[Note: This is the text of a talk given at the 2002 Center for Undergraduate
Research Opportunities Symposium at the University of Georgia. Since some issues
were discussed in the Q & A session that were not covered in the talk itself,
I would like to add briefly that I plan to continue exploring the three-dimensional
possibilities for textual composition and analysis. Also, I am aware, now more
fully, of the problem of establishing a hierarchy between critic and creative
writer (see discussion of Kierkegaard). Still, I have decided to leave the document
unaltered; the speech itself is the fruit of mistakes.]
Should I begin with a gesture toward honesty? If one judges the success or failure of a project by the degree to which the results conform to the blueprints and plans, then my research, I fear, has been a disappointment. What I present to you today is hardly the fulfillment of the abstract, submitted several months back, printed in your guide to this symposium. What began as a research project has collapsed into an apologia, or perhaps better to say, has flowered into an apologia, or better still, has unfolded into an apologia, though one must distinguish between the two meanings of "unfolding," as Walter Benjamin did in his famous essay on Kafka. I don't use the word to mean the flattening of a sheet of paper into legibility, but rather as "a bud unfolds into a blossom," an organic opening, a process, a progress, a dialectic-to use a word that is part of the problem.
What problem? The problem of writing creatively, of trying to create art out of language, as an undergraduate English major, which, not a very exalted position in itself, can be seen as the concentrated embodiment of the subject in a super-textual environment. Who else lives in a super-textual environment? Everyone in this room. It's old news that the post-modern era is characterized by profusion, an incredible surplus, of information. One thinks of Frederic Jameson's model of the many television screens, each showing a different picture, and the impossibility of synthesizing all the data. Undergraduate English majors necessarily face paralyzing textual explosions, proliferations, overloads, and like most members of society, we're still amateurs-the professors, the professionals, have been playing the game for years. Suddenly, we are in the textual web and are expected to navigate our way through it, have feebly staked our GPAs and our academic aspirations on just this hope-that with a little reading and a little practice, we'll be able to pick our way over the dizzying lingual landscape. The world of language, though, is wider and deeper than we thought. A name, let's say Foucault, crops up, specter-like, in various readings, but maybe it's one more reference we can't track down. Strange terms begin to take on an uncanny air-I don't know whom this is, but haven't I seen the name before? Probably French One never knows when a new name, Foucault, or a new word, dialectic, will open a textual field so wide that one could spend a lifetime trying to cross it.
But I digress. And we've hardly started yet. I proposed this project with the official title, "In the Room: A Perfomative Text of Story, Poetics, and Criticism," and in spite of the gap between intended and final product, the title, as I hope to explain, is still appropriate. This is the story of the attempt to write stories, and the text of my speech will hopefully perform the inextricability of poetics and criticism.
First, then, an outline of intentions, of what I had believed possible. I would write a short story and then write two meta-narratives of that story: one about its being written, the poetics; and one about its being read, the criticism. With my three finished and fairly conventional texts, I would construct a new text on a new model-a three-dimensional room. Inspired in part by Johanna Drucker, a book artist who spoke at UGA last year as part of the Lanier Speaker Series, I wanted to find a way to move texts out of their linear temporality and into a spatial model. I wanted a form of the writing process that could be poked and prodded, one that could support and perform various systems of relationships. I had visions of tabs and indexes and color-coding, all used in unconventional ways. I wanted the meta-narratives physically both to support and to be supported by the story itself. I imagined rough drafts hidden in the basement. I plotted tangible hypertext. It still sounds like a good idea, but these were all the fruits of brain storming, before the story had even been written. Before I could illuminate all the latent discourses hidden there, I had to write it, didn't I?
So I did. Or I tried. And at that point, the artificiality of my intentions began to reveal itself. Writing a story is already, in my experience, a hyper-self-conscious exercise, a constant bowing to audience and to influence, punctuated by instants of hope-those stolen, furtive moments of feeling alone and contained in the fictional world. What is the fictional world? Part language, part narrative, neither completely separable nor reducible to the other. In the actual business of trying to write my story, which I titled "In the Room" so it might drop seamlessly into this project, I realized that the meta-narratives were already there, battering me over the head-remember, forget, remember, forget-remember the focus on the verbs, forget that Raymond Carver already wrote a story just like this, remember to put in a bit about the woman with the gold shoes you saw on the bus this morning, forget all about the style guides, remember to stay in voice, forget this narrative form is already obsolete thanks to the post-modern gymnastics of Beckett and-Aaah! The meta-narratives, the poetics and the criticism, are much closer to the surface than the story itself. They are the surface from which story must be dredged. Meta-narrative, then, may be the wrong term, maybe an early wrong turn in my project, for meta- means after, and poetics and criticism were the pressures, the textual currents and relations, that were shaping my discourse before it ever congealed into story. The short story I was trying to force out was really the after-narrative, the meta-narrative of the textual forces pressing in from all sides.
What had I wanted then? I had wanted to vivisect the writing process and watch its organs flash, its lungs wheeze, and its heart ping-ping-ping. I had planned a neat little research machine, but its engine drove me somewhere else, back into the belly of art, where it's very dark. I can only feel my way. The illusion that I can change my hats, shift easily and completely from literary scholar to creative writer, is exposed by unfoldings like this, where the hidden spirit of my project, its apologia impulse, emerges in each step I take deeper into the work, in spite of my designs and plans, in spite of my loud protests that this is academic, this is a research project. No, I can't keep it all straight; I must continually redraw the boundaries, separate the theory from the art, the analysis from the synthesis. Still, there is a certain energy gained by crossing the threshold of one textual genre into another, and I like to think borders are fertile, active places, teeming with the aliens from both sides. This apologia unfolds itself there.
