“What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says — but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.”
– Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
Author Archives: andrew gallix
Quotes
“I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.”
– Andrea Barrett, “The Art of Fiction 180,” interview by Elizabeth Gaffney, The Paris Review 168 Winter 2003
The Project
Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature
The centerpiece of Roubaud’s oeuvre is a lifelong endeavor called le Projet (the Project), which began with a dream he had in 1961 about deciding to write a novel called The Great Fire of London. He started to act on his decision in waking life but eventually abandoned the project, and has now spent way more time writing about that abandonment than he did working on the novel. There are seven books that collectively constitute the Projet, in that they elaborate, in a pseudo-autobiographical style filled with digressions and interpolations and bifurcations, Roubaud’s failure to stick to the initial Projet. (Very Roubaldian distincrion: the imagined work, which he abandoned in 1978 for reasons he explains in a book called ‘the great fire if London’ (lowercase and in single quotes, to differentiate it from the unrealized dream-novel), is the “bigger project”; the actual published work is the “minimal project.”) “Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “And if they’re not true, at least the events are told truthfully, as I remember them.”
Trivialities of Text
Kenneth Grahame, “Marginalia,” Pagan Papers, 1898
Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living bards, when, I may ask — when shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin? How we shall shove and jostle for large paper copies!
Purposely with Ghosts
Tom Bradley, Rev. of Apparitional Experience, 3:AM Magazine 6 March 2013
Fiddleblack Annual #1: Apparitional Experience, Fiddleblack Press 2013
This is a collection of ghost stories “purposely without ghosts”. The epigraph, from On the Road, serves to announce the emphatic Americanness of the contents. Like Kerouac with his continuous roll of typing paper, most of the authors herein have opted for the unadorned style, which has its roots in that country’s Puritan past. The collection satisfies eminently one’s appetite for such work. There are few or no ghosts of the literary sort haunting the first hundred or so pages of this book.
And then, all of a sudden, in the last story, up springs a manifestation that couldn’t be more unAmerican, in the best of all the good senses of that near-universally approbative adjective. It’s Andrew Gallix, and he is purposely with ghosts.
His story, “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter”, displays all the anti-Puritannical virtuosity, erudition, urbanity and sensory luxuriousness that have been established as his trademarks in such works as “Dr Martens’ Bouncing Souls“, “Celesteville’s Burning“, “Half-Hearted Confessions of a Gelignite Dolly-Bird” and “Forty Tiddly Winks“. Andrew Gallix stands out, not only in this book, but on the literary scene at large, as a major exponent of literary sophistication, both syntactical and philosophical.
When he goes On the Road (in his case, that would be the rue Victor Cousin, on his way to teach at one of the world’s oldest universities), Andrew Gallix treads in the astral traces of such unabashed eschewers of the unadorned style as Aquinas, Erasmus, Saint Francis Xavier, Balzac, Saisset, Victor Hugo, de Beauvoir, Teilhard de Chardin, Barthes, Deleuze, Ricoeur, et al. It stands to reason that he’s not obsessed with counting and banishing modifiers and flagellating subordinate clauses down to the bare declarative bones. He knows nothing of the retentive rules of deportment laid down by creative writing programs in the country that invented those institutions.
“Joycean” has been whored out as an adjective for so long, especially by Americans, that it lost meaning two generations ago. But if the term could be resurrected and shriven, it would apply to “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter” better than any fiction I’ve read in years. Andrew Gallix has done precisely what the stream of consciousness demands — and I don’t mean the long-hackneyed literary device, but the complex phenomenological proposition. Every sentence, every phrase, depicts and serves the multiple functions of human awareness, all at once, without discontinuity. The lush descriptions are delivered in a voice that delineates its own quirky persona and those around it, while moving the plot along, expanding upon thematic material, and being hilarious in the bargain.
This complexity can only be achieved by a writer who has at his fingertips all the resources of a longstanding culture, the full vocabulary of two languages, and none of the self-conscious laconicism of those perpetual Puritans who pout, unhaunted, across the Atlantic.
An Excess of Language
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language.
Quotes
“Gary [Lutz] was the first writing teacher I had who showed me that the sentence was capable of art. He would underline good sentences and interrogate bad ones. Verbs would be circled and Gary would ask ‘inevitable?’ And no, the verb was not inevitable, and I’d never considered that concept before, inevitability. It smacks of the eternal, a text beyond the writer to which the writer submits.”
– Dylan Nice, “An Interview with Dylan Nice,” interview by Rachel Yoder, Bookslut March 2013
[See Vladimir Nabokov and William Gaddis.]
A Thing in the World
Gary Lutz, interview by Dylan Nice, Wag’s Revue 7 Fall 2010
I try not to trouble myself all that much with meaning. A sentence of mine is a layout of language. What the sentence might be about is of no permanent concern. I’m mostly drawn toward art that resists exegesis. Donald Barthelme, paraphrasing Kenneth Burke in an essay published in 1964, wrote that “the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world,” and a year later, Susan Sontag, in her essay “On Style,” made an eerily similar statement: “A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.” Both writers eventually backed away from that position, but I buy it.
She Was
Dylan Nice, “Thin Enough to Break,” Other Kinds
She was all the things I couldn’t paint.
Literary Hauntology
Lars Iyer, “Outside Literature: The Lars Iyer Interview,” interview by Tim Smyth, The Quarterly Conversation 31 4 March 2013
In Vila-Matas, we find a humorous recapitulation of Blanchot’s sense that a certain way of literary writing is at an end, and that a new kind of writing, one which registers this end in some way, is beginning. Andrew Gallix has much of interest to say on the topic of the various “ends” of literature that have occurred.[2] In one sense, I want to say that literature is always ending! The end is eternal. It will go on forever. There can be no “apocalypse” of literature. And for that reason, there will always be more hot tubs, more lists, more distractions! But I also want to insist on the specificity, on the singularity of this end . . . I believe in it . . .
Let me risk pretension by putting as follows. Historically, any simple avant-gardist idea of a new literary practice necessarily reconsolidates the traditional institution of literature that it claims to critique. A literary practice that is ostensibly “outside” literature posits an “inside” of literature. By disobeying the police who maintain the borders of literature, they simultaneously confirm the role of those police; avant-garde practices depend on them. But what happens when the police leave their posts? What happens when no-one mans the border — when the sanctity of literature becomes a matter of indifference? There can no longer be an “outlaw” avant-gardism, because there is no law to transgress. But nor is there a literature self-certain enough, secure enough, to arrest, domesticate or tame its “outside.” The authority of literature has vanished. The house of literature is deserted. Granted, that house is haunted. There are such things as literary ghosts, even a literary “hauntology,” as Gallix calls it.
ANDREW GALLIX 