Wassily Kandinsky

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O U L I P O
O U L I P O
Wassily Kandinsky
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The true literature machine will be one that
itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a
reaction against its preceding production of
order a machine that will produce avant-garde
work to free its circuits when they are choked by
too long a production of classicism.
Italo Calvino
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The struggle of Literature is in fact a struggle
to escape the confines of Literature.
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By analogy Language is to the writer what paint
is to the painter Both share a common history
a long, long story about the power of mimesis
the power of the medium to RE-present the world.
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The goal of the artist mimesis of nature
enlightenment through embodied/landscaped ideas
ideas--us. Narrative--represented through
realistic forms enhanced by vanishing point
perspective
The mark of the master artist is craft/technique
and the employment of craft toward moral,
humanistic ideals. The arts seek epiphany in
content and rational, scientific correctness in
form
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In the first half of the 18th century,
photography, not painterly realism, is suddenly
the apotheosis of the mimetic impulse.
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Though art has long been cumulative and, in this
sense, self-reflective, as the turn of the
century approaches, artists begin to create
ruptures with the past that also upset cultural
values, tastes, assumptions.
Manet dejeuner sur lherbe, 1863
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In Manet, we already see the art leaving the
canvas, aware of its medium, aware of its
situation (in the gallery) and somewhat tired of
tradition.
Manet, Olympia 1863
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Cezanne was dissatisfied with the empty formalism
of impressionism. If painting could leave behind
the search for traditional mimesis, and it could
leave behind its traditional aristocratic
subjects, then why should it not enter life
itself? Present life itself in paint?
Modernist artists still struggling to find the
proper subject matter and themes
Revolutions of subject parallel revolutions of
form.
Cezanne
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Picasso 1907
Variations on abstraction initiate the final
split from the mimetic history of painting. With
both form and content overthrown, the painting is
paint first, then composition, and perhaps
nothing else.
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Kandinsky, Composition V
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Kandinsky Contrasting Sounds 1924
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Pollock Moon-Woman
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Pollock creates yet another kind of break in the
continuity of artistic practice his actual
methods of painting utterly transform the craft.
Not to mention that he was never skilled at
representation. What makes an artist good? Worthy
of attention? Can artists invent their own
methods to master? What should artists learn?
Pollock Number 8 1949
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Andy Warhol
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Ad Reinhardt, late 50s
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The death of art
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The atomic law of clinamen, according to
Lucretius...From De rerum natura, as quoted in
Imagining Language Basic bodies take a certain
structure, And have defined positions, and
exchange Their blows in certain ways. The same
bodies, With only a slight change in their
structure, Are capable of forming wood or fire.
Like letters in the words for these same things,
Ignus and lignum with slight transpositions, The
y can be nominated flames, or beams Atoms,
then, are to bodies what letters are to words
heterogeneous, deviant, and combinatory.
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The nineteenth century, from Hegel to Darwin, saw
the triumph of historical continuity and
biological continuity as they healed all the
fractures of dialectical antitheses and genetic
mutations.
Postmodernism is the locus of a crisis
language (Realism has become a State Fiction, a
part of the machinery, of the political state.
It is through the machinery of realism that the
state explains to its citizens the relationship
between themselves and nature, economics,
politics, and their own sexuality
postmodernismopposes any totalizing fiction of
life, that which, in Calvinos words, seeks to
confirm and consecrate the established order of
things.) - Curtis White
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(thanks to World Games)REALISM Presumes A
positively determinable world external to the
work of fiction and which its the fundamental
responsibility of fiction to represent That the
world is a complete, integrated system governed
by a coherent scheme of rules (natural
laws) Mimesis is the right procedure,
therefore, for fiction, being the material
description of an empirically verifiable world
That fiction should pursue a resemblance to
facts and the presentation of the probable,
according to our experience and our normative
procedures of history and science. That because
subjectivity is the greatest barrier to our
perception of truth, the teller of a fiction
should appear and behave as objectively as
possible.
