Intimate Stranger

THE LONG AND THE SHORT

Ought we to apply a hierarchy of values to writing other than those, which emerge from and are embedded in the text itself? Is ‘long’ better than ‘short’? Is ‘reality’ more important than ‘imagination’? Should one adapt one’s imagination to reality? Why? To be more believable? And how? By allowing the lived experience (le vécu) or the biographical to become fictionalized?

The example of Pier Paolo Pasolini comes to mind: his private life subsumed his essays and his poems and thus became public — his ‘deviation’ as gay and communist (in Italy at that time still considered ‘abnormal’ for a young man of good provincial stock) became ideologically argued positions and certainly also shaped the themes and the intentions of his films. Often, he himself would enact a role in these works. Did he end up confusing his life with his creations? Was he, in a manner of speaking, sodomized by his own invented and nurtured existence, by the rough and tumble of his positions? He showed an enduring interest for the stories of the marginalized poor living on the outskirts of Rome, particularly the young men who were often part juvenile delinquent and part pimp. For him they had revolutionary potential. To be ‘without class,’ young and virile and rebellious, cruel and tender and still tied in a gory and mocking way to the rituals of Christian superstitions, was to be primed for revolution. And that’s how he dies, battered to death by one such occasional lover on a strip of vacant land near one of the grimy and gruesome ‘developments.’

Silvina Ocampo, the lady who worked so close to Jorge Luís Borges, transgresses the accepted writing norms in another way. She does not strive for the ‘unity of effect’ that E. A. Poe prescribed, nor is there often any logical, linear structure to her stories. Rather, what we get is a voluntary deconstruction. There is nearly never any singular discernable referent that could calm the play by excluding other angles of perception. For Silvina Ocampo, existence is unintelligible, and so she renounces logic and reason. For her, stories (to be found in Los días de la noche and La furia y otros cuentos, and I’d also recommend her novella, El amor es una droga dura) must be like life, ambiguous and with neither rhyme nor reason. What fascinates her (and it transpires in her work) is the dark dimension of everyday existence. She will convey this fascination by her attention to detail, to the incongruous, to the disorderly. This focus without any meaning makes for a very powerful and present voice. Some may call the sort of product she delivers ‘fantastical,’ but it is neither arbitrary in its presentation of events nor marvelous in its reach for the supernatural; what she does bring along is the disorder of the occult, of the other side of the mirror, the sinkholes and the hollows we normally pretend not to see. As a critic pointed out: “Hers are the tales of an adult Alice.”

We are talking about form, and a little bit about movement.

Quite apart from ‘long’ and ‘short’ in fiction there are to my mind (and in general when we speak about writing) two kinds of form. The one is ‘formal,’ recognized and classified, which we’ll find pegged as novel, etc. — and within the same long form, say, we may then encounter a variety of genres such as the ‘picaresque’ or the ‘epic.’ I’m here of course referring to fixed forms like the sonnet or the ballad in poetry. In terms of this approach we’ll think of the novel as having more or less a given length and structured differently compared to the essay or short fiction.

Then there is the other kind of form, perhaps more aptly called shape, which emerges or becomes apparent as a necessity of contents, enhancing or amplifying the latter, giving the impression of inventing itself as it goes along. Recognizable as form, it is itself an element in establishing the authority, the totality and the reach of the work.

One could submit that the first form is ‘formalistic’ and arbitrary (which does not imply that it cannot be a powerful pole against which to play and set off tensions, and in so doing open other spaces); the second is more unexpected and organic.

Form, whichever way we want to look at it, is expressed in space and length of time. Thereafter it is given face by the way it is textured, stretched or cut up or made hollow.

