Wassily Kandinsky

O U L I P O

O U L I P O

“The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order: a machine that will produce avant-garde work to free its circuits when they are choked by too long a production of classicism.”

—Italo Calvino

The struggle of Literature is in fact a struggle to escape the confines of Literature.

By analogy

Language is to the writer what paint is to the painter…

Both share a common history :

a long, long story about the power of mimesis: the power of the medium to RE-present the world.

The goal of the artist:

mimesis of nature;

enlightenment through embodied/landscaped ideas: ideas--us. Narrative--represented through realistic forms enhanced by vanishing point perspectiveThe mark of the master artist is

craft/technique and the employment of craft toward moral, humanistic ideals. The arts seek epiphany in content and rational, scientific correctness in form

In the first half of the 18th century, photography, not painterly realism, is suddenly the apotheosis of the mimetic impulse.

Manet: dejeuner sur l’herbe, 1863

Though art has long been cumulative and, in this sense, self-reflective, as the turn of the century approaches, artists begin to create ruptures with the past that also upset cultural values, tastes, assumptions.

Manet, Olympia 1863

In Manet, we already see the art leaving the canvas, aware of its medium, aware of its situation (in the gallery) and somewhat tired of tradition.

Cezanne

Cezanne was dissatisfied with the empty formalism of impressionism. If painting could leave behind the search for traditional mimesis, and it could leave behind its traditional aristocratic subjects, then why should it not enter life itself? Present life itself in paint?

Modernist

artists still

struggling to

find the

proper subject matter

and themes

Revolutions of subject parallel revolutions of form.

Picasso

1907

Variations on abstraction initiate the final split from the mimetic history of painting. With both form and content overthrown, the painting is paint first, then composition, and… perhaps nothing else.

Kandinsky, Composition V

Kandinsky

Contrasting Sounds

1924

Pollock

Moon-Woman

Pollock Number 8 1949

Pollock creates yet another kind of break in the continuity of artistic practice: his actual methods of painting utterly transform the craft. Not to mention that he was never skilled at representation. What makes an artist good? Worthy of attention? Can artists invent their own methods to master? What should artists learn?

Andy Warhol

Ad Reinhardt, late 50’s

The death of art

The atomic law of clinamen, according to Lucretius:...From De rerum natura, as quoted in Imagining Language

Basic bodies take a certain structure,

And have defined positions, and exchange

Their blows in certain ways. The same bodies,

With only a slight change in their structure,

Are capable of forming wood or fire.

Like letters in the words for these same things,

Ignus and lignum: with slight transpositions,

They can be nominated ‘flames,’ or ‘beams’

“…Atoms, then, are to bodies what letters are to words: heterogeneous, deviant, and combinatory.”

Postmodernism is the locus of a crisis language…

(Realism has become a State Fiction, a part of the machinery, of the political state. It is through the machinery of realism that the state explains to its citizens the relationship between themselves and nature, economics, politics, and their own sexuality… postmodernism…[opposes] any totalizing fiction of life, that which, in Calvino’s words, seeks “to confirm and consecrate the established order of things.”) - Curtis White

The nineteenth century, from Hegel to Darwin, saw the triumph of historical continuity and biological continuity as they healed all the fractures of dialectical antitheses and genetic mutations.

(thanks to World Games)REALISM Presumes:

——A positively determinable world external to the work of fiction and which it’s the fundamental responsibility of fiction to represent

——That the world is a complete, integrated system governed by a coherent scheme of rules (“natural laws”)

——Mimesis is the right procedure, therefore, for fiction, being the material description of an empirically verifiable world

——That fiction should pursue a resemblance to facts and the presentation of the probable, according to our experience and our normative procedures of history and science.

——That because subjectivity is the greatest barrier to our perception of truth, the ‘teller’ of a fiction should appear and behave as objectively as possible.

. . . the realist fiction should generate a complete and unbroken illusion of a world that we can ‘be in’ and should, in the end, present “a truth that may be unambiguously paraphrased.”

All of these are essential to the presumed didactic function of literature.

These, generally, are assumptions, values of the same order as the “rules” referred to in the OULIPO packet, that is, unconscious constraints. The results of these rules, these values that seem utterly natural and unassailable, are many, for an unconscious rule cannot easily be broken, and gives rise to further rules, explicit values and assertions about the function and material of literature.

“Under” realism, meaning exists in the world; its expression in language is coincidental with the author’s ability to master certain techniques. Anti-realism, understandably, claims the opposite.

READERLY QUESTIONS:

Why do we read?

What do we expect?

