Brooklyn, May 8, 2008 -- part six of six

I set up the blog and titled it “Exspecto Audax.” That’s very bad Latin for “looking for boldness.” In a very old family bible that I found in an attic as a child, I found a Latin motto (supposedly for my mother’s family) which read Mitis et Audax. Mitis is gentleness – which I have no use for – but Audax (boldness) fascinated me. To create the form for your writing, it seems to me, you need to have a certain sense of boldness, a willingness to strike out in unfamiliar and strange territory, to take a step abruptly sideways rather than predictably straight forward.

It also reminded me of Undula and Adela, both of whom are audacious figures. One of Schulz’s sketches is called “Undula and the Artists.”

It shows a series of men, presumably the ‘artists’, all on their knees in rapt contemplation of Undula’s naked foot. Just as Cassandra has to be rescued from her state of objecthood, I think also Undula should be as well – Undula, in my opinion, is one of the artists as much as she is their object of devotion. What happens when Undula tells her story? How does the perspective and structure change?

It is the sound of these multitude voices that I am interested in – the resuscitation of Undula, of Galatea, of Cassandra and Polyxena. They are like the flock of birds that Schulz’s father draws from his ornithological textbook, populating the eaves and rafters, suddenly finding the voices to sing. If, for the last few thousand years, these voices have kept silent, it seems to me that it will occupy us for many generations to find new forms to express their thoughts, their selves. The web, the network that Wolf suggests can expand infinitely – even though Cassandra must eventually go into her slaughterhouse and Franza must succumb to her collapse, there are still more of them, an infinite number perhaps, consumed by that frenzy driven to find words, that wildness which resists the standard forms.

Brooklyn May 6, 2008 -- part five of six

I decided to transform this paper into an on-going blog in order to let it continue indefinitely, and I began to consider my reading plans for the summer. Today I returned to the work of Bruno Schulz, which for some reason continues to be incredibly resonant. To me, it feels like he embroiders wonderful things directly upon the face of reality, creating possibilities that never existed before, grafting new rooms onto old, familiar buildings, making the familiar infinitely strange. His topics are not the heroic, epic stories of conventional literature – like Wolf, he is concerned with the everyday lives of people. He is also preoccupied with the specter of death, and tries to prolong death by transforming the dying into smaller and smaller versions of themselves – his father, the looming figure in both of his books, recedes into a sanatorium and finally re-emerges as a spindly-legged crab, before disappearing altogether. Schulz also grapples with the feeling of failure – the search for The Book is an expression of longing for an ultimate literature which seems forever just beyond his grasp, which he is forever failing to write.

I can’t deny that these two writers are having a profound impact on what I’m writing, on this text called, tentatively, blight. I’m welding together an idea from Wolf – the formation of a web, zigzagging back and forth from past to present, avoiding the future – with a style heavily infected by Schulz – the blooming of possibilities beyond the ‘real,’ the longing for an ideal text (or the idea that these bits are excerpts from a grander, greater piece of writing), and the indefinite postponement of death by transforming the dying into smaller and more remote forms.

I also want to interact with and use something from our current historical moment: the threat of imminent environmental catastrophe. blight, I am finding, takes place in the midst of a terrible storm, a hurricane which floods the city. People tell bits of their stories as they escape on boats, as everything they know is covered slowly in water. Telling the story becomes a way to prolong their possible destruction, another mode of survival.

Just as Wolf revivifies the character of Cassandra as a part of the process of seeking meaning, I am also interested in creating a text that gives a reader a place to also do her work, to have agency. How does the potential use of the internet allow for that reader agency? The Institute for the Future of the Book[1] is now creating networked novels, and books which allow readers to submit comments which are part of the text. If this text I am creating is composed of a series of fragments of survivors floating in the wreckage of a city (some of which I found ‘floating in the wreckage’ of the Internet), it is conceivable that infinite fragments could be added by others, by readers, as a part of the amplification of the novel. This amplification, it seems to me, further enhances the ‘manifoldness of phenomena,’ reinforcing the narrative network that Wolf argues must emerge from the wreckage of patriarchal literary aesthetics. If failure was the only option Wolf could see, she would not have written, would not continue to write. Writing about a failure is not the same thing as a ‘failed’ text. I think that Wolf was grasping through the remnants of the past towards a future which may look very much like the present we now find ourselves in.

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[1] http://www.futureofthebook.org/

Brooklyn, May 2, 2008 -- part four of six

I’ve been re-reading Wolf’s writing about the ‘manifoldness of phenomena[1]’ and a very curious passage on page 262 summarizing the writing of the historian Fritz Schachermeyr:

“In cultures which have no written language…there are…only two ways to make the past accessible…the formation of lists and the concentration on what the poetic imagination perceives as essential. This concentration process…simplifies the quantity of human figures, reducing them to just a few vivid and vital, ideal figures….Vast stretches of time are fused together…What meaning does this observation have for a literature which no longer wants to create large-scale, vital, ideal figures; no longer wants to tell coherent stories held together by war and murder and homicide and the heroic deeds which accrue to them?...Why should the brain be able to “retain” a linear narrative better than a narrative network, give that the brain itself is often compared with a network?”

One interesting corollary to this idea is the present-day existence of the Internet, the largest and most complicated network connecting the world that we have yet known. Is the internet perhaps changing the way we use and incorporate information, making it associative rather than linear, reducing the tendency to prioritize knowledge according to hierarchy? A few days ago, one of the inventors of the web said that he felt it was “still in its infancy,” despite being around for fifteen years or more[2]. Therefore, we hardly even know what this incredible network will mean to our lives in fifty years, a hundred years or more. How can the dominant aesthetic structures of literature, which were formed before the creation of written language, be maintained in the wake of such an enormous wave of networked information and written text? It seems to me that they will eventually be swept away, the sharper edges fading first (this is already happening) until the structure can no longer maintain its integrity and it dissolves, to be replaced by newer structures which have more meaning for our networked descendents.

That last image is very like the series of growing and fading structures created in Stanislaus Lem’s alien ocean. Or the ever-expanding forms revived and propagated by the Oulipo movement. In light of these ideas, Wolf’s Cassandra-like prognostications of inevitable failure in women’s writing seems overly pessimistic to me now. But am I ascribing to Wolf a darker sentiment than she is really suggesting? To what extent does the dark shadow of her historical moment (nuclear arms build-up and cold war of the early 1980s) define her feelings about the state of literature?

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[1] Cassandra, page 287.

[2] BBC news website headline on April 30, 2008, “Web in Infancy, Says Berners-Lee,” URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7371660.stm