Can one move from the short story to the novel by just adding chapters and scenes as one goes along? Garcia Marquez wrote somewhere: “The effort in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel. . But a short story has no beginning, no end; either it works or it doesn’t.” What he’s saying is that the short story, like the beginning of a novel, will be dense and allusive; it must show its tricks over much more condensed ground. It will still be read sequentially, but the ends are so close together that the impression will be one of simultaneousness: a swallow in time, like a gulp, not the furry animal of the mind squirreling away acorns of information for later delectation as it would when reading a novel. Richard Rhodes comments (and I took the Marquez quote above from Rhodes’ manual, How To Write): “(It) helps explain why the short story is such a resonant form: all that follows in a novel, all the elaboration of story and character — the long middle and the brief, resolving end — is held latent in a good short story, left for the reader to fill in from imagination and from personal experience.”

Maybe the reader’s mind has to be more active and participating when dealing with shorter texts, for brief fiction does not have the space or the length to take its leisure in fleshing out a totally autonomous world and then to populate it the way the novel can. It depends for its effects on a stronger and more immediate presence of the building blocks of narration. We normally experience the short story as a whole (and we want no loose ends), whereas we’re willing to accept duller or less interesting parts in the novel, to give it time and head, to even let it be for a while. Time is not always of the same intensity — in the novel, as in life, there will be times of forgetting. The bigger the canvas the more you need ‘gray areas’ (plains, emptiness) to highlight the aspects you wish to bring forward. The main characters, for example, will be less pertinent if all the subsidiary characters are as fully and sharply delineated. A novel is also ‘easier’ on the mind because the division in chapters, to name one option, allows for those major breaks in the narrative that will jump out painfully in a short story unless you can handle the transitions.

One provokes movement in form by, inter alia: resonance, allusion, punctuation, repetition, other patterns; by metaphor (because it shifts the gaze and sets off flares to illuminate the surroundings) and dialogue (you can cut corners and get much more done in a shorter time than a description will take); by switching tenses and swapping attitudes or voices; by jumps and by breaks.

Process, though bordered by form, is incarnated in movement. Sometimes movement is form. You may wish to write in a headlong rush, a river in flood hustling along the pebbles on the bottom. Or use a clipped phraseology so that the movement is in the intake of breath between the bare and brief indications. The movement is in the water, not the stepping stones. Silvina Ocampo brings about a forward and backward flow in the way her focus shifts all the time: the flag flapping is neither the wind nor the cloth, but the mind moving.

And there are differences between narrative movement (the unfolding of the story) and structural precipitations created when you shape your material in sentences, paragraphs and chapters. There may be a movement of ideas relating to larger discourses. Here the form matters; presenting the thoughts in an essay may make them more authoritative, more ‘objective’ than when doing them in a story, as the importance of the thoughts will be foregrounded and not confused with the characters’ traits. And movement can be suggested or introduced by what’s left out. A displacement is caused by the tension between full and empty. Completion is sucked in. One would use all of the above techniques differently depending on the form. The novel may indeed necessitate a fuller engagement (a long-term relationship), but it has a shorter immediate memory: if ideas or images are too far apart in the space of the novel you will lose some resonance and connectedness, and thus ‘sense.’

Henri Focillon wrote: “Human consciousness is a perpetual pursuit of a language and a style. To assume consciousness is at once to assume form. Even at levels below the zone of definition and clarity, measures and relationships exist. The chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself.”

And to assume form is to take on responsibility.

I end where I started. Writing (in this instance) is moving into the unknown in order to picture it, to bring it — however tentatively and unsuccessfully — within reach of appropriation and identification. It is writing to the heart of nothingness, whether to exorcize or disclaim or become it. Who knows? And does it ultimately matter? Nor does it matter in the land of writing whether in this process (along this road) the void is out there or in here. Walking the road of itself depicts and becomes the fear and the fall and the oblivion and life resurgent: it becomes the human condition, the state of man.

(mirror note 5)

Suppose I tried to tell you that what I’m actually saying is giving expression to this half-wild animal in my arms, the man said. Fox or wolf. And that I have to let it go because it is pawing at my arms, drawing blood. Suppose when I let it go then, it doesn’t run off to freedom but turns around to look me in the eyes.

