The Christine Schutt Interview | Quarterly Conversation — David Winters

Dec 022013
 

Here’s a teaser to David Winters’ terrific interview with Christine Schutt at Quarterly Conversation. We’ve been reading about her on NC as part of our focus on Gordon Lish and his influence on contemporary fiction. This interview a  wonderful addition to the ongoing discussion.

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CS: “’Reality,’ of course, is man’s most powerful illusion; but while he attends to this world, it must outbalance the total enigma of being in it at all.” So says Erik H. Erikson, but reality does not for me “outbalance” the bewildering experience of being in the world. Add the scrim of memory and incessant excursions into the past, and the most I can do to construct a world is to stitch together sensations of it. I do not want an impenetrable style but prize compression and music. I abhor quotidian easy speak, psychobabble, brands, news and slogans—a “writner’s prose” as Gordon Lish once described it. Mine calls for close, hard readers of fiction. This year in reviews of Prosperous Friends, I was bumped up from being a writer’s writer to being a writer’s writer’s writer; either way, it cautions challenging prose ahead. A lot is left unsaid and must be inferred simply because I want to avoid the dulling effect of belated language.

via The Christine Schutt Interview | Quarterly Conversation.

Learning from Gordon Lish: A Roundtable @ The Literarian

Sep 252013
 

Jason Lucarelli, David Winters, and Greg Gerke discuss Gordon Lish, style & life, in a roundtable at The Literarian. Not to be missed, given NC’s commitment to Lish studies and Jason’s two essays here.

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When I think of the intersection of style and life, I think mostly of the typical Lish mode, the monologue form. In an interview between Rob Trucks and Gordon Lish, Lish defends his preference for the first-person point of view, saying: “Just to be able to point to a book that was rendered by reason of another kind of device wouldn’t be worth the price in not getting far enough in.” Lish often lectures about “going deep,” about how a writer can never go deep enough. In Tetman Callis’s “The Gordon Lish Notes,” Lish says, “If your work is to work, it must work the way your mind works—the way your mind really works, deep down inside your secret loathsome self.” These ideas, I think, at once dictate the content and the style of the writing produced by Lish and by others who learned from Lish. This daringness, this boldness is reflected in the way these writers often write and in what they are willing to offer up of themselves as they write. There’s often a balancing act—performed through the compositional act of consecution—concerning a secret that, as the poet Mary Ruefle says, “neither hides itself nor reveals itself.” This, I think, is the ethos you’re speaking of, David—the risk of redeeming one’s experience.

Read the rest at The Center for Fiction.

Peru: Novel Excerpt — Gordon Lish

Jun 112013
 

Gordon Lish photo by Bill HaywardGordon Lish: Photo by bill hayward

Gordon Lish, despite his pesky notoriety vis a vis Raymond Carver, bestrides the American literary scene like a colossus but not, you know, in an obvious way because he stands outside the non-tradition of the marketplace, that other colossus. He is a restlessly prolific author, editor and teacher; his influence seeps into the interstices of the culture. He has established a taste and a method (see Jason Lucarelli’s “The Consecution of Gordon Lish: An Essay on Form and Influence“). His ghostly signature lies on what a lot of readers and writers today think of as good writing. There are websites devoted to listing the writers he has touched. The last American prose writer who had this kind of impact on the minds of the best writers of her era was Gertrude Stein.  Like Stein, Lish is in the ranks of the avant garde, the Modernists. Once he was known as Captain Fiction and edited fiction for Esquire and later books for Knopf. I always found that amazing, a disjunct. Because the first piece of Gordon Lish fiction I read was his 1989 novel Extravaganza, which was unlike any American fiction I had read before (and, I thought, completely NOT mainstream — how could this guy be working for Esquire?). Extravaganza is 200 pages of borscht-belt standup comedy, one Jewish joke after another. There is no story at all, but gradually the language of the jokes becomes infected with references to the Holocaust, the hoary old jokes are disrupted with references to whips and cattle cars. It is a beautiful, scary, maddeningly recursive adventure. The recursiveness, the throw of grammar, lulls the reader, defines expectation. Then Lish defies expectation; violence, depradation, sadism, mayhem explode into the sentences.

So, yes, when I think of Gordon Lish, I think of Gertrude Stein, I think of Flaubert (Extravaganza seems like an heir to Bouvard and Pécuchet). I think of the avant garde. I think of a writer super-conscious of the role of language in the shaping of reality. I think of a writer steeped in Continental philosophy (Deleuze, Kristeva — and I think how extremely small-minded and beside the point are the debates about his role in Raymond Carver’s career). I think of a writer who has an almost mystical appreciation for the relationship of words (type, text) and the white space, the frame. I interviewed Lish once (I have published the sound file on NC: Causing Damage — Captain Fiction Redivivus: DG Interview With Gordon Lish), and we spent some time talking about this, his idea of cutting words to expose the “mystery,” the word “mystery” having, yes, a technical armature, almost tangible for Lish. We are talking here not of a mere writer of stories, but of a man who self-dramatizes as being on the world’s rim, the space between language and not-language. He gets your blood up, does Gordon Lish. His sentences make you itch to write.