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. . . the realist fiction should generate a
complete and unbroken illusion of a world that we
can be in and should, in the end, present a
truth that may be unambiguously
paraphrased. All of these are essential to the
presumed didactic function of literature. These,
generally, are assumptions, values of the same
order as the rules referred to in the OULIPO
packet, that is, unconscious constraints. The
results of these rules, these values that seem
utterly natural and unassailable, are many, for
an unconscious rule cannot easily be broken, and
gives rise to further rules, explicit values and
assertions about the function and material of
literature. Under realism, meaning exists in
the world its expression in language is
coincidental with the authors ability to master
certain techniques. Anti-realism, understandably,
claims the opposite.
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READERLY QUESTIONS Why do we read? What do we
expect? What are we looking for? How do we read?
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Defining GENRE
reduction
Expectation/anticipation
pleasure
Symbols/meaning
words
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Yesterday on Route Seven A car Traveling at sixty
miles per hour rammed a sycamore Its four
occupants were Killed.
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Realism, and even modernism in its traditional
mode had as its assumptions linearity,
rationality, consciousness, cause and effect,
naïve illusionism, transparent language, innocent
anecdote, and middle class moral values But
many of these factors held within them the seeds
of the end of modernism, its exhaustion. For
instance,
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if writers were interested in and emphasized in
their work an examination of the nature of
consciousness, and, following Freud, the
relationship between the conscious and
unconscious, the logic of literature, which is
also the logic of escaping literature and
language, also the law of perfecting and
distorting and merging genres The logic f
literature leads them to... ...not only exhaust
the existing narrative techniques for
representing thought, but to invent, for instance
stream of consciousness, and then work to exhaust
and transform this technique
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These transitions are limit experiences for
writers they have exhausted something, or they
feel that something is exhausted. As John Barth
claims of Borges (in reference particularly to
Pierre Menard), His artistic victoryis that he
confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it
against itself to accomplish new ...work At a
limit, it seems possible to distinguish between
naïve novels and deliberate or meta novels
novels that exhibit and respond to the limits of
the existing conventions.
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"The composition of vast books is a laborious and
impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five
hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect
oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A
better course of procedure is to pretend that
these books already exist, and then to offer a
resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more
inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write
notes upon imaginary books. --Borges
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The Death of the Author
To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on
that text, to furnish it with a final signified,
to close the writing ... However by refusing
to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the
text (and the world as text), liberates what may
be called an anti-theological activity, an
activity that is truly revolutionary since to
refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse
God and his hypostases--reason, science, law.
Roland Barthes
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The goal of literature, according to Barthes,
should be "to make the reader no longer a
consumer, but a producer of the text.
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The decisive moment of literary life will be that
of reading.
calvino
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Perhaps the most striking feature of modern
literature is the appearance of a new monolithic,
comprehensive mode of writing, in which the
distinctions among genres, which have been
completely abandoned, give way to what are
admittedly books, but books for which, we might
say, no method of reading has yet been worked
out. Philippe Sollers
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The authors experienced context
The Imagined Author
Readers context
Readers memory
Reader Reading
The TEXT
The Author
The Narrator
The Authors Historical and Literary Context
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Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues
the possibilities implicit in its own material,
independent of the personality of the poet, but
it is a game that at a certain point is invested
with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not
patent on the linguistic plane on which we were
working but has slipped in from another level,
activating something that on that second level is
of great concern to the author or his society.
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Syllables Sounds Words Phrases Sentences Descripti
on Dialogue Images Motifs Symbols Allusions
Inertextuality Metaphor Allegory Tension Conflict
Narrative/or Pattern Structure Plot Character Them
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Creating a form, a literary object that readers
can perform, a work that, in the right place on
the hypothetical bookshelf, causes sparks.