Here is a quote from James Baldwin: "No one can possibly know what is about to happen. It is happening each time, for the first time, for the only time." I had to believe this to write my story. I have to believe this in order to produce any movement at all through the textual density of my environment, the literary and pop-culture atmospheric pressure of language. The writer has to believe, absurdly in the face of so many other texts, absurdly against the vast backdrop of literary history, in the firstness of this story, of this linguistic and narrative event.
I think of Kierkegaard's Knight of Infinite Resignation and Knight of Faith. In Kierkegaard's example, the knights love a princess, and that love becomes the absolute of their lives. The princess, unattainable, must be resigned by the knights and recognized in the infinite. The Knight of Infinite Resignation accepts his never attaining the princess, never having that which he most desires. He makes his spiritual home in the abstract. His brother is the philosopher who comes to the vastness of language and who pulls back from it, who recognizes its infinity, who reflects on it, but who is stopped from entering it fully. He hovers on the surface, what I before referred to as the meta-narratives, the poetics and criticism. His textual home is in the abstract.
The Knight of Faith, in Kierkegaard's fable, also resigns himself to never having the princess, but, in spite of this resignation, he believes, on the strength of the absurd, that he will in fact attain the impossible target. The writer must discover the same gait as the Knight of Faith, somehow leaping between an absolute humility in the face of the discourse network and a discursively creative authority, a belief that real action, real attainment of grace in language, perfect expression is possible. We need critics, our Knights of Infinite Resignation, to chart the surface of the language, but beyond them and more primally, we need the writers, who have faith in the possibilities of language, who give it new powers through their belief, who stretch it to reach new territories. The writers, of course, must also be fully aware of the discursive typology. They must have at least the knowledge of the critics or their plungings are naivete, just as the Knight of Faith must have already resigned himself infinitely for his belief to have any significance. The writer and the Knight of Faith turn the leap between infinite and finite, abstract and concrete, into a stride, a stride here impressed with words instead of footprints, the sentences themselves becoming the instructional diagram on how such a dance, such a graceful one, two, three, is possible.
So my Romantic idea-what moves poetic writing beyond other discourses-can be called the strength of the absurd. Or maybe the Romantic ideal itself, the springs of Xanadu, the individual genius, all that emotion recollected in tranquility, are ways of making the absurd leap possible and sustainable. After all, if one pulls back far enough from the scene, then language can look like a virus or an alien life form, indomitably reproducing itself through whatever means available. I do not know to what extent I am inscribing or inscribed, but these are questions I must leave at the door-leave for criticism and theory. I can only hope to arrive at them through art in the most roundabout, organic, mysterious way. I suppose my perspective can be most closely characterized as existential, my half-believing hope in the individual's power for a graceful audacity. I have to keep a bobbing point of light in view, that my writing, my creative work, should be produced. Somewhere between Romantic genius and host for the language virus there is a blank screen and a blinking cursor-remember, forget, remember, forget-demanding a choice of action.
There are a few things more uninteresting than a writer not interested in language, the writer without desire to move through as much of it as possible, to comment on it, to augment it, to analyze it, to synthesize it, to wallow in it, to scratch its surface, to expose its underbelly to the sun, to draw it in and force it out of the body, to be a wave in its substance. To be a disturbance that ripples through twenty-six elastic letters, to be a wave propagating through the substance of language-that is writing, that is creation. Those twenty-six letters spring back, disinterested, to their original formation, infinitely plastic, like the water falls to smoothness again when the breaker rushes on toward the shore.
Of course, our language is no laboratory wave pool. Any hope for perfect conditions, a language equally accommodating to all forms of story and discourse, fell with the Tower of Bable. But the myth is there; the possibility is there, in the infinitude of the twenty-six letters. They are clean, I think. They are innocent of propaganda and slander, oppression and ideology. One must be constantly aware of the political history of language, how it has been used, is always being used, how it has wrought real consequences in its wake. Words, phrases, tracts have been contaminated, but letters, I think, are still new, still pre-lapsarian. Fingers fluttering on the keyboard, I can hope to pass through the water, the language as the substance of my energy, and that absurd decision to act, to create, allowing me to join the frothing, foaming, choppy surface of the discourse network.
Allow me on last metaphor, one appropriate for my title, "In the Room." A textual room, then, a room dense and brimming with all the texts ever read or known or heard or experienced by one subject, and then the subject herself, the writer, in the room, completely immersed in texts, almost inseparable from them. What are the walls of the room? There are twenty-six walls, one for each letter, and there is no door; as Derrida famously asserted, "There is nothing outside the text." More texts enter the fray; one crams in movies, stuffs in novels by the armload, throws in recipes, comic books, warning labels, philosophical treatises. How to walk through it? It evokes Xeno's paradox. Xeno, an ancient Greek philosopher, postulated that movement was actually impossible because the moving subject always had to cover half the distance between her destination, and half that distance, and half that distance, ad infinitum. Thus, to take one step was to cross infinity. So it is in the textual room. To make on emotion through its density, to step through its multiplying series of discourses, is to do the impossible, to confront that which is larger than the capacity for comprehension. But motion goes on; writing and creation go on. The writer propagates an energy through language and something new results, a new disturbance, a narrative and lingual event never before seen in the room. The process, the unfolding, remains a paradox, but one in which I firmly and passionately believe.