Tuesday, February 14, 2017
ooo
If The Porthole is a mimicry of a collage, in that no source material has actually been cut apart, and Tristiano is a collage created out of (primarily) a single person's work in slightly different modes, then Michel Butor's Letters to the Antipodes, 1981, is closer to the process that creates the type of visual collage people are used to: multiple sources, disassembled, and placed back together in a new order; some things left out, others emphasised by their placement. There are strategies in Antipodes that don't have equivalents in the other Butor books that I've read, such as the word "red" inserted in the joins between segments, and the names of authors added to the ends of the excerpts sometimes ("VERNE," "COOK") and of course the entire text being printed in red ink; then the "ooo" at the bottoms of the pages; this constant reassertion of himself as a controlling force over a text that he has not, for the most part, written, (though letters from himself have been cut up for material too), these methods that resist his own disappearance or effacement.
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This idea of turning a text into an art object that doesn't rely on the "meaning" of the underlying text makes more and more sense to me the more I attempt to write texts with "meaning." I was thinking just yesterday afternoon that, if I were to write another novel, I wouldn't want to do so until I had learned the entirety of human knowledge, and even at that point I'd have no assurance that my complete knowledge wasn't based on false assumptions and therefore a pot of lies. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann...
ReplyDeleteThis is the point at which you start opting for extreme quietness and turn into Samuel Beckett.
DeleteThat's pretty much where I am, yep.
Delete(But, this sort of breaking or turning point sounds incredibly exciting - surely you're about to deduce something interesting - )
DeleteI don't know. Silence is awfully attractive. Or maybe I'll turn to wee little poems. Or instrumental music.
DeleteHuh. Passing Time was merely a novel. I guess Butor got tired of those.
ReplyDeleteIt's as if Australia was so unwieldy and unfamiliar (so far away from his usual context) that he had to deal with it by building a machine instead of writing just a travel memoir (and it's not as if he couldn't do that when he felt like it. Spirit of Mediterranean Places is straightforward enough).
Delete