plano

para 2011: se for a Barcelona, comprar um quilo de pecans. (ah, o romantismo disto) e de resto, é isso.

basicamente

o que me (e vos) desejo para 2011: três em um nesta charada.



e a sacaninha da nova zelândia que já lá chegou?

uma revolução

caseira tem crescido na minha mala desde que lá juntei Mamet de American Buffalo a César Vallejo. se o primeiro ganha em pujança física, já o outro se adianta nos argumentos. apesar da fome, do exílio e da doença.

"Matam o livro, disparam sobre os seus verbos auxiliares,
sobre a sua primeira página indefesa!"

César Vallejo, no poema Himno a los volontarios de la República.

a velhinha

cusca. que mastiga com o último dente as ceroulas alheias.

céu da boca

"na introdução de referências a pormenores autobiográficos que, sendo desconhecidos do leitor, são espaços herméticos pelos quais alguns têm querido espreitar e penetrar, procurando descobrir esses pormenores em testemunhos dos que conheceram o poeta, ou em cartas deste, aplicando-os a este ou àquele verso, a este ou àquele poema, não se rendendo à impenetrabilidade de versos e poemas inteiros, ao segredo que o poeta quis que eles fossem, quando a incomunicação é acaso a leitura final desses versos ou poemas, que são a expressão de um mistério, de um desejo ou de uma incapacidade de comunicar ou dizer tudo." no Prólogo de José Bento à Antologia Poética de César Vallejo, sobre o caso de coscuvilhice literária que tenta, tantas vezes, ligar versos a biografias [essa personagem não foi de avião por razões da autobiografia: Sam Shepard não voa nunca, não gosta de aviões]. e depois?, apetece dizer.

À mesa de um bom amigo então comi
com seu pai a recém-chegar do mundo,
com suas tias decrépitas que falam
em grisalho repintado de porcelana,
cochichando por seus alvéolos viúvos;
e com talheres efusivos de alegres tiroliros,
porque estão em sua casa. Assim, que graça!
E doeram-me as facas
desta mesa em todo o céu da boca.

parte do poema XXVIII do livro Trilce (1922), título inventado, diz o próprio, que gostou da palavra. lá fora está escuro e cinzento e começou a chover outra vez. nós temos o céu dentro da boca, quem fala inglês tem um telhado.

cabeça no ar (chamarolas)

cidade com cor de inverno

s/n

desta vida descontente

são pedro de alcântara

s/n

s/n

vento

tinha um

projecto [umaespéciede]. começou hoje. "São as profundas quedas dos Cristos da nossa alma,/de uma fé adorável que o Destino blasfema. / Tais pancadas sangrentas são as crepitações / de um pão que à porta do forno se nos queima." César Vallejo, Antologia Poética da Relógio d'Água com tradução de José Bento.

aqui no original, que me escapa. ou aqui.

"La Vieille Dame Et Les Pigeons"

de Sylvain Chomet.

se

as crianças não podem ver este filme, então que crianças são estas, as nossas.





um desejo para 2011: ir ver o Ilusionista de Tati, de Sylvain Chomet.

Doutor Avalanche (2)

já foram duas avalanches, falta a minha.

Potemkin

as listas

que se fazem nesta altura para lembrar os atrasados que ainda vão a tempo de comprar e estar em sintonia com o estado das coisas (corram, corram). o livro do ano, a não perder.-- como não vendo nada, posso embarcar nesta actividade inútil que se enquadra bem na inutilidade pública deste espaço. li finalmente Faulkner com a lentidão e repetição que queria, foi o meu do ano, tal como Sebald que levo agora sempre nas caminhadas andarilhas, as dele -que descem no tempo como pelos trilhos. no cinema Kiarostami acima de todos, embora tenha sido um ano bom: de frequência do King, ou mau pela morte do Nimas. do palco, sempre a Barraca no Largo de Santos (aplauso). das imagens, o meu olhar vidrado, a Guernica ao vivo, o museu Paula Rego aqui ao lado e mais ainda, Heidi Romano. os sons no Laeiszhalle. foi o ano das praias, de pedras e de árvores. do Outono, de chegadas, desilusão. Porto, Olhão, Serra d'Aire, Madrid, Copenhaga, Hamburgo, Estocolmo e Mälmo. voltar ao estudo, Lisboa, ano do Noma, de ver a cor do Báltico, de espreitar o mar do Norte e de apanhar boleia de velejador. aprender a ler, a nadar, bicicleta, tanta coisa. de esperar que seja sempre pelo menos assim.

Maxine Hong Kingston (4)

daqui.

Maxine Hong Kingston (3)

Maxine Hong Kingston (2)

prenda de natal

aos leitores teimosos ou fortuitos deste blogue: uma selecção de textos publicados na Harper's aos longo dos anos (Carroll, Kipling, Hardy, Twain, Jack London, Melville e outros). e até para o ano.

totally my cup of tea ou totalmente a ver:

New Landscape Photography.

uma espécie

de balanço, na função bloco de notas. este ano, como festa em casa própria não houve, fui breve contribuinte para o splash de açúcar em mesas alheias (ou seja, andei a asilar). o embrulho este ano teve: double chocolate cookies a que acrescentei nozes e meia tsp de aroma de amêndoa; pecan white chocolate cookies, as preferidas; sugar cookies, todas com receita da Hummingbird Bakery. também chocolate maple syrup almond cinnamon bark, invenção do ano e umas cassis cookies, receita Martha Stewart para deitar fora. o cranberry sauce (canela e Porto Ruby veio para ficar). e o melhor, a Apple Pie a que acrescentei nozes, receita da Baked. até pareceu pouco.

defining moment [e a caça]

"Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved - from a distance, though - and given what he wanted. And in return he would be...what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhapiness.

They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn't go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people, his self - the cocoon that was "personality" - gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn't see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself. There was nothing here to help him-not his money, his car, his father's reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact, they hampered him. Except for his broken watch, and his wallet with about two hundred dollars, all he had started out with on his journey was gone: his suitcase with the Scoth, the shirts, and the space for bags of gold; his snap-brim hat, his tie, his shirt, his three-piece suit, his socks, and his shoes. His watch and his two-hundred dollars would be of no help out here, where all a man had was what he was born with, or had learned to use. And endurance. Eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch-and some other sense that he knew he did not have: the ability to separate out, of all the things there were to sense, the one that life itself might depend on.

(...)

He could still hear them-the way they had sounded the last few hours. Signalling one another. What were they saying? "Wait up?" "Over here?" Little by little it fell into place. The dogs, the men - none was just hollering, just signaling location or pace. The men and the dogs were talking to each other.In distinctive voices they were saying distinctive, complicated things. That long yah sound was followed by a specific kind of howl from one of the dogs. The low howm howm that sounded like a string bass imitating a bassoon meantsomething the dogs understood and executed. And the dogs spoke to the men: singleshot barks - evenly spaced and widely spaced - one every three or four minutes, that might go on for twenty minutes. A sort of radar that indicated to the men where they were and what they saw and what they wanted to do about it. And the men agreed or told them to change direction or to come back. All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeee's of a cornet, the unh unh unh bass cords. It was all language. An extension of the click peope made in their cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them. And he was hearing it in the Blue Ridge Mountains under a sweet gum tree. And if they could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn't they know about human beings? Or the earth itself, for that matter. It was more than tracks Calvin was looking for-he whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, touched them, as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning though his fingers."

em Song of Solomon de Tony Morrison.
para fechar o livro, no dia do mais completo fazer nada de nada.

"L’enfant moine de l’Himalaya"

ilustrações de Gérard DuBois para a revista XXI, três de uma série de 10.
(uma quase enciclopédia de memórias colectivas em imagens, a sua obra)

título fantástico

de uma crítica de cinema no The National: "childhood memories ruined by CGI". ou a hipermercatização do mundo.

portentosa

não só ela, como a história a contar e como foi contada. já nem saboreando o sabor doce e intenso e quente dos couscous. (mulheres, cozinha, família, o social, minorias, spices, sarcasmo, racismo, exclusão, povo, o Magreb, e estou lá, caída que nem um patinho).

aqui e aqui.

curiosidade para acabar a noite

na cnn.

meia tarde

para distribuir amor e beijos.

votos de feliz natal

(verdade, uma mensagem deixada a correr)

por

estranho que pareça, nos últimos dias, para além da matança das saudades, o que me descansou foi andar com meias cor de rosa.

Thomas Hicks

Thomas Hicks Animation Montage from Thomas Hicks on Vimeo.


Kaiten Mokuba from Thomas Hicks on Vimeo.




Thomas Hicks from Etapes on Vimeo.

falar do mesmo não chega

"If the word, spoken or withheld, is a central and potent fact of theatre, so, too, is space and the occupation of that space by the body. Nor is it simply a matter of proxemics, of the meaning generated by gesture or appearance; it is that the word is made flesh. The theatre is by its nature sensuous. Even didactic drama alchemises its arguments through the mind made body. The severity of words on the page is corrupted by the mouth which articulates them. The minimalism of the printed word gives way to plenitude. That seduction, implicit in the text, becomes explicit in production. It cannot be extirpated. "

em Modern American Drama de C.W.E. Bigsby
aqui, para ler tudo.
[na loja são quarenta dólares, o que dá que pensar]

Modern American Drama


pensamento limpo também conta.

formas

socialmente aceites de falar sozinho. esta e ao telemóvel, em qualquer lado, até nos transportes públicos. há outras, como ter alguém a mover a boca do outro lado.