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The definition of mastery the elimination of
genius. W h a t i s q u a l i t y ? W h a t
i s v a l i d w or k ? These questions feel
very different when we are in the process of
writing. And writing is not really the process of
seeking validity. While the metaphor of the
hypothetical bookshelf may allow you to put your
work in context and to perceive your reader as a
literary being as much as the author is a being
made only of words on the page, its poor
consolation in the writing process.
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We still want to know what good writing is. But
lets go back briefly one step why should
writing be good? Good, after all, is
subjective. My own rationalization for why
writing should be good includes a trust in the
medium of language and even in some of the
existing conventions of language to help us to
write at and explore the limits of our knowledge,
our senses the limits, you might say, of our
condition. It must include, then, an
understanding of the conventions that make
literature what it is, an approach that is
essentially experimental, not because its wacky,
but because it proceeds by trial and error.
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To be good at writing also means that the very
act and process of writing, revising, crafting,
applying techniques, and so on is a process of
intellectual, emotional, and imaginative
exploration and growth. To be GOOD is to be
changing, to be becoming something elsewhy
wouldnt a writer strive for this transformation
if it is what he expects his reader to
achieve? And clearly, all of this reasoning does
not merely parallel writing to reading writing
is reading as a writer you are foremost a
reader. Reading what you have written is far more
challenging than getting it on the page. Good
writers are also good readers. They are aware of
how language works and how it affects them. They
are aware of their process of writing and how it
might work for others.
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Advice for writers comes in three forms 1 The
writing is compared with and judged by its
relationship to conventions How well does the
work achieve what it appears to be repeating from
other works? If it seems to be a mystery, does it
have the qualities of a good mystery as we know
from reading other things? Questions of this
type will point to the plot structure, the
quality and kind of character development, the
presence and appropriateness of themes
generally, such questions utilize the terms that
we are familiar with to check the writing for
what are commonly considered flaws or
possibilities, or, of course, successes. A flaw
can be a failed deviation from the norm, or it
can be a failed attempt at reproducing the norm.
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2 The writing is described in terms of the
readers experience of it. The readers
experience cannot be said to have any absolute
perspective on the work except in so far as it
can be carefully discussed between reader and
writer. In the first kind of advice, reader and
writer have an external text in common (the
good mystery). But when the readers experience
is at the fore, the writer and reader can only
share the writers work. The writer can see their
work but dimly the reader instinctively sees it
as flawed and partial. Here, the challenge is the
readers to accurately sense and describe their
experience of reading. This approach produces
fewer questions and more descriptions on the part
of the reader. The implicit question, of course,
is Did you mean this? Its up to the author
to pose more specific questions, to see if his
technique has been effective (or even noticed),
if his themes are emerging clearly, and so on
formulating these questions requires that the
writer know what he intends or where there might
be problems. Its a bit unfair to ask your
reader did it make sense? Likewise, its
unfair to pretend that whatever the reader gets
is what you intended, or represents the polysemic
nature of your work. A writer should be able
toor willing to try toanswer all of the
readers questions.
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3 This last one is the most difficult because it
can be mistaken for an invitation to counsel the
writer. There is no doubt that writing can tell
us a lot about someone. But what it can tell us
is no more accurate than what the shape of ones
skull tells us. But this last form of advice
understands the journey that every writer is
taking in their work, the process of discovery,
change, and introspection. It is, then, the
advice that encourages and guides this process,
but it must be done through the writing on the
page, not confused with psychological and
emotional counseling, and it must be distinct
from the readers experience and issues of
criteria. The best question to ask the writer,
and sometimes the only one, in this mode is Why
are you doing this? The answer, of course,
should not be, because I have to.
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Unquenchable in all of this, and in the spirit of
The Turbulent Mirror, it is difficult to desire
anything but wholeness, even in chaos, even
though it be partial wholeness, a broken whole...
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The workshop method learning to write Cormac
McCarthy Teaching writing is a scam. Kay
Boyle All creative writing programs ought to be
abolished by law.
