“The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.”
--Julio Cortázar
Is meaning created through the interaction of man and text? It seems so. In many of his short stories, Borges implies the disturbing supposition that the meaning of literary works is entirely dependent on the varying historical and social contexts in which they are read. In other words, that literary meaning is constructed through mental processes irrevocably tied to location and period. Reading, then, is more central to a text's intellectual "life" than its writing and, consequently, a reader is more important to a text than its writer.
We can see how influential Borges’ ideas were on contemporary writers. For example, in Hopscotch, Cortazar invites the reader to participate in his innovative project by letting the reader choose in what order to read the chapters. In his own words, “For my part, I wonder whether someday I will ever succeed in making it felt that the true character and the only one that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation, transportation.”
If we are to have a high esteem for the reader, we have to invite her to the party. Not every sentence needs to be complete, not every plot needs a twist, nor does every flower need a color. Let the reader create alongside the text. Easy prose is akin to baby food. It is time to take the spoon out of the reader’s mouth.
According to Milan Kundera, "If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it. The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: 'Things are not as simple as you think.' That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off."
My novel as seen in the Author's Bookshelf of the current issue of Harvard Magazine. Be ready for The Book of I, coming this fall.
It’s possible that the fact that literature has been commercialized now in a way it never was before has had an influence. That is, the fact that people now talk about “bestsellers,” that fashion has an influence (something that didn’t use to happen). I remember that when I began to write, we never thought about the success or failure of a book. What’s called “success” now didn’t exist at that time. And what’s called “failure” was taken for granted. One wrote for oneself and, maybe, as Stevenson used to say, for a small group of friends. On the other hand, one now thinks of sales. I know there are writers who publicly announce they’ve had their fifth, sixth, or seventh edition released and that they’ve earned such and such an amount of money. All that would have appeared totally ridiculous when I was a young man; it would have appeared incredible. People would have thought that a writer who talks about what he earns on his books is implying: “I know what I write is bad but I do it for financial reasons or because I have to support my family.” So I view that attitude almost as a form of modesty. Or of plain foolishness.
--Jorge Luis Borges
"No, not a lament. Ecstasy instead. The sound between common notes. My voice unencumbered. This may be how I sound without sheet music, outside the confines of the pentagram. Those five lines with spaces in between, the iron grid, the field of known sonority, and time, eternal time maybe, but predetermined, fated and a little dead. Were this to be a lament, I would surrender to my moaning."
--The lesser violin
"The air matters in those bars, and the thought of my voice immersed in that rancid miasma of smoke, sweat, alcohol, and the cacophony of other instruments, frightens me. What if I reach the space between half notes? What if I sing like a Roma? Why do I fear the night when at dawn the air will eventually dissipate and strangulate all voices?"
--THE LESSER VIOLIN
The lesser violin.
"And here is what I, Artaud, think of thought:
INSPIRATION DOES EXIST.
There is a phosphorescent point where all reality is rediscovered, but changed, metamorphosed--and by what?--a point open for the magic usage of things. And I believe in mental meteors, in individual cosmogonies."
--Antonin Artaud
And when the rain comes down, my words are safe in my dry within. I flourish from inside my skull.
"Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas, I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulses, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, the rhythm moves into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and which turns out prose, literature, or what have you. First there is a confused situation, which can only be defined by words; I start out from this half-shadow and if what I mean (if what is meant) has sufficient strength, the swing begins at once, a rhythmic swaying that draws me to the surface, lights everything up, conjugates this confused material and the one who suffers it into a clear third somehow fateful level: sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, book. This swaying, this swing in which confused material goes about taking shape, is for me the only certainty of its necessity, because no sooner does it stop than I understand that I no longer have anything to say." --Julio Cortazar
"I hear a prelude, words I detest for their familiar ring, a chord so rich bathing my skin, and the rings of Saturn, the breath of a long horn, the resounding drum of skin tight, and the butterflies, and the caterpillars, and the pizzicato of fractured fingers, I hear a voice woman and a voice man, the chorus of molten flesh, imprisoned flesh, and the melody of a bite, teeth puncturing, and the long, long whistling sound of air between lies."
--The Lesser Violin
The word is out. THE BOOK OF I is a dark novel. Like the waters of a river deep, or the night behind the moon. I take solace in Kafka: “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
Everyday contains a moment when you think you will touch immortality. What follows next is the stuff of novels.
Artist Liselott Johnsson created this phenomenal image as a conceptual response to central themes in the book: “I am water,” and the ever-threatening “Whiteness.” Here they blend into each other seamlessly. The image of the “I” impersonates Teaston as he straddles the vastness of the sea and the whiteness above. He is immersed in both, but the bold blue color indicates he has the capacity to rise above them.
According to E.M. Forster, "characters are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible." In traditional literature those characters are usually human. In order to introduce inanimate objects as characters we will need to learn about their secret lives, that is, their psychology. Can a violin have a secret life? Can a violin be wicked? I think it can, given the right amount of magic. Stay tuned...
"Mornings like this remind me I sing for others. A prostitute? No, not a prostitute. That is not what I am. Even when they touch my open body, even when they rip through me, I still sing my individual harmonic frequencies. They follow the score of a dead master, but I follow my own veins. And I oscillate at will, and go places they detest, for my voice is hoarse, luminous, and sometimes unreal. Who plays whom?" -- The lesser violin
Following a request from my friend Audrey Camp, here are my answers to some prickly questions:
1. What am I working on?
I am working on being alive. And between one breath and the next, I am writing the story of a lesser violin. It goes something like this: “My condition is nothing other than a wooden box that vibrates when played. ‘Play me,’ I say. And when their hands do, my ribs expand and my chest bursts. I sing. Sometimes I cry. But without the scratch of Mongolian hair on my neural cords, and the poking of finger tips on my neck, my words spill out of the case and die in silence.” –The lesser violin.
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I write the books I have yet to read. In essence, I jump over the edge of tradition and throw my words up in the air hoping for the wind to take them places no one else has reached.
3. Why do I write what I do?
Because I am who I am. My writing comes from that white center inside my brain—the unconscious—oozing out of me every time I sit down to write.
4. How does my writing process work?
I write like a jaguar, to the neck, all at once.
I wrote and explored. Jumped over the edge of tradition. I learned not to be harmless.
"That is when he plays me hard, digging the Mongol hair, roughing my cords. I sing off tune for the very pleasure of his frustration. And I fill the air with a small grunt, or a squeal, a screech for sure. He sweats then, and turning his left eye long down my neck, he wishes to strangle me. I know he does."
(From THE LESSER VIOLIN)
"Listening to the words, listening to the songs, listening to the inherent vibrations in every syllable, I come to conceive the literary world as a musical creation where every effort to mesmerize with text, every attempt to excel in prose or verse, is nothing other than a venture into musical composition. And if I were to sing a vida, or if I were to write a sonnet, I would be doing one and the same. And if I were to write a novel, or if I were to compose a symphony, my writing hand and my musical mind would be in unison. I open my mind to the world of sounds, to the world of words, to their communion. And I am happy." --The fat poet
(From THE ROAR OF THE RIVER)