American sunset

aqui.
- - -

"You know, I was sitting in the University of Texas where they have the original manuscript of Watt by Mr Beckett and it was amazing because there were all these drawings on them, so I sat there one afternoon and copied them!"
It's almost as if Sam Shepard has spent his life circling around Samuel Beckett. It was discovering his plays as a young man that first inspired him to write, and Patti Smith says that in those days he never went anywhere without a copy of one or other of his plays on him.

daqui.

- - -

"we're constantly buying crap" (well)

How do films feed into this?

We have our own film tradition which has created some extraordinary works of film, some masterpieces. Nonetheless, the American tradition of film overall is that it's a commercial medium. That's not necessarily bad. The films of William Wyler came out of that and the films of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick happened in spite of that. Nonetheless, we don't have a tradition of film as art. As the media gets more and more powerful, film as mass entertainment, which is to say solely as marketing of the consumer product, that tradition gets much, much stronger. The job of mass entertainment is exactly the opposite of the job of art. The job of the artist gets more difficult. On the other hand, maybe that's always been the case.

Why is the job of the artist the exact opposite of mass entertainment?

I like mass entertainment. I've written mass entertainment. But it's the opposite of art because the job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.

- - -
entrevista de David Mamet para a Salon em 97, aqui.

não me surpreendeu. action. prefiro, quem não, as obras do início (e a toda a hora Shepard)
over and out. não sabia que o Carteiro era dele, nem como o teatro ficou tão enleado no cinema.

Mamet on Charlie Rose

what is your favorite word

youtubando:
- What is your favorite word?
- Zugga.
- Zugga?
- Well, yes.

"Instant Light"

as polaroids de Tarkovsky.




























daqui e de outros lados.

Tarkovsky: Light Painting, aqui.

se tivesse alguma referência e se isso quisesse dizer alguma coisa, seria esta.

cor

estava a ver naturezas-mortas de Caravaggio. onde foi que, recentemente, li que a cor deixou de interessar em termos absolutos. depende de ecrã para ecrã, de impressão para impressão, de película para película. ah.. daqui -> aqui.

e então, já foram ver

Angel City, de Sam Shepard, encenado por Rita Lello, na Barraca?
as fotos são da  Sara Santos.

prestes

a experimentar Chocolate Bark with Sugar-Coated Nuts and Spices ou Dark Chocolate Bark with Walnuts ou as Mini Florentines do Little Book of Christmas Cooking.

ainda uns

links:

individuals are defined by the forces that surround them

The Crying of Lot 49, full text.

na Time.

Pynchon wiki.

A Journey into the Mind of Watts.

e outros no Libyrinth, um belo link.

(depois de duas semanas com o pós-modernismo na cama estou pronta a ler a bíblia)

estava 'on'

e depois deixou de estar. isto devia dizer-me qualquer coisa.
trata-se da introdução que Pynchon fez à colectânea de contos Slow Learner, escritos entre 59 e 68 (antes da mitificação do autor desaparecido) e publicados em 1984. um texto raro de auto-referência. e, talvez, um dos mais claros na descrição de uma época literária.

- -

As NEARLY as I can remember, these stories were .. written between 1958 and 1964. Four of them I wrote when I was in college —the fifth, "The Secret Integration" (1964), is more of a journeyman than an apprentice effort. You may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read over anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks. My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon. My second thought was about some kind of a wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I can't very well just 86 this guy from my life. On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped technology I were to run into him today, how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and talk over old times?

It is only fair to warn even the most kindly disposed of readers that there are some mighty tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent too. At the same time, my best hope is that, pretentious, goofy and ill-considered as they get now and then, these stories will still be of use with all their flaws intact, as illustrative of typical problems in entry-level fiction, and cautionary about some practices which younger writers might prefer to avoid.

"The Small Rain" was my first published story. A friend who'd been away in the army the same two years I'd been in the navy supplied the details. The hurricane really happened, and my friend's Signal Corps detachment had the mission described in the story. Most of what I dislike about my writing is present here in embryo, as well as in more advanced forms. I failed to recognize, just for openers, that the main character's problem was real and interesting enough to generate a story on its own. Apparently I felt I had to put on a whole extra overlay of rain images and references to "The Waste Land" and A Farewell to Arms. I was operating on the motto "Make it literary," a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.

Equally embarrassing is the case of Bad Ear to be found marring much of the dialogue, especially toward the end. My sense of regional accents in those days was primitive at best. I had noticed how in the military voices got homogenized into one basic American country voice. Italian street kids from New York started to sound like down-home folks after a while, sailors from Georgia came back off leave complaining that nobody could understand them because they talked like Yankees. Being from the North, what I was hearing as a "southern accent" was really this uniform service accent, and not much else.

I imagined I had heard oo for ow in civilian voices around Tidewater Virginia, but didn't know that in different areas of this real or civilian South, even in different parts of Virginia, people spoke in a wide number of quite different accents. It is an error also noticeable in movies of the time. My specific problem in the barroom scene is not only that I have a Louisiana girl talking in Tidewater diphthongs imperfectly heard to begin with, but worse, that I insist on making it an element of plot — it makes a difference to Levine, and therefore to what happens in the story. My mistake being to try to show off my ear before I had one.

At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome, is the defective way in which my narrator, almost but not quite me, deals with the subject of death. When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death - how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted. (I suspect one of the reasons that fantasy and science fiction appeal so much to younger readers is that, when the space and time have been altered to allow characters to travel easily anywhere through the continuum and thus escape physical dangers and timepiece inevitabilities, mortality is so seldom an issue.)

In "The Small Rain" characters are found dealing with death in pre-adult ways. They evade: they sleep late, they seek euphemisms. When they do mention death they try to make with the jokes. Worst of all, they hook it up with sex. You'll notice that toward the end of the story, some kind of sexual encounter appears to take place, though you'd never know it from the text. The language suddenly gets too fancy to read. Maybe this wasn't only my own adolescent nervousness about sex. I think, looking back, that there might have been a general nervousness in the whole college-age subculture. A tendency to self-censorship. It was also the era of Howl, Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, and all the excesses of law enforcement that such works provoked. Even the American soft-core pornography available in those days went to absurdly symbolic lengths to avoid describing sex. Today this all seems a dead issue, but back then it was a felt constraint on folks's writing.

What I find interesting about the story now is not so much the quaintness and puerility of attitude as the class angle. Whatever else the peacetime service is good for, it can provide an excellent introduction to the structure of society at large. It becomes evident even to a young mind that often unacknowledged divisions in civilian life find clear and immediate expression in the military distinction between "officers" and "men." One makes the amazing discovery that grown adults walking around with college educations, wearing khaki and brass and charged with heavy-duty responsibilities, can in fact be idiots. And that working-class white hats, while in theory capable of idiocy, are much more apt to display competence, courage, humanity, wisdom, and other virtues associated, by the educated classes, with themselves. Although cast in literary terms, Lardass Levine's conflict in this story is about where to put his loyalties. Being an unpolitical '50's student, I was unaware of this at the time - but in hindsight I think I was working out of a dilemma that most of us writing then had, in some way, to deal with.

At the simplest level, it had to do with language. We were encouraged from many directions — Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March, emerging voices like those of Herbert Gold and Philip Roth - to see how at least two very distinct kinds of English could be allowed in fiction to coexist. Allowed! It was actually OK to write like this! Who knew? The effect was exciting, liberating, strongly positive. It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of possibilities. I don't think we were consciously groping after any synthesis, although perhaps we should have been. The success of the "new left" later in the '6o's was to be limited by the failure of college kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically. One reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of communication between the two groups.

The conflict in those days was, like most everything else, muted. In its literary version it shaped up as traditional vs. Beat fiction. Although far away, one of the theatres of action we kept hearing about was at the University of Chicago. There was a "Chicago School" of literary criticism, for example, which had a lot of people's attention and respect. At the same time, there had been a shakeup at the Chicago Review which resulted in the Beat-oriented Big Table magazine. "What happened at Chicago" became shorthand for some unimaginable subversive threat. There were many other such disputes. Against the undeniable power of tradition, we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro," the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.

A collateral effect, for me anyway, was that of Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars, reprinted in the early '50's, an account of the young poets of the Middle Ages who left the monasteries in large numbers and took to the roads of Europe, celebrating in song the wider range of life to be found outside their academic walls. Given the university environment of the time, the parallels weren't hard to see. Not that college life was dull, exactly, but thanks to all these alternative lowlife data that kept filtering insidiously through the ivy, we had begun to get a sense of that other world humming along out there. Some of us couldn't resist the temptation to go out and see what was happening. Enough of us then came back inside with firsthand news to encourage others to try it too - a preview of the mass college dropouts of the '60's.

I enjoyed only a glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement. Like others, I spent a lot of time in jazz clubs, nursing the two-beer minimum. I put on hornrimmed sunglasses at night. I went to parties in lofts where girls wore strange attire. I was hugely tickled by all forms of marijuana humor, though the talk back then was in inverse relation to the availability of that useful substance. In 1956, in Norfolk, Virginia, I had wandered into a bookstore and discovered issue one of the Evergreen Review, then an early forum for Beat sensibility. It was an eye-opener. I was in the navy at the time, but I already knew people who would sit in circles on the deck and sing perfectly, in parts, all those early rock'n' roll songs, who played bongos and saxophones, who had felt honest grief when Bird and later Clifford Brown died. By the time I got back to college, I found academic people deeply alarmed over the cover of the Evergreen Review then current, not to mention what was inside. It looked as if the attitude of some literary folks toward the Beat generation was the same as that of certain officers on my ship toward Elvis Presley. They used to approach those among ship's company who seemed likely sources -combed their hair like Elvis, for example. "What's his message?" they'd interrogate anxiously. "What does he want?"