What are we looking for?

How do we “read”?

Defining GENRE

words

Symbols/meaningpleasure

Expectation/anticipationreduction

Yesterday on Route Seven

A car

Traveling at sixty miles per hour rammed

a sycamore

Its four occupants were

Killed.

Realism, and even modernism in its traditional mode had as its assumptions linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and middle class moral values…

But many of these factors held within them the seeds of the end of modernism, its exhaustion.

For instance,

if writers were interested in and emphasized in their work an examination of the nature of consciousness, and, following Freud, the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the logic of literature,

which is also the logic of escaping literature and language,

also the law of perfecting and distorting and merging genres…

The logic f literature leads them to...

...not only exhaust the existing narrative techniques for representing thought, but to invent, for instance stream of consciousness, and then work to exhaust and transform this technique

These transitions are limit experiences for writers; they have exhausted something, or they feel that something is exhausted.

As John Barth claims of Borges (in reference particularly to Pierre Menard), “His artistic victory…is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new ...work”

At a limit, it seems possible to distinguish between “naïve” novels and deliberate or “meta” novels: novels that exhibit and respond to the limits of the existing conventions.

"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.” --Borges

“To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his

hypostases--reason, science, law.”

The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes

The goal of literature, according to Barthes, should be "to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.

The decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading.

calvino

Perhaps the most striking feature of modern literature is the appearance of a new monolithic, comprehensive mode of writing, in which the distinctions among genres, which have been completely abandoned, give way to what are admittedly “books,” but books for which, we might say, no method of reading has yet been worked out.”

Philippe Sollers

The

Author’s

Historical

and Literary Context

Reader’s context

Reader’s memory

Reader Reading

The TEXT The

Narrator

The Imagined “Author”

The Author

The author’s

experienced context

Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society.

Syllables

Sounds

Words

Phrases

Sentences

Description

Dialogue

Images

Motifs

Symbols

Allusions

Inertextuality

Metaphor

Allegory

Tension

Conflict

Narrative/or

Pattern

Structure

Plot

Character

Theme

Creating a form, a literary

object that readers can perform, a

work that, in the right

place on the hypothetical

bookshelf, causes

sparks.

The definition of mastery & the elimination of genius.

W h a t i s q u a l i t y ?

W h a t i s v a l i d w or k ?These questions feel very different when we are in the process of writing. And writing is not really the process of seeking validity. While the metaphor of the hypothetical bookshelf may allow you to put your work in context and to perceive your reader as a literary being as much as the author is a being made only of words on the page, it’s poor consolation in the writing process.

We still want to know what good writing is.

But let’s go back briefly one step: why should writing be good? “Good,” after all, is subjective.

My own rationalization for why writing should be “good” includes a trust in the medium of language and even in some of the existing conventions of language to help us to write at and explore the limits of our knowledge,

our senses — the limits, you might say, of our condition.

It must include, then,

— an understanding of the conventions that make literature what it is,

—an approach that is essentially experimental, not because it’s wacky, but because it proceeds by trial and error.

To be good at writing also means that the very act and process of writing, revising, crafting, applying techniques, and so on is a process of intellectual, emotional, and imaginative exploration and growth.

To be GOOD is to be changing, to be becoming something else—why wouldn’t a writer strive for this transformation if it is what he expects his reader to achieve?

And clearly, all of this reasoning does not merely parallel writing to reading: writing is reading: as a writer you are foremost a reader. Reading what you have written is far more challenging than getting it on the page.

Good writers are also good readers. They are aware of how language works and how it affects them. They are aware of their process of writing and how it might work for others.

Advice for writers comes in three forms:

1The writing is compared with and judged by its relationship to conventions: How well does the work achieve what it appears to be repeating from other works? If it seems to be a mystery, does it have the qualities of a “good” mystery as we know from reading other things?

Questions of this type will point to the plot structure, the quality and kind of character development, the presence and appropriateness of themes; generally, such questions utilize the terms that we are familiar with to “check” the writing for what are commonly considered flaws or possibilities, or, of course, successes. A flaw can be a failed deviation from the norm, or it can be a failed attempt at reproducing the norm.

2The writing is described in terms of the reader’s experience of it. The reader’s experience cannot be said to have any absolute perspective on the work except in so far as it can be carefully discussed between reader and writer. In the first kind of advice, reader and writer have an external text in common (the “good” mystery). But when the reader’s experience is at the fore, the writer and reader can only share the writer’s work. The writer can see their work but dimly; the reader instinctively sees it as flawed and partial. Here, the challenge is the reader’s: to accurately sense and describe their experience of reading.