All this by way of introducing the following brief, shocking excerpt from Lish’s 1986 novel Peru, just republished by Dalkey Archive Press with an introduction by the author. Peru is a compulsively “spoken,” recursive, stylized monologue that circles around and around the moment in 1940, when, at the age of six, the narrator murdered another six-year-old boy with a toy hoe in a sandbox. I give you here one of the great death/murder scenes, bizarrely dispassionate, full of a kind of schizophrenic detail and a consciousness on the narrator’s part of wanting to tell you the story correctly. So, at the outset, the first detail he tells you about the murder is that he could hear water running for the garden spigot, a detail that seems irrelevant and then compelling. We see the pitted marks the hoe leaves on the victim’s face. We see the victim getting up from his dying and stumbling around, watching his own dying. Everything is strange, focused, and unexpected. Lish escapes the novelese of conventional expectation and launches us into a realm of language and horror.

In addition to the excerpt, I point you here to David Winters’ excellent essay on the novel in 3AM Magazine: “Truth, Force, Composition.” Also, as linked above, Jason Lucarelli’s essay on Lish’s compositional method, called consecution, and my interview with Lish. Finally, the photographer bill hayward, long an associate and friend of Gordon Lish, recently allowed NC to publish a series of Lish portraits: Gordon Lish: Photographs — bill hayward.

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Peru

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I’ll tell you one of the worst things in my life.  This is one of the worst things in my life—a day when the nanny said that I couldn’t come over and play but one when she went ahead and changed her mind later on and said that I could actually do it—and then it started raining just a little bit after she’d said it, like just instants, just instants after she had given me her blessing—and then for the whole rest of the day, all the rest of that day after Andy Lieblich went in and the nanny went in with him, I sat down inside of our garage and kept feeling funny and out of the ordinary, like as if I was in some kind of trouble and that certain things which I did not exactly know about yet were probably dangerously unfinished, lying lopsided somewhere and being dangerous, and it made me feel a terrible wildness, this strange feeling, which I think, to my way of thinking as a child, was the worse one, the feeling before the feeling of wildness, the feeling of incompletion and of chaos, a feeling of things getting started and of never getting them over with, of parts of them being impossible for you to ever get them totally taken care of yourself.

In a halfway sense, I think I can say that the day I killed Steven Adinoff, that is, that that particular day—but only in this halfway sense of things which I have mentioned—was a day like that.  On the other hand, now that I have said that, I think it is only fair for me to say that I have the feeling that I am making too much out of the thing, that I am probably not really remembering anything.

I should be skipping the feelings and be sticking to other things, anyway.  To what I remember because I actually heard it or saw it or so forth and so on—I should be sticking to things like this before things start getting too mixed up.

I heard the water going.

The whole time I was killing him I heard the water getting out of where the colored man had it hooked up to the Lieblich’s spigot—the water he was using for the Buick, the whole time the other thing was happening, the water for the fit between the hose, on the one hand, and the spigot, on the other, was a little bit loose, even though it was the colored man who had it hooked up and who—next to me, next to me—was the world’s most watchful human being in the whole wide world.

Even afterwards, even when I was going home, it was still going then, the tiny hissing was, like a sizzle, like the way a frying pan with some drops of water in it will sizzle, or make a sizzle, or sound like it’s sizzling.

The nanny saw it.  Andy Lieblich saw it.  So did Steven Adinoff himself.  We all saw it.  We all watched.  Steven Adinoff watched just as much as anybody else.

That’s the thing about it—you watch.

That’s the unbelievable thing about it—that you watch it even if it’s you yourself that’s getting killed.

He watched himself get chopped up.

To me it looked like he was interested in just lying there and watching it.  Because isn’t it interesting to watch it even if it’s happening to you?  That you’re the one who’s getting it doesn’t make any difference.  Actually, if my own personal experience can be counted for anything, that part of it—my opinion is that that part of it is the part of it which just makes you al the more interested in it.

But maybe he did not understand what was going on anymore, what connection there was between him getting killed and the hoe anymore, between what was happening to him and what I myself was doing to him with the hoe anymore.  Maybe the thing was that Steven Adinoff was probably thinking of something else.