We were at a transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of cultural time, with our loyalties divided. As bop and rock'n'roll were to swing music and postwar pop, so was this new writing to the more established modernist tradition we were being exposed to then in college. Unfortunately there were no more primary choices for us to make. We were onlookers: the parade had gone by and we were already getting everything secondhand, consumers of what the media of the time were supplying us. This didn't prevent us from adopting Beat postures and props, and eventually as post-Beats coming to see deeper into what, after all, was a sane and decent affirmation of what we all want to believe about American values. When the hippie resurgence came along ten years later, there was, for a while anyway, a sense of nostalgia and vindication. Beat prophets were resurrected, people started playing alto sax riffs on electric guitars, the wisdom of the East came back in fashion. It was the same, only different.

On the negative side, however, both forms of the movement placed too much emphasis on youth, including the eternal variety. Youth of course was wasted on me at the time, but I bring up the puerility angle again because, along with imperfectly developed attitudes about sex and death, we may also note how easily some of my adolescent values were able to creep in and wreck an otherwise sympathetic character. Such is the unhappy case with Dennis Flange, in "Low-lands." In a way this is more of a character sketch than a story. Old Dennis doesn't "grow" much in the course of it. He remains static, his fantasies become embarrassingly vivid, that's about all that happens. A brightening of focus maybe, but no problem resolution and so not much movement or life.

It is no secret nowadays, particularly to women, that many American males, even those of middle-aged appearance, wearing suits and holding down jobs, are in fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys inside. Flange is this type of a character, although when I wrote this story I thought he was pretty cool. He wants children — why isn't made clear - but not at the price of developing any real life shared with an adult woman. His solution to this is Nerissa, a woman with the size and demeanor of a child. I can't remember for sure, but it looks like I wanted some ambiguity here about whether or not she was only a creature of his fantasies. It would be easy to say that Dennis's problem was my problem, and that I was putting it off on him. Whatever's fair — but the problem could have been more general. At that time I had no direct experience with either marriage or parenting, and maybe I was picking up on male attitudes that were then in the air — more documentably, inside the pages of men's magazines, Playboy in particular. I don't think this magazine was the projection, exclusively, of its publisher's private values: if American men had not widely shared such values, Playboy would have quickly failed and faded from the scene.


[1º número de 1953]

Oddly enough, I had not intended this to be Dennis's story at all - he was supposed to have been a straight man for Pig Bodine. The counterpart in real life to this unwholesome bluejacket was actually my starting point. I had heard the honeymoon story when I was in the navy, from a gunner's mate on my ship. We were out on shore patrol duty in Portsmouth, Virginia. Our beat was a desolate piece of shipyard perimeter — chain link fences, railroad spurs - and the night was inhospitably cold, with no ill-behaved sailors abroad for us to regulate. So to my shipmate, as senior member of the patrol, fell the obligation to pass the time telling sea stories, and this was one of them. What had actually happened to him on his own honeymoon is what I had happen to Dennis Flange. I was heavily amused not so much at the content of the story as at the more abstract notion that anybody would behave that way. As it turned out, my partner's drinking companion figured in a wide body of shipboard anecdote. Transferred before my time to shore duty someplace, he had become a legend. I finally did get to see him the day before I was discharged, mustering in the early morning outside a barracks at the Norfolk naval base. The minute I caught sight of him, before I heard him answer to his name, I swear I had the strange ESP knowledge that that's who he was. Not to overdramatize the moment — but because I still like Pig Bodine so much, having brought the character in a time or two since in novels, it's pleasant to recall that our paths really did cross in this apparitional way.

Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it was also my own at the time. The best I can say for it now is that, for its time, it is probably authentic enough. John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to make his name by kicking third-world people around, another extension of the boy's adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading. There had prevailed for a while a set of assumptions and distinctions, unvoiced and unquestioned, best captured years later in the '70's television character Archie Bunker.

It may yet turn out that racial differences are not as basic as questions of money and power, but have served a useful purpose, often in the interest of those who deplore them most, in keeping us divided and so relatively poor and powerless. This having been said, however, the narrative voice in this story here remains that of a smart-assed jerk who didn't know any better, and I apologize for it.

Disagreeable as I find "Low-lands" now, it's nothing compared to my bleakness of heart when I have to look at "Entropy." The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it. By contrast, the characters in "Low-lands," though problematic in other ways, were at least where I began from, bringing the theoretical stuff in later, just to give the project a look of educated class. Otherwise it would only have been about a number of unpleasant people failing to resolve difficulties in their lives, and who needs that? Hence, adventitious lectures about tale-telling and geometry.

Because the story has been anthologized a couple-three times, people think I know more about the subject of entropy than I really do. Even the normally unhoodwink-able Donald Barthelme has suggested in a magazine interview that I had some kind of proprietary handle on it. Well, according to the OED the word was coined in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius, on the model of the word "energy," which he took to be Greek for "work-contents." Entropy, or "transformation-contents" was introduced as a way of examining the changes a heat engine went through in a typical cycle, the transformation being heat into work. If Clausius had stuck to his native German and called it Verwandlungsinhalt instead, it could have had an entirely different impact. As it was, after having been worked with in a restrained way for the next 70 or 80 years, entropy got picked up on by some communication theorists and given the cosmic moral twist it continues to enjoy in current usage. I happened to read Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings (a rewrite for the interested layman of his more technical Cybernetics) at about the same time as The Education of Henry Adams, and the "theme" of the story is mostly derivative of what these two men had to say. A pose I found congenial in those days - fairly common, I hope, among pre-adults — was that of somber glee at any idea of mass destruction or decline. The modern political thriller genre, in fact, has been known to cash in on such visions of death made large-scale or glamorous. Given my undergraduate mood, Adams's sense of power out of control, coupled with Wiener's spectacle of universal heat-death and mathematical stillness, seemed just the ticket. But the distance and grandiosity of this led me to short-change the humans in the story. I think they come off as synthetic, insufficiently alive. The marital crisis described is once again, like the Flanges', unconvincingly simplified. The lesson is sad, as Dion always sez, but true: get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

For a while all I worried about was that I'd set things up in terms of temperature and not energy. As I read more about the subject later, I came to see that this had not been such a bad tactic. But do not underestimate the shallowness of my understanding. For instance, I chose 37 degrees Fahrenheit for an equilibrium point because 37 degrees Celsius is the temperature of the human body. Cute, huh?

Further, it turns out that not everyone has taken such a dim view of entropy. Again according to the OED, Clerk Maxwell and P. G. Tait used it, for a while at least, in a sense opposite to that of Clausius: as a measure of energy available, not unavailable, for work. Willard Gibbs, who in this country a century ago developed the property at theoretical length, thought of it, in diagram form anyway, as an aid to popularizing the science of thermodynamics, in particular its second law.

What strikes me nowadays about the story is not so much its thermodynamical gloom as the way it reflects how the '50's were for some folks. I suppose it is as close to a Beat story as anything I was writing then, although I thought I was sophisticating the Beat spirit with secondhand science. I wrote "Entropy" in '58 or '59 — when I talk about '57 in the story as "back then" I am being almost sarcastic. One year of those times was much like another. One of the most pernicious effects of the '50's was to convince the people growing up during them that it would last forever. Until John Kennedy, then perceived as a congressional upstart with a strange haircut, began to get some attention, there was a lot of aimlessness going around. While Eisenhower was in, there seemed no reason why it should all not just go on as it was.

Since I wrote this story I have kept trying to understand entropy, but my grasp becomes less sure the more I read. I've been able to follow the OED definitions, and the way Isaac Asimov explains it, and even some of the math. But the qualities and quantities will not come together to form a unified notion in my head. It is cold comfort to find out that Gibbs himself anticipated the problem, when he described entropy in its written form as "far-fetched . . . obscure and difficult of comprehension." When I think about the property nowadays, it is more and more in connection with time, that human one-way time we're all stuck with locally here, and which terminates, it is said, in death. Certain processes, not only thermodynamic ones but also those of a medical nature, can often not be reversed. Sooner or later we all find this out, from the inside.

Such considerations were largely absent when I wrote "Entropy." I was more concerned with committing on paper a variety of abuses, such as overwriting. I will spare everybody a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is. I think I took the word from T. S. Eliot. I have nothing against tendrils personally, but my overuse of the word is a good example of what can happen when you spend too much time and energy on words alone. This advice has been given often and more compellingly elsewhere, but my specific piece of wrong procedure back then was, incredibly, to browse through the thesaurus and note words that sounded cool, hip, or likely to produce an effect, usually that of making me look good, without then taking the trouble to go and find out in the dictionary what they meant. If this sounds stupid, it is. I mention it only on the chance that others" may be doing it even as we speak, and be able to profit from my error.

This same free advice can also be applied to items of information. Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything — or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story. Opera librettos, movies and television drama are allowed to get away with all kinds of errors in detail. Too much time in front of the Tube and a writer can get to believing the same thing about fiction. Not so. Though it may not be wrong absolutely to make up, as I still do, what I don't know or am too lazy to find out, phony data are more often than not deployed in places sensitive enough to make a difference, thereby losing what marginal charm they may have possessed outside of the story's context. Witness an example from "Entropy." In the character of Callisto I was trying for a sort of world-weary Middle-European effect, and put in the phrase grippe espagnole, which I had seen on some liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. I must have thought this was some kind of post-World War I spiritual malaise or something. Come to find out it means what it says, Spanish influenza, and the reference I lifted was really to the worldwide flu epidemic that followed the war.