This approach produces fewer questions and more descriptions on the part of the reader. The implicit question, of course, is “Did you mean [this]…?” It’s up to the author to pose more specific questions, to see if his technique has been effective (or even noticed), if his themes are emerging clearly, and so on… formulating these questions requires that the writer know what he intends or where there might be problems. It’s a bit unfair to ask your reader: “did it make sense?” Likewise, it’s unfair to pretend that whatever the reader “gets” is what you intended, or represents the polysemic nature of your work. A writer should be able to—or willing to try to—answer all of the reader’s questions.

3This last one is the most difficult because it can be mistaken for an invitation to counsel the writer. There is no doubt that writing can tell us a lot about someone. But what it can tell us is no more accurate than what the shape of one’s skull tells us. But this last form of advice understands the journey that every writer is taking in their work, the process of discovery, change, and introspection. It is, then, the advice that encourages and guides this process, but it must be done through the writing on the page, not confused with psychological and emotional counseling, and it must be distinct from the reader’s experience and issues of criteria.

The best question to ask the writer, and sometimes the only one, in this mode is: “Why are you doing this?” The answer, of course, should not be, “because I have to.”

Unquenchable in all of this, and in the spirit of The Turbulent Mirror, it is difficult to desire anything but wholeness, even in chaos, even though it be partial wholeness, a broken whole...

The workshop “method” & learning to write

Cormac McCarthy: “Teaching writing is a scam.”

Kay Boyle: “All creative writing programs ought to be abolished by law.”

Tom Grimes:“Let’s leave behind, for the moment, the historical vicissitudes of literary theory and return to the original question. Can creativity be learned, let alone taught?”

Eve Shelnutt: “I have never been interested in the question that has plagued MFA programs since their inception, namely can creative writing be taught?”

Some of your ducks and shoot them now.

You are the author.

You are not the narrator.

Even if the narrator is you, you are not the narrator.

Narrators can have a variety of relationships to the story they relate:

First Person Central

First Person Peripheral

Third Person Limited

Third Person Shifting

Omniscient

Objective or Effaced

Stream of Consciousness

Meta-author

The beginning of every short story is ridiculous at first. There seems to be no hope that this newborn thing, still incomplete and tender in every joint, will be able to keep alive in the complicated organization of the world, which, like every complicated organization, strives to close itself off. However, one should not forget that the story, if it has any justification to exist, bears its complete organization within itself even before it has been fully formed; for this reason despair over the beginning of a story is unwarranted; in a like case parents should have to despair of their suckling infant, for they had no intention of bringing this pathetic and ridiculous being into the world. -Franz Kafka.

There are some kinds of writing that you have to do very fast, like riding a bicycle on a tightrope.

-William Faulkner

All my life I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Who reads and why?

How are writers educated and trained?

How do writers and readers gain access to each other, and what specifically constitutes that access (publishers, etc.)?

How do we define and judge “mastery”?

What differences exist between distinct audiences or circumstances of consumption; for instance, how do the works read by college students (students of literature) differ from works discussed in the popular media, from works that sell the most? What differences exist between works read by students of different disciplines, in different nations, and so on?

How are the boundaries of literature defined, assailed, and defended?

Thanks to Curtis White… “The monstrousness of

postmodernism’s literary possibilities is the result, on the one hand, of the debunking or deconstructing of certain central conventions of nineteenth-century literary realism, especially the notions of mimesis and genre….”

“Mimesis and anti-mimesis, realism and experimentalism are oppositions that exist only through an exercise of force, and which, therefore, tell us as much about the politics of our own time as they do about language and literature.”

David Hayman (Writers in the Wake of the Wake)

Authors, like other artists, are refusing the superficial classical finish, the “elitist” polish of certain masterpieces, to indulge in postclassical exuberance, elaborately controlled “free” invention. Thus, according to Ihab Hassan, ‘Finnegans Wake carries the tendencies of high art and of popular culture to their outer limits, there where all tendencies of mind may meet, there where the epiphany and the dirty joke become one.’ The parallels with other uneasy ages—with the Hellenistic period, the later Roman, the Baroque, the late Romantic movement in Germany,and the fin de siecle—are worth noting. Perhaps we are in what Northrop Frye calls the ironic period.

You can look up irony in your dictionary of literary terms, but one simple way of thinking of what would constitute an “ironic age” is distance.

Another spatial metaphor is that the ironic and the postmodern are sensibilities for breadth, and they lack the “depth” of previous movements.