Tom GrimesLets leave behind, for the moment,
the historical vicissitudes of literary theory
and return to the original question. Can
creativity be learned, let alone taught? Eve
Shelnutt I have never been interested in the
question that has plagued MFA programs since
their inception, namely can creative writing be
taught?
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Some of your ducks and shoot them now.
You are the author. You are not the
narrator. Even if the narrator is you, you are
not the narrator. Narrators can have a variety of
relationships to the story they relate
First Person Central First Person
Peripheral Third Person Limited Third Person
Shifting Omniscient Objective or Effaced Stream
of Consciousness Meta-author
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The beginning of every short story is ridiculous
at first. There seems to be no hope that this
newborn thing, still incomplete and tender in
every joint, will be able to keep alive in the
complicated organization of the world, which,
like every complicated organization, strives to
close itself off. However, one should not forget
that the story, if it has any justification to
exist, bears its complete organization within
itself even before it has been fully formed for
this reason despair over the beginning of a story
is unwarranted in a like case parents should
have to despair of their suckling infant, for
they had no intention of bringing this pathetic
and ridiculous being into the world. -Franz
Kafka.
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There are some kinds of writing that you have to
do very fast, like riding a bicycle on a
tightrope. -William Faulkner
All my life Ive been frightened at the moment I
sit down to write. -Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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Who reads and why? How are writers educated and
trained? How do writers and readers gain access
to each other, and what specifically constitutes
that access (publishers, etc.)? How do we define
and judge mastery? What differences exist
between distinct audiences or circumstances of
consumption for instance, how do the works read
by college students (students of literature)
differ from works discussed in the popular media,
from works that sell the most? What differences
exist between works read by students of different
disciplines, in different nations, and so on? How
are the boundaries of literature defined,
assailed, and defended?
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Thanks to Curtis White The monstrousness of
postmodernisms literary possibilities is the
result, on the one hand, of the debunking or
deconstructing of certain central conventions of
nineteenth-century literary realism, especially
the notions of mimesis and genre. Mimesis and
anti-mimesis, realism and experimentalism are
oppositions that exist only through an exercise
of force, and which, therefore, tell us as much
about the politics of our own time as they do
about language and literature.
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David Hayman (Writers in the Wake of the
Wake) Authors, like other artists, are refusing
the superficial classical finish, the elitist
polish of certain masterpieces, to indulge in
postclassical exuberance, elaborately controlled
free invention. Thus, according to Ihab Hassan,
Finnegans Wake carries the tendencies of high
art and of popular culture to their outer limits,
there where all tendencies of mind may meet,
there where the epiphany and the dirty joke
become one. The parallels with other uneasy
ageswith the Hellenistic period, the later
Roman, the Baroque, the late Romantic movement in
Germany,and the fin de siecleare worth noting.
Perhaps we are in what Northrop Frye calls the
ironic period.
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You can look up irony in your dictionary of
literary terms, but one simple way of thinking of
what would constitute an ironic age is
distance. Another spatial metaphor is that the
ironic and the postmodern are sensibilities for
breadth, and they lack the depth of previous
movements. That depth is a continuity between
aspects of life and experience does your science
support your faith? Does your faith determine
your politics? Does your literature reflect your
science? Does your image of private self match
your public self? Does your concept of self
correspond to the communal and national self? If
all of these correspond, does your construction
of the world match that of your fellow citizens?
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Postmodernism and postmodern literature has
actively attacked depth, along with the
continuity and coherence that comes with it. The
result is an aesthetic of fragmentation,
unresolved tensions, absurdity, juxtaposition,
diversity of voices and styles, contortions of
time and space, characterless plotless
narratives Also Depth implies center
de-centered implies diversity/multiculturalism/at
the extreme, anarchy.
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As with painting, Literature has long been
cumulative, self-reflective, responsive to its
past and changing in fits and starts of
rebellion, shifting with the times, with culture,
with taste, with politics, with morals, with
technology To define Literature is not to say
what it IS, but to describe what it has been
How have we --and how do we now-- USE THE WORD
LITERATURE?