The lesson here, obvious but now and then overlooked, is just to corroborate one's data, in particular those acquired casually, such as through hearsay or off the backs of record albums. We have, after all, recently moved into an era when, at least in principle, everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information, just by stroking a few keys on a terminal. There are no longer any excuses for small stupid mistakes, and I hope this also leads to much more inhibition about stealing data on the chance that no one will catch it.

Fascinating topic, literary theft. As in the penal code, there are degrees. These range from plagiarism down to only being derivative, but all are forms of wrong procedure. If, on the other hand, you believe that nothing is original and that all writers "borrow" from "sources," there still remains the question of credit lines or acknowledgements. It wasn't till "Under the Rose" (1959) that I could bring myself, even indirectly, to credit guidebook eponym Karl Baedeker, whose guide to Egypt for 1899 was the major "source" for the story.

I spotted this book in the Cornell Co-op. All fall and winter I had been having writer's block. I was taking a writing seminar run by Baxter Hathaway. Having returned that semester after some time off, he was an unknown quantity, and terrified me. The course had been going on for some time, and I hadn't handed in a thing. "Come on," people advised me, "he's a nice guy. Don't worry about it." Were they kidding, or what? It was getting to be a major problem. Finally about halfway through the semester there arrived in the mail one of those cartoon cards, showing a toilet stall covered with graffiti. "You've practiced long enough," it said - open the card — "Now write!" It was signed "Baxter Hathaway." Could I, even as I laid down cash for it at the cash register, have been subconsciously planning to loot this faded red volume for the contents of a story?

Could Willy Sutton rob a safe? Loot the Baedeker I did, all the details of a time and place I had never been to, right down to the names of the diplomatic corps. Who'd make up a name like Khevenhüller-Metsch? Lest others become as enchanted as I was and have continued to be with this technique, let me point out that it is a lousy way to go about writing a story. The problem here is like the problem with "Entropy": beginning with something abstract — a thermodynamic coinage or the data in a guidebook — and only then going on to try to develop plot and characters. This is simply, as we say in the profession, ass backwards. Without some grounding in human reality, you are apt to be left only with another apprentice exercise, which is what this uncomfortably resembles.

I was also able to steal, or let us say "derive," in more subtle ways. I had grown up reading a lot of spy fiction, novels of intrigue, notably those of John Buchan. The only book of his that anyone remembers now is The Thirty-nine Steps but he wrote half a dozen more just as good or better. They were all in my hometown library. So were E. Phillips Oppenheim, Helen MacInnes, Geoffrey Household, and many others as well. The net effect was eventually to build up in my uncritical brain a peculiar shadowy vision of the history preceding the two world wars. Political decision-making and official documents did not figure in this nearly as much as lurking, spying, false identities, psychological games. Much later I got around to two other mighty influences, Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station and Machiavelli's The Prince, which helped me to develop the interesting question underlying the story — is history personal or statistical? My reading at the time also included many Victorians, allowing World War I in my imagination to assume the shape of that attractive nuisance so dear to adolescent minds, the apocalyptic showdown.

I don't mean to make light of this. Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough in '59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow. There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it — occasionally, as here, offset to a more colorful time and place.

So, if only for its feeble good intentions, I am less annoyed with "Under the Rose" than with the earlier stuff. I think the characters are a little better, no longer just lying there on the slab but beginning at least to twitch some and blink their eyes open, although their dialogue still suffers from my perennial Bad Ear. Thanks to the relentless efforts of the Public Broadcast System, everyone these days is hyperfamiliar with the furthest nuances of English as spoken by the English. In my day I had to depend on movies and radio, which as sources then were not 100% reliable. Hence all the pip-pip and jolly-ho business, which to a modern reader comes across as stereotyped and inauthentic. Readers may also feel shorted because of how, more than anyone, the masterful John le Carré has upped the ante for the whole genre. Today we expect a complexity of plot and depth of character which are missing from my effort here. Most of it, happily, is chase scenes, for which I remain a dedicated sucker — it is one piece of puerility I am unable to let go of. May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude.

Attentive fans of Shakespeare will notice that the name Porpentine is lifted from Hamlet, I, v. It is an early form of "porcupine." The name Moldweorp is Old Teutonic for "mole" — the animal, not the infiltrator. I thought it would be a cute idea for people named after two amiable fuzzy critters to be duking it out over the fate of Europe.

Less conscientiously, there is also an echo of the name of the reluctant spy character Wormold, in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, then recently published.

Another influence in "Under the Rose," too recent for me then to abuse to the extent I have done since, is Surrealism. I had been taking one of those elective courses in Modern Art, and it was the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention. Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of the movement, and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father's orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, "One of the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful."

I was to get even worse at this, as is evident from the junkshop or randomly assembled quality to many of the scenes in "The Secret Integration." But because I like more than dislike this story, I sometimes will blame it more on the cluttered way that items accumulate in the rooms of memory. Like "Low-lands " this is a hometown story, one of the few times I tried to write directly out of the landscape and the experiences I grew up with. I mistakenly thought of Long Island then as a giant and featureless sandbar, without history, someplace to get away from but not to feel very connected to. It is interesting that in both stories I imposed on what I felt to be blank space a set of more complicated topographies.

Perhaps I felt this was a way to make the place a little more exotic.

Not only did I complicate this Long Island space, but I also drew a line around the whole neighborhood, picked it up and shifted it all to the Berkshires, where I still have never been. The old Baedeker trick again. This time I found the details I needed in the regional guide to the Berkshires put out in the 1930's by the Federal Writers Project of the WPA. This is one of an excellent set of state and regional volumes, which may still be available in libraries. They make instructive and pleasurable reading. In fact, there is some stuff in the Berkshire book so good, so rich in detail and deep in feeling, that even I was ashamed to steal from it.

Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to me. Displacing my personal experience off into other environments went back at least as far as "The Small Rain." Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively, understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.

Then again, maybe another factor in it was just claustrophobia. I wasn't the only one writing then who felt some need to stretch, to step out. It may have gone back to the sense of academic enclosure we felt which had lent such appeal to the American picaresque life the Beat writers seemed to us to be leading. Apprentices in all fields and times are restless to be journeymen.

By the time I wrote "The Secret Integration" I was embarked on this phase of the business. I had published a novel and thought I knew a thing or two, but for the first time I believe I was also beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality. I was out on the road at last, getting to visit the places Kerouac had written about. These towns and Greyhound voices and fleabag hotels have found their way into this story, and I am pretty content with how it holds up.

Not that it's perfect, understand, not by a long shot. The kids, for example, seem in some areas to be not very bright, certainly not a patch on the kids of the '8o's. I could also with an easy mind see axed much of the story's less responsible Surrealism. Still, there are parts of it I can't believe I wrote. Sometime in the last couple of decades, some company of elves must have snuck in and had a crack at it. As is clear from the up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too much to expect that I'd keep on for long in this positive or professional direction. The next story I wrote was "The Crying of Lot 49," which was marketed as a "novel," and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then.

Most likely, much of my feeling for this last story can be traced to ordinary nostalgia for this time in my life, for the writer who seemed then to be emerging, with his bad habits, dumb theories and occasional moments of productive silence in which he may have begun to get a glimpse of how it was done. What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock'n'roll. But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.

- - -
em que ganhei diferente respeito pelo autor.

espólio

uma colecção de lenços e kleenexes, caixas de xaropes pingos e ilvicos no lugar de jarras, as chávenas todas usadas e o stock dos chás em ruptura, agora mesmo um rooibos, a conta do médico. o aquecedor deixou de funcionar e afinal era o interruptor (uma pancada). mantas cobertores pijamas, ninguém para fazer sopa, obrigada a ler compulsivamente Thomas Pynchon e o fim da humanidade racional, bibliografias robotizadas, a grande conspiração. hei-de arrastar esta herança por mais uma semana. Redentor-solarengo-fabricador de felicidade rápida: um par de cálices de vinho do Porto, o desenho de Siza, com a meia lua (a lua toda brilha) numa das arestas da haste. ou seja, nem tudo é queixume, nem tudo é Buarque.

the floating opera

de John Barth:

"It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn't be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and then they'd have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they'd have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most times they wouldn't understand what was going on at all, or they'd think they knew, when actually they didn't... I needn't explain that that's how much of life works."

almoçageme

onde voltei. abóbora, umas flores, espinafres, pão de Janas.

é mesmo

isto o que penso.

grotesque

[podia fazer isto para sempre] em Friedrich Theodor Visher: "the turbulent acummulation of incidents and the demonic nature of a mechanism which, once triggered, tumultuosly unfolds itself and completely disintegrates a whole segment of reality."

esfriada

somos dois por quarenta e oito horas mais e depois nada. por uma vez não houve um grande mapa afixado, tudo ainda ao vento, nem prendas compradas, nada, passa o Natal como se fosse uma seda. uns, embrenhados em autofagias, e os outros, que desconsolo. há prendas que não deveriam ter sido dadas. felizmente há céu vento e alguma luminosidade nas ruas. era para mim.

Entropy

mas esta a de Maros Krivy.



do site: "Entropy is an observable increase of complexity within a certain system. At the spatial level, parallel to the bucket with a gray sand are 'in-between' spaces, neither central nor peripheral, with a complex mixture of variety of elements. If design is an effort to fully define the relationships between elements, entropy is its breakdown and interspersion of elements into relationships and constellations not envisaged by design.

If we then understand design as an attempt to deny entropy, I am looking at the process that is opposite. Here, the place becomes increasingly complex by both historical progress of time and emergence of spatial relationship between things that were originally envisaged only within their isolated, local and particular designs. I am interested in the relationship between banality and complexity to be found in these places."