I don’t know.  Maybe that’s what you do—you think of something else.  Maybe you can’t even help it.  Maybe you can’t even stop yourself from just going ahead and thinking of something which doesn’t have anything to do with the thing that is happening to you, except I myself don’t think that’s it, that that explains it, no.

But I don’t know what does, what would.  I can’t even begin to guess, except for the fact that I think it’s got something to do with a nice feeling, with having a nice dreamy sleepy very special, very sleepy now feeling.

Or else I am overdoing it or am anyway just wrong.  Maybe he just wanted to see how getting killed looked.  Maybe it didn’t matter to him who was getting killed.  Because for a lot of the time he just lay there watching instead of trying to get up and fight back and try to kill me back—and then he finally did, finally did get up—except that by then he was almost dead, except by then I think he was almost dead, even though he wasn’t actually acting dead, even though he just got up and started acting baffled and shocked instead of being sorrowful or mad at me.  But I don’t think it was so much on account of someone having almost killed him as it was on account of his realizing how he’d missed the boat on this thing by getting distracted, by letting himself get distracted, and by not paying enough attention to it, or at least not to the part of it which really counted, until it was just too late and you felt silly for more or less being the center of attention of what’s going on but the last one to be informed as to what it is all about and means.  I mean, I’ll bet it’s like finding out that you are the last one to get in on a secret which turns out to have been much more about you than you ever dreamed it was, ever could have, in your wildest dreams, dreamed of or thought of anything.

To my mind, Steven Adinoff was just woolgathering and then caught himself at it and went ahead and woke himself up and then noticed he was almost dead.

Except that it was just probably only a gesture by then.

There were pieces of his face—there were all of these cuts which were deep in his head.

Not that he couldn’t actually get up when he tried.  He got right back up on his feet again and went and got the rake again and then he walked around for a while, then he walked in and out of the sandbox for a while, stepping up to get in it and then stepping down to get out of it, and meanwhile saying these different things and looking in his pockets almost all of this time, but some of it, some of the time, looking at me again and trying to get me with the rake again before I myself got ready to really buckle down to business again and kill him again and then he fell over again almost as soon as I got busy on him again and really dug in.

Anybody could tell that this time it was for good.  It didn’t matter if you were just a six-year-old boy.

Any six-year-old could have killed Steven Adinoff.

 

—Gordon Lish

Writing & Context: A Note On Writing And Reading With Your Eyes Open

Apr 242013
 

I’ve been writing books for decades, teaching writing on and off for less than 20 years. Teaching makes up much less of who I am or how I present myself to myself than writing, being a father, etc. But it does provide me with a measuring stick (what are people thinking and reading these days?) and an occasional locus for thought (how does one explain how a work of literature is built?). One of the things I’ve noticed in my years of teaching is how few people come to the craft with much understanding of the context, the cultural backdrop, the history of ideas that informs works of art now. This is kind of like driving a car while wearing a blindfold. There is a huge difference between writing a sketch of a story or a bit of memoir and creating a work of art out of that sketch, between just getting down the bare facts and writing something beautiful, between anecdote and a short story, novel, essay, memoir. Modernism, as Gabriel Josipovici talks about it in his book What Ever Happened to Modernism? arises out of this distinction, the distinction between bare communication and art, between the naive use of language and the use of language that is aware of its own contradictions, glories and insufficiencies. I have a page on NC, the Necessary Books page, which lists some of the books I have found helpful in informing my own sense of context. And recently I’ve been telling students and the poor, long-suffering writers on the NC masthead, to read Josipovici’s book. No book tells the whole story, spells out the answers; we all have to assemble our own sense of tradition. But the ideal is always to be moving toward a larger and larger awareness of the intellectual furniture of the world. I append here three reviews of Josipovici’s book to whet your appetite. And then, to complicate matters, because matters should always be made more complicated, I add a link to David Winters’s review of Shane Weller’s Modernism and Nihilism.

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A long time ago Philip Roth said that there are around 60,000 serious readers in the United States. That is 60,000 who would buy a Philip Roth book, maybe, but realistically there are much fewer serious readers. The kind of readers who sit up late with Ulysses, or who consider Kierkegaard’s Either/Or to be beach reading. What’s more, of these readers I would guess that a significant percentage of them have a go at writing fiction or poetry. Even if they were all lucky enough to be published, a single popular novel would be enough to sap all the media attention away from them (even in the age of the internet, which, by the way, is conspicuously absent as a force in this book. I’m not complaining; it was actually a serene delight to read a new non-fiction book that did not pour on the dreaded “e” prefix remorselessly.) The fault is not with the authors, as such, but with the culture and the criticism surrounding them. It is this that Josipovici wants to change.