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If we begin with a Literature that re-presented
reality in the same manner as painters, then we
can find similar checkpoints along the way that
have redefined what we know now to be
Literature. Literature, as we will talk about
it, then, begins with the novel. To go further
back, we would be quickly be grappling with the
enormously interesting transition from an oral
tradition to a print culture. We wont go
there. The novel represents a serious investment
in what otherwise had been casual entertainment,
the ephemeral realm of secular reading. What in
short form can be a distraction becomes radically
different when extended beyond a small gathering
of pages. What, one should ask, could be worth
that much time and effort? (not only to read, but
to print!)
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The novel is the flagship of a secular Literature
that eventually becomes a hallmark of the
educated and enlightened man. The form is
defined and mastered by those capable of wielding
long, subtle, and complex narratives, it divides
into genres based on responses to this length and
different sorts of content.Overwhelming, a
novels worth is assessed according to the
criteria for realist fiction and accompanying
assumptions and assertions. A parallel story to
the one told with art is not hard to find. Where
realistic painters were rattled by the feats of
photography, literature has been gently smacked
around by communication technology until the
final smackdown of film displaced it from its
place as the ultimate story-telling, world-making
medium. Film can accomplish all the complexity,
all the scope and subtlety of the novel all
literature has going for it is language itself.
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Literature changed over time in all the ways we
can imagine painting transforming right up until
its mid-life crisis, when it realized that it had
spent its life trying to accomplish something
that the youthful and sexy technology of
photography could do much better. Painting needed
a make-over! The drama of the last century LIT
shares with painting considering a division in
literature between form and content, it has
generally been the content that has evolved.
Technique and theory and criticism has been a
mastery of content, in a sense, through form (but
through form the same way way we see our wine
through a lovely crystal goblet). Everything
happens at once content overflows, and form
becomes unstable, questionable...
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Form, which allowed the innocence of depth,
suddenly appears suspect.An archetypal question
in literary studies now asks, quite despondently,
How can there be lyric poetry after Auschwitz?
(Theordor Adorno) The question is not simply
rhetorical. It implies a loss of faith, a loss of
trust in the way things are done, in our ability
to define beauty, goodness, civilization. It
attempts to be, couched in a discrete corner of
poetics, an ultimate question. How can there be
anything? After Auschwitz, after slavery, after
Hiroshima. What is there to write (to read) but
wreckage? All content, all depth, seems illusory
in the wake of these disasters. As if the axioms
of geometry were suddenly pulled out from under
us, writers felt an overwhelming need to escape
from Literature, some to destroy it, and they saw
a problem in its most basic forms, its actual
substance.
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The assumptions of realism were viewed by some,
as Curtis White views them, as mechanism of the
State. The literature of realism, reproduces
reality as it is, reinforces and consecrates it
as it is, maintains the dominant myths of our
reality, feeds them to us with a variety of
contents, which, no matter how revolutionary,
reproduced in the assumptions and values of
realism a dogma of submission Any defense of
this position has to begin with some assertions
about language and about narrative.
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First, that language is ontogenetic, and by this
function at least partially determines our
experiences of phenomena. By extension, language
continuously orients us in the world, describes
it and organizes it for us. Before we can
articulate a new thing, language is there to
translate it, in the moment, in memory, into
something old, normal, and complete. Narratives
play a large role in determining the use and
value of specific words. Narratives further more
organize complex and layered experiences, in a
sense, chunking language and chunking the world
so that greater portions of our experiences can
be effectively mediated and rendered meaningful (
or meaningless).
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Exhaustion Replenishment -John Barth
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To gratify critics who look for similarities
between things literary and things historical,
sociological, or economic, the machine could
correlate its own changes of style to the
variations in certain statistical indices of
production, or income, or military expenditure,
or the distribution of decision-making powers.