"The Waste Land"

audio-

e nem foi Pecola

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” em The Bluest Eye de Toni Morrison. parece que finalmente cheguei a algum presente. aqui reconheço o canal mulher, séries, mini-séries, sérieB e reality shows. tinham de se alimentar algures. (algures sendo Wuthering Heights e o seu oposto simultaneamente)

outra chegada

"When grandfather Crazy Heart died they killed his two ponies, heads toward the east and tails to the west. They had told each horse, "Grandson, your owner loved you. He has need of you where he's going now." Grandfather knew for sure where he was going, and so did the people who buried him according to the old custom, up on a scaffold where the wind and the air, the sun, the rain and the snow could take good care of him. I think that eventually they took the box with his body down from the scaffold and buried it in a cemetery, but that happened years later and by then he and his ponies had long gone to wherever they wanted to be."
John Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes em Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. (browse inside version)

counterrealism (3)

daqui.

counterrealism (2)

daqui.

academização

da loucura.
(o que talvez pela idade e outras maleitas se aplica a mim como casca de noz)

counterrealism

Muse, Spare Me
de John Barth

In 1965 the term postmodernist was not yet current, though the American fiction it would come to describe was being written. The term Black Humorist, on the other hand, left over from the Fifties, was still in vogue, though the literary phenomenon it described had pretty much run its course. The little Friday-piece below was commissioned that year by Book Week, at that time the book-review supplement of the New York World Journal Tribune. The editors asked for a few hundred words upon the Black Humorists, of whom I was supposed to be one. As I had never tried my hand at a newspaper piece, I agreed to give it a go on condition I be allowed to say almost nothing about Black Humor, of which I had almost nothing to say, and to speak instead mostly of Scheherazade, about whom I seem frequently to have things to say. They said Okay.

For the posturing in my first paragraph -- "I'm not impressed by the apocalyptic character of the present age. . ." -- I apologize. If I ever wasn't, I have certainly become so.

I beseech the Muse to keep me from ever becoming a Black Humorist. Mind, I don't object to Black Humorists, in their place; but to be numbered with them inspires me to a kind of spiritual White Backlash. For one thing, they are in their way responsible, like more conventional social satirists: They dramatize -- and good for them! -- the Madness of Contemporary Society, of Modern Warfare, of Life With the Bomb, of What Have We Nowadays. But I say, Muse, spare me (at the desk, I mean) from social-historical responsibility, and in the last analysis from every other kind as well, except artistic. Your teller of stories will likely be responsive to his time; he needn't be responsible to it. I'm not impressed by the apocalyptic character of the present age -- nor is the age to my indifference -- though I note the fact, and shall return to it. Joyce figured the writer as Dedalus, Mann as Faust; the best of the Black Humorists are good comical Amoses and Isaiahs.

My own favorite image in this line used to be Cassandra -- a madly laughing Cassandra, of course -- the darling of many another young writer convinced that he has unhappy truth by the tail, or on his back, and that no one's getting the message. Later, shorn of such vanity, I preferred an image out of Dante: the Florentine assassins alluded to in Canto XIX of the Inferno. Head-downwards in a hole and sentenced to be buried alive, the murderer postpones his fate by drawing out his confession to the attendant priest. The beauties of this image are its two nice paradoxes: The more sins he has to confess, the longer retribution is delayed, and since he has nothing to lose anyhow, he may well invent a few good ones to hold the priest's attention.
But as soon as his audience grants absolution, the wretch's mouth is stopped with earth: "Nothing fails like success," as Leslie Fiedler says of our popular novelists. Less satisfactory are the details that his audience is also captive, duty-bound to hear him out whether entertained or not; respite is granted for as long as he talks, not merely for as long as he amuses, and there's no real stay of execution, only a hold in the countdown. Moreover, though the fact that the assassin's tale consists of his own misdemeanors (a perverse kind of authorial self-aggrandizement) may make the image apter yet for some novelists we know -- assassins indeed of the characters they "draw from life," as one draws a man to the gallows -- it does not, I hope, apply to my own concoctions.

In any case, the image I'm lately fonder of -- the aptest, sweetest, hauntingest, hopefullest I know for the storyteller -- is Scheherazade. The whole frame of those thousand nights and a night speaks to my heart, directly and intimately -- and in many ways at once, personal and technical. The sultan Shahryar, you remember, is so disenchanted with life in general and love in particular that he "marries" a virgin every night and has her killed in the morning. Scheherazade, who has "perused the books, annals, and legends of preceding kings, and the stories, examples, and instances of by-gone men. . . antique races and departed rulers," volunteers herself. The King "abates her virginity" (as if it were an intense condition), whereafter, with the prearranged assistance of her younger sister, Dunyazade -- about whose role much might be said -- Scheherazade beguiles her deflowerer with a tale, artfully continued, involuted, compounded, and complicated through a thousand and one nocturnal installments, during the invention of which she also bears three sons by her imperious audience. It is on behalf of these offspring that, her inspiration spent at last, she begs for her life; and the king grants her -- in honor of her stories, not her children -- the relative tenure of formal marriage. Scheherazade's tales are published (in 30 volumes), and their author lives happily with her hard-earned family. But not ever after; only until they all are taken by the Destroyer of Delights, whereafter, we're specifically told, "their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins. . . and [other] kings inherited their riches" -- including The Thousand and One Nights.

My love affair with Scheherazade is an old and continuing one. As an illiterate undergraduate, I worked off part of my tuition filing books in the Classics Library at Johns Hopkins, which included the stacks of the Oriental Seminary. One was tacitly permitted to get lost for hours in that splendrous labyrinth and to intoxicate, engorge oneself with story. Especially I became enamored of the great tale-cycles and collections: Somadeva's Ocean of Story in ten huge volumes, Burton's Thousand Nights and a Night in seventeen, the Panchatantra, the Gesta Romanorum, the Novellini, and the Pent- Hept- and Decameron. If anything ever makes a writer out of me, it will be the digestion of that enormous, slightly surreptitious feast of narrative.

Most of those spellbinding liars I have forgotten, but never Scheherazade. Though the tales she tells aren't my favorites, she remains my favorite teller, and it is a heady paradox that this persistence, being the figure of her literal aim, thereby generates itself, and becomes the emblem as well of my figurative aspiration. When I think of my condition and my hope, musewise, in the time between now and when I shall run out of ink or otherwise expire, it is Scheherazade who comes to mind, for many reasons -- not least of which is a technical interest in the ancient device of the framing-story, used more beautifully in the Nights than anywhere else I know.

Chaucer's frame, for example, the pilgrimage to Canterbury, is an excellent if venerable ground-metaphor -- life as a redemptive journey -- but, having established it, he does nothing with it. Boccaccio's frame -- ten wealthy young ladies and gentlemen amusing themselves with clever stories while the great post-Easter plague of 1348 lays waste the countryside -- is more arresting for its apocalyptic nature, for the pretty rules with which the company replaces those of their literally dying society, for the hints of growing relationships between the raconteurs and raconteuses themselves, and for the occasional relevance of the tales to the tellers and to the general situation. On the other hand, the very complex serial frames of the Ocean of Story, for example, are full-fledged stories in themselves, but except for the marvelous (and surely fictitious) "history of the text" and the haunting title, they have no apparent meaningfulness beyond their immediate narrative interest.

The story of Scheherazade excels these others in all respects. For one thing, her tales are told at night: an inestimable advantage, for the whole conception, despite its humor, is darker, more magical and dreamish than Boccaccio's or Chaucer's. Consider too the prerequisites for her taletellerhood: not only native endowment and mastery of the tradition, but the sacrifice of her present personal maidenhead to her auditor and absolute critic -- whose pleasure, by the way, fertilizes as well as spares her, and who finally rewards her (for what they have in a manner of speaking created together) with official distinctions which he will not take away (though her productivity, it seems, ends with the award of tenure), but time will.

Consider finally that in the years of her flourishing, her talent is always on the line: not enough to have satisfied the old cynic once, or twice; she's only as good as her next piece, Scheherazade; night by night it's publish or perish. Thus her situation is no less apocalyptic in its way than the Decameron's, and perhaps more pointed, even without regard to the interesting "public" state of affairs: the King's epical despair and the ruin it's bringing his kingdom to. For though the death of one person is not the death of a people, even mankind's demise will have to consist of each of our dyings. In this respect, all apocalypses are ultimately personal -- an important fact, since it validates apocalyptic visions age after age despite the otherwise awkward circumstance that the world has, so far, persisted. Even the detail that Scheherazade's stories are drawn from the literal and legendary foretime, I find arresting. It reminds me that the eschewing of contemporaneous, "original" material is a basic literary notion, by comparison to which its use is but an occasional anomaly and fad of the last couple of centuries. Not only classical epic and tragedy, and Elizabethan and neoclassical drama, but virtually all folk and heroic narrative, both Eastern and Western, follows Horace's advice: ". . . safer shall the bard his pen employ / With yore, to dramatize the Tale of Troy, / Than, venturing trackless regions to explore, / Delineate characters untouched before."