And it is a gargantuan task. If contemporary culture has taught us anything it’s that a worldwide web, a few dragging steps towards equality, and a more inclusive attitude in general have almost no impact on public taste. Most people just don’t care enough about the arts to do anything other than lie supine and wait to be entertained, and one wonders if this book can have any traction in a culture that resists elitism so stubbornly. And yet I can’t help but feel that this book is so alive because the world is turned the other way. Even with insurmountable resistance, What Ever Happened to Modernism? is an inspiring, sometimes electrifying, call to arms; a serious book for serious readers.

via The Millions : Getting Serious: Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?

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For Josipovici modernism is a response in art (all art, music and painting too for example, not just literature) to the “disenchantment of the world”. That disenchantment is the loss of the Medieval sense of the numinous as being part of everyday life. In short, the Medieval vision of a world filled with purpose and divine meaning gave way to what would ultimately become the Enlightenment with its vision of a secular world governed by reason and natural laws (yes, I did just gloss over about 400 years there).

This is absolutely critical to everything that follows. The death of enchantment does not mean that people were happy in the middle ages but disillusioned thereafter. It is not a personal loss of enchantment. The point is that the European concept of the world changed from it being a place in which the natural and supernatural were different facets of the same reality to a world in which the natural and the supernatural were firmly separated (and in which the supernatural could therefore potentially be discarded entirely).

With the death of enchantment comes the death of meaning. Before the disenchantment of the world it is possible to speak with authority, because the world has meaning from which authority can be derived. After that disenchantment there is no longer such an authority. The only authority that exists is that which we assert.

via The death of enchantment | Pechorin’s Journal.

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The Modernist project has been around for far longer than you might think: from Euripides, looked at one way; or from Rabelais, looked at another; certainly since Cervantes. “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember …” is how Don Quixote begins, and it is as if the rest of the book is itself a huge piss-take of the very idea of narrative, a healthy scorn for plodding literalism. When Duchamp – he of the urinal in the art gallery – was asked in 1922 for his views on photography, he replied thus: “Dear Stieglitz, Even a few words I don’t feel like writing. You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are.” Josipovici notes the “very Beckettian style” of this (pre-Beckett though it may be); and it reminds us that the Modernist avant garde is by no means without a sense of humour.

via What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici – review | Books | The Guardian.

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To consider the concept of nihilism, Simon Critchley once remarked 1, is to take up the trail of ‘Ariadne’s thread’, a theoretical route through the labyrinth of history. For Critchley, the story of nihilism is the story of what it means to be modern, and to read the philology of nihilism, of the nihil, is to look through a lens at modernity’s underside. Shane Weller’s survey of the web of relations between Modernism and Nihilism proceeds from the same supposition. His book unpicks the thread where it’s at its most knotted, in the high modernist literatures of the early twentieth century. For Weller, what’s at work in the works of the modernists – from Tzara to Kafka to Cioran – is a discursive puzzle for which ‘nihilism’ would seem to be the key, the master term that could unlock and make sense of the modern. Yet the thrust of his thesis is the fact that it fails to do so; the way that whatever it touches is rendered resistant to interpretation. So, on the one hand, thought and talk about ‘nihilism’ is ubiquitous across modern culture: wherever the modernist moment is, nihilism sits alongside (or inside) it. On the other, modernism proves unable to reduce nihilism to its propaedeutic, its explanatory toolkit. Rather, nihilism is what haunts modernism, as its ghost or double, a tense co-presence forever unsettling its meanings.

via Modernism and Nihilism by Shane Weller « Book Review « ReadySteadyBook – for literature….

David Winters on Heywood Broun’s Inner Tube @ Writers No One Reads

Feb 272013
 

Broun’s next text, Inner Tube (Knopf, 1985), was acquired by legendary editor Gordon Lish, whose stylistic influence can be felt throughout Broun’s subsequent work. By now Broun had become—a little like Barry Hannah, another author from Lish’s stable—a writer less of conventional “sentences” than of freewheeling, aphoristic riffs. But beyond this, Inner Tube displays a brilliant strain of misanthropy that is all Broun’s own. The book begins with the narrator’s mother committing suicide by putting her head through a TV screen. Compelled to escape this constitutive trauma (plus his incestuous lust for his sister), he flees into an increasingly fractured, ersatz social world. Along the way, man is revealed as merely

an over-evolved creature whose most dangerous enemies come from within… Imagine the first useless panic, the first nightmare, the first crushing turn of anomie. Ten thousand generations later, all we can do is palliate. Misery abhors a vacuum, and history is a list of sedatives.

Eventually Broun’s narrator escapes from this failed civilization, leaving to live alone in the desert. Inner Tube’s plot provides no palliation; instead it presents a pessimistic awareness that “we are animals. All the consoling fabrications must be waived.”

Read the rest of the essay at Writers No One Reads • [The following is a submission from David Winters,….