Transgressions and connections — thus Picaro closes the subject of a months-long reflection on writing in a note to his students. (That he who is so lost between make and make-believe should have been teaching!) You will remember that we set out with the intention to closely read a number of texts by Carver, Sebald and Kundera, he starts — and that we’d then approach these through discussions pursued to wherever they might lead us? Of course, we were on our way to the Middle World of wanderers and parrots. The intention was to identify those considerations that speak to us as writers as we navigate the reefs of writing. That’s why I did not propose formal lectures, or the academic study of a particular literature, but rather an exchange of insights and thoughts around specific texts. Like paper boats. No need to have the keel ripped off.

Writing is in essence a self-taught discipline. By that Picaro says he means, as well, a discipline of teaching the self what writing is all about. What we tried to do together was to dedramatize the act and the process by scrutinizing it more objectively, testing our reading and our interpretations, stepping away from too cosseted a relationship to our efforts. By looking closely at the work of others we may be more sensitive to what they saw and heard, and to their ways of transcription. The wound that allows you to write will, if sufficiently infected, keep people away from you. Do you then write so that the thing you write about may go away? It is true that once something is defined or cut down to size, it may either fade or mutate, or just quietly slip away in the water. He says this was a question.

From these premises, Picaro says, we then moved to the ground where fiction (heightened language) and non-fiction (ordinary communication) meet. How do they inform, shape, deform, imitate or deflate one another? What both share may be the fabrication of lies, either dull or subtle, and the elaborate making of disguises.

The Transgressions in the course title was meant to indicate that we would be crossing genres and categories — for instance, by looking at poetry as non-fiction; or to observe how, in poetry as well, there can be movement and a tension between the so-called ‘real’ (the lived experience, le vécu) and ‘projection’ or ‘imagination.’ Transgression, exactly, because we expect to find few hard and fast distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, obviously with the exception of some scientific texts on the mating habits of bugs — and even there (Picaro claims), we soon find that narrative creates truth. And then we tried to see whether using the same techniques could establish connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among these: the uses and the effects of projection, imagination, tense, points of view, voice, the narrative arc, pattern making, rhythm or breath, “the relativity that is indispensable to novelistic space,” etc.

Beyond that, Picaro admonishes his students, we intended to consider notions of ethics — that is, the role writing can play to be ‘good’ in itself and within larger contexts.

“. . the need arises concretely of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons.”

A New Type of State, Antonio Gramsci

Fiction/Imagination is an unveiling of what we didn’t know we knew. It is not possible, as far as we know, to think the ‘unthinkable.’ Imagination pre-figures its implementation by shaping the thinkable. We write into the pre-existent pool or underground of images, memories, thoughts, etc. — if only because the words we use connote meaning or morph into metaphors. This ‘pool’ will to a large extent be collective and to some smaller degree personal. “I, Picaro Wordfool, go into the mirror to exist.” It is an ‘unknown’ continent we may wish to explore (or sail across with closed eyes) — but also a continent in progress so that we may never chart its outlines and features once and for all. ‘Uncovering’ the shared Atlantis of the imagination does not imply that it is fixed. (Note: he’s not referring to the Freudian ‘sub-conscious’ although there are obvious similarities.) Because it is pre-existent, ‘out there,’ we may say we are but reporting (bringing back) from what is shared and thus not inventing. We are describing non-fiction. Fiction resides in the ambiguity of lineage.

Story (when it articulates effectively!) modifies perception even about the verifiable existent. It becomes part of the substance of non-fiction. The stones brought back from the moon by the astronauts turned out to be green cheese.

Milan Kundera goes further. He postulates an aesthetic effect to the search for meaning by means of creative fiction. In The Art of the Novel: “Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful.” And: “Beauty, the last triumph possible for the man who can no longer hope. Beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said.”