Joyce's Dedalus calls history a nightmare from which he's trying to wake; some other writers have found it more a wet-dream (and their readers, perhaps, a soporific). For me, also, the past is a dream -- but I laugh in my sleep. The use of historical or legendary material, especially in a farcical, even a comic, spirit, has a number of virtues, among which are esthetic distance and the opportunity for counterrealism. Attacked with a long face, the historical muse is likely to give birth to costume romances, adult Westerns, tiresome allegories, and ponderous mythologizings; but she responds to a lighthearted approach. Magic is what chiefly saves Scheherazade's tales from these poor categories -- a device we may hardly use today, for the realistic tradition and its accompanying cultural history are under our belts, for better or worse, and may not be ignored. They may, however, be come to terms with and got beyond, not by the use of farce alone, surely, but by farce inspired with passion -- and with mystery, which, older than magic, still enwraps our lives as it does the whole queer universe. In passionate, mysterious farce, I think, lies also the possibility of transcending categories more profound than Tragedy and Comedy: I mean the distinction between Tragedy and Mystery -- or, if you like, tragicism and mysticism, the finest expressions respectively of the Western and Eastern spirits. No matter that the achievement of such a synthesis would want the talents of Scheherazade, Shakespeare, and Schopenhauer combined; it is a pole star that even a middling comic novelist may steer by, without mistaking it for his destination.

Like a parable of Kafka's or a great myth, the story of deflowered Scheherazade, yarning tirelessly through the dark hours to save her neck, corresponds to a number of things at once, and flashes meaning from all its facets. For me its rich dark circumstances, mixing the subtle and the coarse, the comic and the grim, the realistic and the fantastic, the apocalyptic and the hopeful, figure, among other things, both the estate of the fictioner in general and the particular endeavors and aspirations of this one, at least, who can wish nothing better than to spin like that vizier's excellent daughter, through what nights remain to him, tales within tales within tales, full-stored with "description and discourse and rare traits and anecdotes and moral instances and reminiscences. . . proverbs and parables, chronicles and pleasantries, quips and jests, stories and. . . dialogues and histories and elegies and other verses. . ." until he and his scribblings are fetched low by the Destroyer of Delights.

- -
os chineses são fantásticos, diria eu, mas nem faço ideia se são chineses. dadas as ideias em cima da mesa, não deixa de ser curioso o modo de as obter. a noção de realismo depois de espancada até à morte é interessante [yaya acorda], gostamos tanto de jogos e de dizer Après moi, le déluge, como se o sol ainda girasse em torno da terra. o prémio: novelas de supermercado até porque a educação das massas é de difícil digestão e a liberdade de expressão ainda mais.

Billy the Kid

Morrison - Faulkner

"William Faulkner reprised: isolation in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon'"
Lorie Watkins Fulton
daqui, onde se pode ler todo o artigo. e também neste livro.


A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF ALMOST ANY AUTHOR IN CONJUNCTION WITH modernist giant William Faulkner risks treating Faulkner's work as a master text. This potential for privilege perhaps accounts for Toni Morrison's sensitivity to such comparisons early in her writing career. One can practically hear the irritation in her voice when she stated in a 1983 interview with Nellie McKay, "I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense" (152). Morrison has elsewhere said, "I'm not sure that he [Faulkner] had any effect on my work" and "I don't really find strong connections between my work and Faulkner's" ("Faulkner and Women" 296-97). However, Morrison has also expressed praise and admiration for Faulkner's work, particularly for his unique style. (1) She once described teaching a class in which she traced for her students the way that Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! forces readers "to hunt for a drop of black blood [by trying to ascertain Charles Bon's lineage] that means everything and nothing." Morrison elaborated, "No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don't care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don't personally care, but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this" ("Art of Fiction" 101). She developed that fascination early on; as she told the audience at the 1985 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, "in 1956 I spent a great deal of time thinking about Mr. Faulkner because he was the subject of a thesis that I wrote at Cornell." Morrison added, "there was for me not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect" ("Faulkner and Women" 295-96).

Critics have already identified several facets of Morrison's Faulknerian influence. Typical comparisons point out structural similarities such as syntax and cadence, and thematic similarities centering in historical concerns and social codes. Two pairings repeatedly emerge as scholars generally read Beloved with Absalom, Absalom! and Song of Solomon with Go Down, Moses. (2) However, Morrison's thesis, "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated," also provides the basis for drawing thematic comparisons between Quentin Compson's story in the two Faulkner novels that it considers, Absalom, Absalom / and The Sound and the Fury, and Morrison's own bildungsroman, Song of Solomon. (3) Only Alessandra Vendrame has made a concerted effort to connect Morrison's interpretation of Faulkner in the thesis to her own body of work and I would argue that doing so affords valuable insight into her fiction, and into Faulkner's as well. (4) Morrison begins her thesis by defining "alienation," which she seems to use interchangeably with "isolation," as the predominant literary theme of the twentieth century ("Treatment" 1). After establishing this working definition, she analyzes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the Faulkner novels in light of their differing approaches to isolation. Essentially, Morrison determines that Woolf's characters can only become self-aware and honest with themselves in isolation, and that Faulkner's characters can never attain this sort of self-knowledge when isolated (2-3). That her thesis privileges Faulkner's insistence on the need for communal connection becomes apparent when she reads Faulkner's stance as the "antithesis" to Woolf's position, rather than vice-versa (4). Her chapter on Faulkner also seems more fully developed than the one on Woolf, and, after all, Morrison's later writings reveal where her sympathies lie. In her thesis introduction she writes, "Alienation is not Faulkner's answer" to the problems of modernity (3). Nor is it Morrison's.

- - -

John Leonard

"That's luck. These are special books. About them, a reviewer tends to feel touch and possessive."
sobre Song of Solomon e outros que tais. (John Leonard)

na Trama, o Oeste. a minha novidade: Gary Snyder. [eu é que não sei se ainda cá vou estar]
para além de tudo gostaria de deixar expressa a minha desafectação e desafeição profunda por maiores de quarenta usando álcool ou ansiolíticos ou semelhantes para qualquer função nas suas vidas. que além do mais causam tristeza de quem está no cimo da paisagem a ver as suas terras em baixo, de cima para baixo. as caras gosto delas em frente à minha.

e essa esperança seca do amor.

written in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point, Margared Atwood sobre Beloved. aqui a comparação que procurava.

e não se mistura tudo assim por ordem roughly cronológica. ou roughly o que sucede, umas coisas no topo de outras e cruzando-se.



neste link.

se fosse dar nome à imagem, outra experiência, diria instável, queda, torre de londres. pedaço despedaço (lame). tentativa instável. aqui passa-se alguma coisa, nem que seja o fim.

"Black Matters"

em Playing in the Dark (1992)
Toni Morrison


I am moved by fancies, that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
T. S. Eliot, "Preludes, IV"

These chapters put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature into what I hope will be a wider landscape. I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World – without the mandate for conquest. I intend to outline an attractive, fruitful, and provocative critical project, unencumbered by dreams of subversion or rallying gestures at fortress walls.

I would like it to be clear at the outset that I do not bring to these matters solely or even principally the tools of a literary critic. As a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the ways all writers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are wrenched with pity; the way Dostoevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner's Benjy, James's Maisie, Flaubert's Emma, Melville's Pip, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – each of us can extend the list.

I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from – and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer's imagination. My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work,
becoming.

My project rises from delight, not disappointment. It rises from what I know about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language, and the ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts of debates blanketed in their text. And rises from my certainty that writers always know, at some level, that they do this.

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as "knowledge." This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence – which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture – has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature. Moreover, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular "Americanness" that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, [meu sublinhado] those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. This agreement is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country's literature. The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.

These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature – individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell – are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. It has occurred to me that the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and unsettling population. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence – one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.

My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term "Africanism" not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term "Africanism," nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom. The United States, of course, is not unique in the construction of Africanism. South America, England, France, Germany, Spain – the cultures of all these countries have participated in and contributed to some aspect of an "invented Africa." None has been able to persuade itself for long that criteria and knowledge could emerge outside the categories of domination. Among Europeans and the Europeanized, this shared process of exclusion – of assigning designation and value – has led to the popular and academic notion that racism is a "natural," if irritating, phenomenon. The literature of almost all these countries, however, is now subject to sustained critiques of its racialized discourse. The United States is a curious exception, even though it stands out as being the oldest democracy in which a black population accompanied (if one can use that word) and in many cases preceded the white settlers. Here in that nexus, with its particular formulations, and in the absence of real knowledge or open-minded inquiry about Africans and African-Americans, under the pressures of ideological and imperialistic rationales for subjugation, an American brand of Africanism emerged: strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego-reinforcing, and pervasive. For excellent reasons of state –because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country – the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony.

These remarks should not be interpreted as simply an effort to move the gaze of African-American studies to a different site. I do not want to alter one hierarchy in order to institute another. It is true that I do not want to encourage those totalizing approaches to African-American scholarship which have no drive other than the exchange of dominations – dominant Eurocentric scholarship replaced by dominant Afrocentric scholarship. More interesting is what makes intellectual domination possible; how knowledge is transformed from invasion and conquest to revelation and choice; what ignites and informs the literary imagination, and what forces help establish the parameters of criticism.

Above all I am interested in how agendas in criticism have disguised themselves and, in so doing, impoverished the literature it studies. Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape. It is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view.

What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary "blackness," the nature – even the cause – of literary "whiteness." What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as "American"? If such an inquiry ever comes to maturity, it may provide access to a deeper reading of American literature – a reading not completely available now, not least, I suspect, because of the studied indifference of most literary criticism to these matters.

One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate. The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. It is just this concept of literary and scholarly moeurs (which functions smoothly in literary criticism, but neither makes nor receives credible claims in other disciplines) that has terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded American authors and blocked access to remarkable insights in their works.


