the real, their structural identity, so that the subject of the sentence was precisely the time of its being furthered — this was what I valued in one of the only people I described as a “major poet” without irony, John Ashbery. … Reading an Ashbery sentence, an elaborate sentence stretched over many lines, one felt the arc and feel of thinking in the absence of thoughts. … The “it” in an Ashbery poem seemed ultimately to refer to the mysteries of the poem itself. … The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains behind you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.”
Making It Less
Joan Didion, “The Art of Fiction N° 71” by Linda Kuehl, The Paris Review Fall-Winter 1978
I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it’s not the ideal, it’s not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe — if I go ahead and finish it anyway — I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.
Eliminating Possibilities
Joan Didion, “The Art of Fiction N° 71” by Linda Kuehl, The Paris Review Fall-Winter 1978
The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities. Unless you’re Henry James.
Blank Score
Seven Hours Away
****** slinks out to the pool in a sky-blue bikini and wide-brim sun hat, a slim volume dangling from her right hand. The distance separating the armchair in which Valentin is sitting from the armchair in which ****** is no longer sitting is absolute. Valentin stands up and walks towards the empty armchair. 787.2 kilometres away, Kühlotts is feeling ******’s breasts and cunt. In five steps, he should be there. Seven hours and thirty-five minutes away, ****** slinks out to the pool in a sky-blue bikini and wide-brim sun hat, a slim volume dangling from her right hand. With each step, the cafe grows wider and the armchair recedes. The universe is expanding faster and faster, pushing everything away; tearing everyone apart.
– “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter”
Saying No to the World
David Winters, “Learning From Lish: A Roundtable on Style in Fiction” by David Winters, Greg Gerke, and Jason Lucarelli, The Literarian 14 (September 2013)
The world, as Wittgenstein says, is everything that is the case. But writing is whatever is not. And in saying “no” to the world, so long as this “no” is said strongly enough, art perhaps promises us nothing less than the “yes” of salvation.
A Beautiful Fuck You to Reality
David Winters, “Learning From Lish: A Roundtable on Style in Fiction” by David Winters, Greg Gerke, and Jason Lucarelli, The Literarian 14 (September 2013)
But I think some of what you’ve both said links up quite well with Lish’s thinking on “noise,” and with his valuing of “mystery” over “information.” My understanding is that Lish advises writers to work against the cacophony of contemporary culture. As he says, “it is necessary to attempt some kind of severance between ourselves and the noise that is everywhere thus.” Now, this severance could take several forms — I see it, for instance, in Gary Lutz’s refusal to specify the locations of his stories; or in his regret at having used a brand name (Coca-Cola) in one of them.
At a more elemental level, maybe writing has to cast a silence around itself. …One difference between our generation and Lish’s is that we live in a so-called “information age.” But if we are to create art, the message that arises from much of this writing is that we must make information our enemy. Right now, for instance, Jason Schwartz is one of the few writers still working out ways to do this. Schwartz’s work speaks in a style that startles the surrounding world into silence. His stories are radically self-sufficient, and in this respect they work against our age’s entropic reduction of language to data. The philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote that “art is magic, delivered from the lie of being truth.” And since we’re speaking of “tradition,” perhaps this is precisely what artworks were in prehistory — mysteries; auratic artefacts whose very existence was an affront, a beautiful “fuck you” to reality.
The Ghosts of Unchosen Words
Greg Gerke, “Learning From Lish: A Roundtable on Style in Fiction” by David Winters, Greg Gerke, and Jason Lucarelli, The Literarian 14 (September 2013)
In a Bookworm interview, Michael Silverblatt spoke of how Gass has written about “how sometimes we can not only hear the word that’s been chosen, but the ghosts of words that haven’t been chosen”.
ANDREW GALLIX 