Non-fiction/reporting, Picaro argues, depends for its effectiveness, perhaps even accessibility, on means and methods we usually associate with fiction writing: the shaping through choices and presentation, the ‘making-story’ in order to obtain traction. “Oneiric narrative; let’s say, rather: imagination, which, freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought.” (Kundera)

Maybe this is the only way we can encounter and extend consciousness. Even when transmitting a thought, as in non-fiction, it has to be ‘storied’ with its rise and fall to be accessible. Similarly, we both need to encounter and abide the reader’s attention if we wish to enter her or his mind. And we only exist in the minds and the imaginations of others. At this point he could have suggested to them how he came to live in the clothes of Simon Snow, or how much he would like to penetrate Reader’s mind and her mother-mouth — but this, he thinks, is too personal to unwrap; it could provoke shyness. Truth, in order to exist, must leave a part unsaid. That is why veils and hats are so alluringly important. “The dark inside the mind/ lies hidden” (The Art of Writing, Wen Fu).

A person wearing a hat in a story has certainly an unavowed life to hide or display (or not). And that is why Carver’s stories seemed so ‘real’ to us in class, Picaro concludes this section of his recapitulation.

Imagination gives access to ‘meaning.’ Story telling is a system of knowledge; the very act of narration carries a presumption of truth. It would seem that we are hardwired to see intention in the world, Picaro observes. We are predisposed to the art of learning causal maps: that is, disclosing by intervention. We become by making. We realize ourselves through acts of transformation. “Here we are.”

‘Writing’ is thus both the translation of an opening to non-fiction, and — through fiction — the bringing about of non-fiction. If you were to imagine yourself a woman out walking with a dog (Picaro says), the mere sniffing at the soil by the animal will expose the bones of a story.

“. . the very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.” (The Content of the Form, Hayden White)

Look at how Sebald in his Austerlitz promotes the transgression between ‘fiction’ and ‘fact,’ Picaro says, obviously taking cover behind an established author’s coattails; how he melded and moulded the two: merging the voices as one would expect in non-fiction mainly through the effacement of the I (in any event a close invention); in creating distance, as one would expect, by dint of his use of an apparatus of footnotes, pictures, French. See how he employs in his work of fiction the effects and the artefacts of non-fiction: the quasi-scientific lists from botany, astrology, entomology and architecture. Watch how he brings real people into the narrative, like Darwin, and have them lift their veils to shake hands with the population of his mind; how he mixes real sites with imaginary ones, all bathed in the same luminescence of gloom, until we take the made-up for real. Topography, where the illusion of precision is created, seems particularly important to him, Picaro points out. The real is an ever evasive, evanescent entity. That’s why it bothers us. Look at how he equates the labyrinth with forgetting, and that with cruelty. In his instance (Sebald’s, but also Picaro’s) one could hold that ‘imagination’ (as close and as buried as that living death we call ‘memory’) is a matter of focus. We sense throughout the despair of trying to be. “Moreover, I had constantly been preoccupied by that accumulation of knowledge, that which I had pursued for decades, and which served as a substitute or compensatory memory.” Words, words, words over the palimpsest of words meant that “everything was fading before our eyes.” The quotes are from Sebald.

The difference between fact and fiction is the focus brought to bear on the matter of the text; perhaps also the latitude of space we allow the reader. But ‘focus’ implies intention, thus imagination. Part of the latitude allowed the reader may also be confined by limitation — another possible attribute of ‘focus’ — and sheer mindlessness brought about by a blind obedience to repetition.