These moeurs are delicate things, however, which must be given some thought before they are abandoned. Not observing such niceties can lead to startling displays of scholarly lapses in objectivity. In 1936 an American scholar investigating the use of Negro so-called dialect in the works of Edgar Allan Poe (a short article clearly proud of its racial equanimity) opens this way: "Despite the fact that he grew up largely in the south and spent some of his most fruitful years in Richmond and Baltimore, Poe has little to say about the darky."'

Although I know this sentence represents the polite parlance of the day, that "darky" was understood to be a term more acceptable than "nigger," the grimace I made upon reading it was followed by an alarmed distrust of the scholar's abilities. If it seems unfair to reach back to the thirties for samples of the kind of lapse that can occur when certain manners of polite repression are waived, let me assure you equally egregious representations of the phenomenon are still common.

Another reason for this quite ornamental vacuum in literary discourse on the presence and influence of Africanist peoples in American criticism is the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim – of always defining it asymmetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes. A good deal of time and intelligence has been invested in the exposure of racism and the horrific results on its objects. There are constant, if erratic, liberalizing efforts to legislate these matters. There are also powerful and persuasive attempts to analyze the origin and fabrication of racism itself, contesting the assumption that it is an inevitable, permanent, and eternal part of all social landscapes. I do not wish to disparage these inquiries. It is precisely because of them that any progress at all has been accomplished in matters of racial discourse. But that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject. What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions. The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.

Historians have approached these areas, as have social scientists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and some students of comparative literature. Literary scholars have begun to pose these questions of various national literatures. Urgently needed is the same kind of attention paid to the literature of the western country that has one of the most resilient Africanist populations in the world – a population that has always had a curiously intimate and unhingingly separate existence within the dominant one. When matters of race are located and called attention to in American literature, critical response has tended to be on the order of a humanistic nostrum – or a dismissal mandated by the label "political." Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery. A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only "universal" but also "race-free" risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist.

I am vulnerable to the inference here that my inquiry has vested interests; that because I am an African-American and a writer I stand to benefit in ways not limited to intellectual fulfillment from this line of questioning. I will have to risk the accusation because the point is too important: for both black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting, and definitive.

Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. What is fascinating, however, is to observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy – an informing, stabilizing, and disturbing element – in the literature they do study. It is interesting, not surprising, that the arbiters of critical power in American literature seem to take pleasure in, indeed relish, their ignorance of African-American texts. What is surprising is that their refusal to read black texts – a refusal that makes no disturbance in their intellectual life – repeats itself when they reread the traditional, established works of literature worthy of their attention.

It is possible, for example, to read Henry James scholarship exhaustively and never arrive at a nodding mention, much less a satisfactory treatment, of the black woman who lubricates the turn of the plot and becomes the agency of moral choice and meaning in What Maisie Knew. Never are we invited to a reading of "The Beast in the Jungle" in which that figuration is followed to what seems to me its logical conclusion. It is hard to think of any aspect of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives that has not been covered, except the exploratory and explanatory uses to which she puts the black woman who holds center stage in that work. The urgency and anxiety in Willa Cather's rendering of black characters are liable to be missed entirely; no mention is made of the problem that race causes in the technique and the credibility of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. These critics see no excitement or meaning in the tropes of darkness, sexuality, and desire in Ernest Hemingway or in his cast of black men. They see no connection between God's grace and Africanist "othering" in Flannery O'Connor. With few exceptions, Faulkner criticism collapses the major themes of that writer into discursive "mythologies" and treats the later works – whose focus is race and class – as minor, superficial, marked by decline.

An instructive parallel to this willed scholarly indifference is the centuries-long, hysterical blindness to feminist discourse and the way in which women and women's issues were read (or unread). Blatant sexist readings are on the decline, and where they still exist they have little effect because of the successful appropriation by women of their own discourse. [meu sublinhado]

National literatures, like writers, get along the best way they can, and with what they can. Yet they do seem to end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind. For the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man. If I am disenchanted by the indifference of literary criticism toward examining the range of that concern, I do have a lasting resort: the writers themselves.

Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. The languages they use and the social and historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and direct revelations of that power and its limitations. So it is to them, the creators of American literature, that I look for clarification about the invention and effect of Africanism in the United States.

My early assumptions as a reader were that black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American writers. Other than as objects of an occasional bout of jungle fever, other than to provide local color or to lend some touch of verisimilitude or to supply a needed moral gesture, humor, or bit of pathos, blacks made no appearance at all. This was a reflection, I thought, of the marginal impact that blacks had on the lives of the characters in the work as well as the creative imagination of the author. To imagine or write otherwise, to situate black people throughout the pages and scenes of a book like some government quota, would be ludicrous and dishonest.

But then I stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer. Living in a racially articulated and predicated world, I could not be alone in reacting to this aspect of the American cultural and historical condition. I began to see how the literature I revered, the literature I loathed, behaved in its encounter with racial ideology. American literature could not help being shaped by that encounter. Yes, I wanted to identify those moments when American literature was complicit in the fabrication of racism, but equally important, I still wanted to see when literature exploded and undermined it. Still, those were minor concerns. Much more important was to contemplate how Africanist personae, narrative, and idiom moved and enriched the text in self-conscious ways, to consider what the engagement meant for the work of the writer's imagination.

How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the "work." As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing "happens": Africans and their descendants were not in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative – displays of the agile writer's technical expertise. I assumed that since the author was not black, the appearance of Africanist characters or narrative or idiom in a work could never be about anything other than the "normal," unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black people – no more than Uncle Tom's Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.

It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl – the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface – and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the large world. In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation. What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence. I have made much here of a kind of willful critical blindness – a blindness that, if it had not existed, could have made these insights part of our routine literary heritage. Habit, manners, and political agenda have contributed to this refusal of critical insight. A case in point is Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a text that has been virtually jettisoned from the body of American literature by critical consensus. References to this novel in much Cather scholarship are apologetic, dismissive, even cutting in their brief documentation of its flaws- of which there are a sufficient number. What remains less acknowledged is the source of its flaws and the conceptual problems that the book both poses and represents. Simply to assert the failure of Cather's gifts, the exhaustion of her perception, the narrowing of her canvas, evades the obligation to look carefully at what might have caused the book to fail – if "failure" is an intelligent term to apply to any fiction. (It is as if the realms of fiction and reality were divided by a line that, when maintained, offers the possibility of winning but, when crossed, signals the inevitability of losing.)

I suspect that the "problem" of Sapphira and the Slave Girl is not that it has a weaker vision or is the work of a weaker mind. The problem is trying to come to terms critically and artistically with the novel's concerns: the power and license of a white slave mistress over her female slaves. How can that content be subsumed by some other meaning? How can the story of a white mistress be severed from . a consideration of race and the violence entailed in the story's premise? If Sapphira and the Slave Girl neither pleases nor engages us, it may be enlightening to discover why. It is as if this last book – this troublesome, quietly dismissed novel, very important to Cather – is not only about a fugitive but is itself a fugitive from its author's literary estate. It is also a book that describes and inscribes its narrative's own fugitive flight from itself. Our first hint of this flight appears in the title, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The girl referred to is named Nancy. To have called the book "Sapphira and Nancy" would have lured Cather into dangerous deep water. Such a title would have clarified and drawn attention immediately to what the novel obscures even as it makes a valiant effort at honest engagement: the sycophancy of white identity. The story, briefly, is this.

Sapphira Colbert, an invalid confined to her chair and dependent on slaves for the most intimate services, has persuaded herself that her husband is having or aching to have a liaison with Nancy, the pubescent daughter of her most devoted female slave. It is clear from the beginning that Mistress Colbert is in error: Nancy is pure to the point of vapidity; Master Colbert is a man of modest habits, ambition, and imagination. Sapphira's suspicions, fed by her feverish imagination and by her leisure to have them, grow and luxuriate unbearably. She forms a plan. She will invite a malleable lecherous nephew, Martin, to visit and let his nature run its course: Nancy will be seduced. The purpose of arranging the rape of her young servant is to reclaim, for purposes not made clear, the full attentions of her husband.

Interference with these plans comes from Sapphira's daughter, Rachel, estranged from her mother primarily for her abolitionist views but also, we are led to believe, because Sapphira does not tolerate opposition. It is Rachel who manages to effect Nancy's escape to the north and freedom, with the timid help of her father, Mr. Colbert. A reconciliation of all of the white characters takes place when the daughter loses one of her children to diphtheria and is blessed with the recuperation of the other. The reconciliation of the two key black characters is rendered in a postscript in which many years later Nancy returns to see her aged mother and recount her post-flight adult narrative to the author, a child witnessing the return and the happiness that is the novel's denouement. The novel was published in 1940, but has the shape and feel of a tale written or experienced much earlier.

This précis in no way does justice to the novel's complexities and its problems of execution. Both arise, I believe, not because Cather was failing in narrative power, but because of her struggle to address an almost completely buried subject: the interdependent working of power, race, and sexuality in a white woman's battle for coherence.

In some ways this novel is a classic fugitive slave narrative: a thrilling escape to freedom. But we learn almost nothing of the trials of the fugitive's journey because the emphasis is on Nancy's fugitive state within the house before her escape. And the real fugitive, the text asserts, is the slave mistress. Furthermore, the plot escapes the author's control and, as its own fugitive status becomes clear, is destined to point to the hopelessness of excising racial considerations from formulations of white identity.