That depth is a continuity between aspects of life and experience: does your science support your faith? Does your faith determine your politics? Does your literature reflect your science? Does your image of private self match your public self? Does your concept of self correspond to the communal and national self? If all of these correspond, does your construction of the world match that of your fellow citizens?

Postmodernism and postmodern literature has actively attacked depth, along with the continuity and coherence that comes with it.

The result is an aesthetic of fragmentation, unresolved tensions, absurdity, juxtaposition, diversity of voices and styles, contortions of time and space, characterless & plotless narratives…

Also

Depth implies center: de-centered implies diversity/multiculturalism/at the extreme, anarchy.

As with painting, Literature has long been cumulative, self-reflective, responsive to its past and changing in fits and starts of rebellion, shifting with the times, with culture, with taste, with politics, with morals, with technology…

To define Literature is not to say what it IS, but to describe what “it” has been…

How have we --and how do we now--

USE THE WORD “LITERATURE”?

If we begin with a Literature that re-presented reality in the same manner as painters, then we can find similar “checkpoints” along the way that have redefined what we know now to be Literature.

Literature, as we will talk about it, then, begins with the novel. To go further back, we would be quickly be grappling with the enormously interesting transition from an oral tradition to a print culture. We won’t go there.

The novel represents a serious investment in what otherwise had been casual entertainment, the ephemeral realm of secular reading. What in short form can be a distraction becomes radically different when extended beyond a small gathering of pages. What, one should ask, could be worth that much time and effort? (not only to read, but to print!)

The novel is the flagship of a secular Literature that eventually becomes a hallmark of the educated and enlightened man.

The form is defined and mastered by those capable of wielding long, subtle, and complex narratives, it divides into genres based on responses to this length and different sorts of content.Overwhelming, a novel’s worth is assessed according to the criteria for realist fiction and accompanying assumptions and assertions.

A parallel story to the one told with art is not hard to find. Where realistic painters were rattled by the feats of photography, literature has been gently smacked around by communication technology until the final smackdown of film displaced it from its place as the ultimate story-telling, world-making medium.

Film can accomplish all the complexity, all the scope and subtlety of the novel… all literature has going for it is language itself.

Literature changed over time in all the ways we can imagine painting transforming right up until its mid-life crisis, when it realized that it had spent its life trying to accomplish something that the youthful and sexy technology of photography could do much better.

Painting needed a make-over!

The drama of the last century LIT shares with painting: considering a division in literature between form and content, it has generally been the content that has evolved. Technique and theory and criticism has been a mastery of content, in a sense, through form (but “through form” the same way way we see our wine through a lovely crystal goblet). Everything happens at once: content overflows, and form becomes unstable, questionable...

Form, which allowed the innocence of depth, suddenly appears suspect.An archetypal question in literary studies now asks, quite despondently, “How can there be lyric poetry after Auschwitz?” (Theordor Adorno)

The question is not simply rhetorical. It implies a loss of faith, a loss of trust in the way things are done, in our ability to define beauty, goodness, civilization. It attempts to be, couched in a discrete corner of poetics, an ultimate question. “How can there be anything?” After Auschwitz, after slavery, after Hiroshima….

What is there to write (to read) but wreckage?

All content, all depth, seems illusory in the wake of these disasters. As if the axioms of geometry were suddenly pulled out from under us, writers felt an overwhelming need to escape from Literature, some to destroy it, and they saw a problem in its most basic forms, its actual substance.

The assumptions of realism were viewed by some, as Curtis White views them, as mechanism of the State.

The literature of realism, reproduces reality as it is, reinforces and consecrates it as it is, maintains the dominant myths of our reality, feeds them to us with a variety of “contents,” which, no matter how revolutionary, reproduced in the assumptions and values of realism a dogma of submission

Any defense of this position has to begin with some assertions about language and about narrative.

First, that language is ontogenetic, and by this function at least partially determines our experiences of phenomena.

By extension, language continuously orients us in the world, describes it and organizes it for us. Before we can articulate a new thing, language is there to translate it, in the moment, in memory, into something old, normal, and complete.

Narratives play a large role in determining the use and value of specific words.

Narratives further more organize complex and layered experiences, in a sense, chunking language and chunking the world so that greater portions of our experiences can be effectively mediated and rendered meaningful ( or meaningless).

Exhaustion & Replenishment-John Barth

To gratify critics who look for similarities between things literary and things historical, sociological, or economic, the machine could correlate its own changes of style to the variations in certain statistical indices of production, or income, or military expenditure, or the distribution of decision-making powers.