What is it we are imagining? Picaro asks. The ‘real’? Can it be argued that imagination recognizes the real and does so by imitating it? In order to imitate you have to recognize the other as an agent; more precisely, you have to recognize that the other incarnates a goal. What’s the difference between pretending (to understand) and imitating recognition? It is believed that non-human primates do not have the capacity for monitoring shared attention, and thus they cannot teach one another. How do they learn then? By mere aping? What is it that they imitate if not the gestures and actions that would ensure survival, like putting on hats and veils? But then, Picaro says, he has read that the mating dance among chimpanzees and baboons may be far more intricate than among humans — that with chimps, for example, the loud sounds made during sex will reflect careful and sophisticated social calculation. It is believed (but how can we ever know?) that the female tries to blur paternity by mating with as many individuals as possible when her sexual swellings show that she’s ready to conceive, because the males are prone to kill any infant they believe not to be theirs. By shouting (being “acoustically exuberant”) while getting fucked the female attracts and excites and recruits other partners, hoping to thus gain many influential protectors for her future offspring. But when a higher-ranking female is present she will be as quiet as a mouse, even while she’s being had, so as not to incite the obstructiveness of her elders. One has to feed. “Copulation calls are not a feature of public life in Western societies, but the situation could be different in hunter-gatherer groups, which enjoy little privacy.” (Nicholas Wade, The New York Times)

By imitating the form of writing we try to apprehend contents, Picaro postulates.

So as to survive we mime the stories of ourselves. We are apes imagining ourselves to be human and hairless the better to invent selves. Hence the importance of veils and hats.

The dust of this body of mine is the Veil face of the soul, Behind the Veil they treat me as men treat parrots,

Hafiz

But (Picaro warns) we should not mistake this imitation/ apprehension of the ‘real’ as the incarnation of ‘truth.’ It may well be but a projection of one possibility among others. Kundera tells us that Kafka’s writing “represents one fundamental possibility of man and his world, a possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally.”

Ethics come into play in the implications of what we imagine. On a very basic level, evidently, Picaro holds, we may argue that we recognize the ethical approach in writing by what it is not, what it does not transport or relish in: racism, gratuitous cruelty, deliberate misrepresentation, ‘inventing’ facts, old women giving blowjobs to young medical students in Paris. . But can it not be reasoned that this is censorship underestimating the reader’s capacity for making her own judgments and drawing her own inferences? Transportation is, after all, not the same as promotion. Or is it? Codes of behaviour may be as important in real societies as they are in imaginary ones. Drawers are useful.

Responsibility — to both material and reader — lies in the choices we make, according to Picaro: ordering (sequencing), which implies a hierarchy of attention if not importance, and is played out in structuring and elimination and highlighting. Can all information conceivably have equal value and importance? Will the consciousness be able to access information unless it is given the ‘texture’ of inequality in presentation and treatment, of degrees of resonance and implication? And can we therefore say, he speculates, that there may be opposition between doing away with ignorance (by putting everything out there, however horrible or despicable, going to the limits of the conceivable, and beyond) and compassion (trying to help bring about a modicum of liveable conditions by, for instance, limiting cruelty and greed)?

Or is this not a concern of writing? Picaro would like to imagine himself a hedonist. Are we not here to entertain and divert? Perhaps to edify, but moderately? (“Small fish ought to be fried lightly.” [Laotse]) And is oblivion not as important to human congress as anything else? Writing may be about re-membering but it is also about for-getting. Why should we know that which we can do nothing about? In the world that we inhabit there’s “the progressive concentration of power, tending to deify itself; the bureaucratization of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths; and the resulting depersonalization of the individual.” (Kundera)

Picaro, if you paid attention, dear Reader, wrote about this extensively in previous chapters. He now repeats: “We need to remember that we’re bastards and forget that we’re obedient citizens.”

“The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity, at least over long passages, proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce liter-ature in the face of total destruction. Conversely, the construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.”

On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald

But we write a life, Picaro argues. Living (mostly unconsciously) and writing (often wittingly) are processes of finding and according a fullness to life and attempts to sidestep death for as long as possible. “Once more he found himself in the presence/ of mystery. Rain. Laughter. History. Art. The hegemony of death. He stood there, listening.” (Listening, Raymond Carver)

Death can be sidestepped by imitating life. (This is another of Picaro’s fond wishes.) For that you have to camouflage yourself so as not to be noticed — you have to become one with the surroundings. Don’t watch too overtly what’s going on: an open eye is a sign of fear and “an eye is a hard thing to disguise in nature.” (The Book of Angels and Dogs, Simon Snow)

To be believable/invisible you have to learn not only the tricks of blending but also the art of the rupture. “Now you see it, now you don’t” — this is the craft of the bird-catcher. “Now you are part of it and now you are different.”