Escape is the central focus of Nancy's existence on the Colbert farm. From the moment of her first appearance, she is forced to hide her emotions, her thoughts, and eventually her body from pursuers. Unable to please Sapphira, plagued by the jealousy of the darker-skinned slaves, she is also barred from help, instruction, or consolation from her own mother, Till. That condition could only prevail in a slave society where the mistress can count on (and an author can believe the reader does not object to) the complicity of a mother in the seduction and rape of her own daughter. Because Till's loyalty to and responsibility for her mistress is so primary, it never occurs and need not occur to Sapphira that Till might be hurt or alarmed by the violence planned for her only child. That assumption is based on another – that slave women are not mothers; they are "natally dead," with no obligations to their offspring or their own parents.

This breach startles the contemporary reader and renders Till an unbelievable and unsympathetic character. It is a problem that Cather herself seems hard put to address. She both acknowledges and banishes this wholly unanalyzed mother-daughter relationship by inserting a furtive exchange between Till and Rachel in chapter 10:

. . . Till asked in a low, cautious murmur: "You ain't heard nothin', Miss Rachel?" "Not yet. When I do hear, I'll let you know. I saw her into good hands, Till. I don't doubt she's in Canada by this time, amongst English people."
"Thank you, mam, Miss Rachel. I can't say no more. I don't want them niggers to see me cryin'. If she's up there with the English folks, she'll have some chance."'

The passage seems to come out of nowhere because there has been nothing in a hundred or so pages to prepare us for such maternal concern. "You ain't heard nothin'?" Till asks of Rachel. Just that — those four words — meaning: Is Nancy all right? Did she arrive safely? Is she alive? Is anybody after her? All of these questions lie in the one she does manage to ask. Surrounding this dialogue is the silence of four hundred years. It leaps out of the novel's void and out of the void of historical discourse on slave parent—child relationships and pain. The contemporary reader is relieved when Till finally finds the language and occasion to make this inquiry about the fate of her daughter. But nothing more is made of it. And the reader is asked to believe that the silence surrounding the inquiry as well as its delay are due to Till's greater concern about her status among dark-skinned "field" niggers. Clearly Cather was driven to create the exchange not to rehabilitate Till in our readerly eyes but because at some point the silence became an unbearable violence, even in a work full of violence and evasion. Consider the pressures exerted by the subject: the need to portray the faithful slave; the compelling attraction of exploring the possibilities of one woman's absolute power over the body of another woman; confrontation with an uncontested assumption of the sexual availability of black females; the need to make credible the bottomless devotion of the person on whom Sapphira was dependent. It is after all hers, this slave woman's body, in a way that her own invalid flesh is not. These fictional demands stretch to breaking all narrative coherence. It is no wonder that Nancy cannot think up her own escape and must be urged into taking the risk.

Nancy has to hide her interior life from hostile fellow slaves and her own mother. The absence of camaraderie between Nancy and the other slave women turns on the device of color fetish — the skin-color privilege that Nancy enjoys because she is lighter than the others and therefore enviable. The absence of mother love, always a troubling concern of Cather's, is connected to the assumption of a slave's natal isolation. These are bizarre and disturbing deformations of reality that normally lie mute in novels containing Africanist characters, but Cather does not repress them altogether. The character she creates is at once a fugitive within the household and a sign of the sterility of the fiction-making imagination when there is no available language to clarify or even name the source of unbelievability.

Interestingly, the other major cause of Nancy's constant state of flight is wholly credible: that she should be unarmed in the face of the nephew's sexual assault and that she alone is responsible for extracting herself from the crisis. We do not question her vulnerability. What becomes titillating in this wicked pursuit of innocence — what makes it something other than an American variant of Clarissa - is the racial component. The nephew is not even required to court or flatter Nancy. After an unsuccessful reach for her from the branches of a cherry tree, he can, and plans to, simply arrive wherever she is sleeping. And since Sapphira has ordered her to sleep in the hall on a pallet, Nancy is forced to sneak away in the dark to quarters where she may be, but is not certain to be, safe. Other than Rachel, the pro-abolitionist, Nancy has access to no one to whom she can complain, explain, object, or from whom she can seek protection. We must accept her total lack of initiative, for there are no exits. She has no recourse — except in miserable looks that arouse Rachel's curiosity.

Nor is there any law, if the nephew succeeds in the rape, to entertain her complaint. If she becomes pregnant as a result of the violence, the issue is a boon to the economy of the estate, not an injury to it. There is no father or, in this case, "stepfather" to voice a protest on Nancy's behalf, since honor was the first thing stripped from the man. He is a "capon," we are told, given to Till so that she will have no more children and can give her full attention and energy to Mistress Sapphira.

Rendered voiceless, a cipher, a perfect victim, Nancy runs the risk of losing the reader's interest. In a curious way, Sapphira's plotting, like Cather's plot, is without reference to the characters and exists solely for the ego-gratification of the slave mistress. This becomes obvious when we consider what would have been the consequences of a successful rape. Given the novel's own terms, there can be no grounds for Sapphira's thinking that Nancy can be "ruined" in the conventional sense. There is no question of marriage to Martin, to Colbert, to anybody. Then, too, why would such an assault move her slave girl outside her husband's interest? The probability is that it would secure it. If Mr Colbert is tempted by Nancy the chaste, is there anything in slavocracy to make him disdain Nancy the unchaste?

Such a breakdown in the logic and machinery of plot construction implies the powerful impact race has on narrative — and on narrative strategy. Nancy is not only the victim of Sapphira's evil, whimsical scheming. She becomes the unconsulted, appropriated ground of Cather's inquiry into what is of paramount importance to the author: the reckless, unabated power of a white woman gathering identity unto herself from the wholly available and serviceable lives of Africanist others. This seems to me to provide the coordinates of an immensely important moral debate.

This novel is not a story of a mean, vindictive mistress; it is the story of a desperate one. It concerns a troubled, disappointed woman confined to the prison of her defeated flesh, whose social pedestal rests on the sturdy spine of racial degradation; whose privileged gender has nothing that elevates it except color, and whose moral posture collapses without a whimper before the greater necessity of self-esteem, even though the source of that esteem is a delusion. For Sapphira too is a fugitive in this novel, committed to escape: from the possibility of developing her own adult personality and her own sensibilities, from her femaleness; from motherhood; from the community of women; from her body.

She escapes the necessity of inhabiting her own body by dwelling on the young, healthy, and sexually appetizing Nancy. She has transferred its care into the hands of others. In this way she escapes her illness, decay, confinement, anonymity, and physical powerlessness. In other words, she has the leisure and the instruments to construct a self; but the self she constructs must be – is conceivable only as – white. The surrogate black bodies become her hands and feet, her fantasies of sexual intimacy with her husband and not inconsiderably, her sole source of love.
If the Africanist characters and their condition are removed from the text of Sapphira and the Slave Girl we will not have a Miss Havisham immured or in flames, We have nothing: no process of deranged self-construction that can take for granted acquiescence in so awful an enterprise; no drama of limitless power. Sapphira can hide far more successfully than Nancy. She can, and does, remain outside the normal requirements of adult womanhood because of the infantilized Africanist population at her disposal.

The final fugitive in Cather's novel is the novel itself. The plot's own plotting to free the endangered slave girl (of no apparent interest, as we have seen, to the girl's mother or her slave associates) is designed for quite other purposes. It functions as a means for the author to meditate on the moral equivalence of free white women and enslaved black women. The fact that these equations are designed as mother–daughter pairings and relationships leads to the inescapable conclusion that Cather was dreaming and redreaming her problematic relationship with her own mother.

The imaginative strategy is a difficult one at best, an impossible one in the event – so impossible that Cather permits the novel to escape from the pages of fiction into nonfiction. For narrative credibility she substitutes her own determination to force the equation. It is an equation that must take place outside the narrative.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl turns at the end into a kind of memoir, the author's recollection of herself as a child witnessing the return, the reconciliation, and an imposed "all rightness" in untenable, outrageous circumstances. The silenced, acquiescent Africanist characters in the narrative are not less muzzled in the epilogue. The reunion – the drama of it, like its narrative function – is no more the slave characters' than their slave lives have been. The reunion is literally stage-managed for the author, now become a child. Till agrees to wait until little Willa is at the doorway before she permits herself the first sight she has had of her daughter in twenty-five years.

Only with Africanist characters is such a project thinkable: delayed gratification for the pleasure of a (white) child. When the embrace is over, Willa the white child accompanies the black mother and daughter into their narrative, listening to the dialogue but intervening in it at every turn. The shape and detail and substance of their lives are hers, not theirs. Just as Sapphira has employed these surrogate, serviceable black bodies for her own purposes of power without risk so the author employs them in behalf of her own desire for a safe participation in loss, in love, in chaos, in justice.

But things go awry. As often happens, characters make claims, impose demands of imaginative accountability over and above the author's will to contain them. Just as Rachel's intervention foils Sapphira's plot, so Cather's urgent need to know and understand this Africanist mother and daughter requires her to give them center stage. The child Cather listens to Till's stories, and the slave, silenced in the narrative, has the final words of the epilogue.

Yet even, or especially, here where the novel ends Cather feels obliged to gesture
compassionately toward slavery. Through Till's agency the elevating benevolence of the institution is invoked. Serviceable to the last, this Africanist presence is permitted speech only to reinforce the slaveholders' ideology, in spite of the fact that it subverts the entire premise of the novel. Till's voluntary genuflection is as ecstatic as it is suspicious.

In returning to her childhood, at the end of her writing career, Cather returns
to a very personal, indeed private experience. In her last novel she works out and toward the meaning of female betrayal as it faces the void of racism. She may not have arrived safely, like Nancy, but to her credit she did undertake the dangerous journey.


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Notes
1 Killis Campbell, "Poe's Treatment of the Negro and of the Negro Dialect," Studies in
English 16 (1936), p. 106.
2 Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), p. 49.