Picaro reminds his students of how he suggested that a tentative ‘approach to ethics in writing’ might contain the following elements:

Ethics inform aesthetics when there is exactitude in telling. The ‘exactitude’ I’m referring to, he explains, the clarity, is not necessarily brought about by linear narration or even precise description: a big part of establishing clarity is induced by the spaces left to the reader to invest and participate in. How else is he going to snare her? Ruptures and discordances can be strategically important. The fuckup remains a creative principle. That was my rule of thumb in writing the dying days of Simon Snow, he now claims.

The painting out of self helps. The ‘I’ is a fiction, a construct — imagined in part by culture and history and theology. It is, however, also a necessity of consciousness as point of passage for observations. And again, the ‘ways’ of seeing will be defined in part by culture, history. . Ah yes, the ‘I’ is the dark glass through which we look.

The less ‘I,’ Picaro proposes, the more neutrality, the less self-indulgence, the less we are obsessed by our ‘right’ to happiness and to ‘private space,’ the less we think of ourselves as ‘victims,’ the less infantile we are in our needs for ‘understanding’ and for ‘healing,’ the less judgmental and moralistic we are — the more there is room for things and events to ‘speak for themselves.’ The authority of the narrative will be enhanced by obscuring or obliterating authorship. (He knows he may be whistling in the dark here, but refrains from saying so.) “Mehr Licht!” These were Goethe’s dying words.

But don’t get hung up on the importance of the self, even negatively, he advises. (Here, Picaro reminds his students, you will remember that Reader objected vigorously and vociferously to the drift of his argument. She said: “You may be right, sir, and put that way it sounds attractive even if it may not mean much. For writing grows out of a self that takes itself — or at least its own questions and vision of the world — seriously; a self that opts to talk rather than listen, at least momentarily. And one depends on the other, of course. . Is writing or voicing the self a symptom of insecurity or a path toward clarity? Isn’t thinking enough? Are words necessary bricks of, or toward, original thought, or do they limit it, since they are created, borrowed, worn out by others? How can we invent a private language that can communicate to others? Is that what love is? Private and shared emotion or vision or experience beyond words? Do words break its unspoken power or allow it another dimension? What do silence and inner calm reveal? Strength, death, inhibition, fear, implosion, wonder, honesty, patience, faith, deception, all, nothing? Are true silence and peace possible, or are they horizons?”)

These were a whole bushel of questions. Picaro knows he did not respond in adequate depth, although he appreciated her talking back. He did admonish Reader, and the others as well, not to reify individual words. Words are like ants and will ruthlessly climb over one another to get at the food, but they only really make sense when they are subsumed by the whole, by the anthill. Sense or ‘meaning’ is a labyrinth in the apparition of an anthill.

As regards Self, it is only one of a pair. God or Void (to give the Unknown a name) begins wherever the I stops. Whatever you cannot conceive of is God. (Again Reader interrupted: “But isn’t it possible for our conceptions to embrace the Void — the ineffable — the untouchable? Horizons without lines, the rise/drift/erosion of an intuition, silence in a minor key. . And there must be a few things we can’t articulate that aren’t godlike.”)

The two of you are separate, contingent, perhaps interacting agencies. In any event, dependent on one another. It may be said that you (the I) are God’s imagination, its dog, since you will begin where his I-ness stops. The void is bound to imagine /inhale substance. This ‘cannibalism’ and confusion may well have been the intimate and ultimately alienated relationship between the narrator Sebald and his protagonist Austerlitz, where, according to Picaro’s reading, we have a take-over of the one by the other, a displacement or perhaps a confiscation of voice. Who flows into whom? Who barks? “Shut up! Have you ever heard me bark?” the blind man asked his dog who was barking at strange passers-by.

“The self is an imitation of the imagination of self” (On the Art of Meeting Strangers, Picaro Wordfool). He feels it legitimate to bring himself into the text, especially because he likes the sound of the formula.

Michael Fried in his Courbet’s Realism writes about the phenomenon of narcissism that may arise, and then quotes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Aesthetics: “The universal and absolute need from which art. . springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is. . This consciousness of himself man acquires in a two-fold way: first, theoretically, in so far as inwardly he must bring himself into his own consciousness, along with whatever moves, stirs, and presses in the human breast; and in general he must see himself, represent himself to himself, fix before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone alike in what is summoned out of himself and in what is accepted from without. Secondly, man brings himself before himself by practical activity, since he has the impulse, in whatever is directly given to him, in what is present to him externally, to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself. This aim he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things; a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversi-form phenomena up to that mode of self-production in external things which is present in the work of art.”

Fried argues that for Hegel artistic production is at bottom a form of self-representation — or self-production, a notion that would be developed by Marx and enthusiastically endorsed by Picaro. “The effacement of the very conditions of resemblance (the breaking of the mirror-surface of the river) also means that the boy’s relation to the spreading circles in the water might be described in Flaubertian language as one in which he is ‘present everywhere but visible nowhere.’” (Picaro likes being part of the chain quoting a recognized thinker like Hegel. He hopes the proximity may bestow some weight of reflection.)

When you conceptualize a subject you define a space between the recognized and the environment, and that tension between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ gives rise to movement. The space may be duplicitous: it may be nothing more than the clearing where the shaman moves between shadow and substance.

Then Picaro proceeds to what he considers to be the practical application of his thoughts. Stylistically, he says, it will help if there’s willingness to let language come into its own, through rhythm and texture: you will promote textual ‘space,’ he says — and no creativity without space, and no hope for ‘conscience’ without the creativeness of awareness.

The surface of fiction will bring about its own ‘non-fiction’: by focusing on the materiality of the means the illusion of veracity, which is mirrored by fiction will be destroyed. An experience of corporeality — the act of writing — will suspend the demarcation between ‘subject’ and ‘material world’ (in this instance, words). Writing — the production or clarification of consciousness, Picaro claims — is the mediating movement between fact and fiction.

It depends how you situate yourself to language. You are the ‘initiator’ and the ‘companion,’ not the ‘controller.’ (“As with love,” Reader interjected.) Be neither bully nor expert. There can be no Homeland Security in language or, for that matter, in writing narratives. Cervantes left room for both Quijote and Sancho Panza, and then for everybody and everything else as well — time, history, debunking, a multiplicity of lives, imitation, substitution. .

Ethics/neutrality demands that one leaves room for a certain ‘moral imagination’ — that is, the promotion of fragmented spaces for doubt and for the unexpected, even and perhaps especially for what you as writer did not expect to find. And who will take you to the underworld except the processes of creativity? How are you to cut your veins other than with the shards of the smashed dark glass? he asks rhetorically.

If you write ‘down’ to your readers, Picaro warns his students — because that is ‘what they want’ or may ‘understand’ — you are putting yourself up as authority and judge of intelligence (worse, judge of the heart) inside your own text, and this will influence your attitude to your tools. Because of obtuseness your tools will abandon you. Self-effacement is not a moral stance; it is a survival trick. (“Unless it is genuine.” [Reader])

Authenticity should not be confused with ‘authority,’ Picaro finally concludes. Authenticity (the integrity of the voice, not its coherence or its homogeneity) goes beyond reliance on “verifiable facts or information.” Ms Reader, he hopes, will sense whether he can be trusted or not as ‘search party’ into the thickets of existence. She may well be enticed out of the bush. Will she snort and hoot? Authority, on the other dirty hand, is a construct shaped by perceptions about reality (the way the media do about war); it draws its sustenance from collective prejudices and preferences — patriotism, nationalism, religion, racism. .

For a poet, there is terror in the dust.

Wen Fu