#davidantin

i dont think im unique in feeling the     absence of urgency    in constructing a literary object    its    in fact       i think a fairly recent aberration     the existence    of literature     conceived in a tight framework     there is       some sense of urgency out there     a passing police car       they have an audience   they have an audience and a        need    and they may respond to it badly    but they    have their sense of urgency    the most exotic example i can    think of      and the most striking example i can think of      which i have thought about recently    and which is not     something i want to spend a great deal of time thinking about        here    is a kind of post napoleonic commitment    to    producing an amazingly important object     balzac say                                                           i dont   really want to talk about balzac except that hes an example of    incredible arrogance and ambition    with nothing to say a man    goes into a closet in order to say it   a half baked kid decides     to be a great writer   to be like napoleon to take over the    empire of letters     what would he do?    whatever was going     to be great   what would be great?    classical tragedies     that was what was great in paris    what else would be great      in paris?    racine    what else?     he would write plays     now its very difficult     you go with nothing in your    mind    in particular     except your own future greatness     you go there   to paris    to write great plays    because    thats where they write them    you go there    mainly to      exercise your dominion    balzac is a good example   he    couldnt speak    he had nothing to say                                           coffee    black coffee    was the answer     self intoxication late at night   what     came out   presumably                           ive never seen an autograph manuscript     of balzac  and i dont know anybody who has      but ive seen      early proof sheets                          he obviously managed to achieve        finally     utterance   a string of clichés   an incredible      propulsion of garbage   an incredible group of commonplaces    flowing one after another                              but they flow     after endless     cups of coffee     which      presumably finally killed him    second proof sheet third proof sheet i never saw a second or   third proof sheet     presumably i saw eleventh proof sheets     or something of that order    theyre filled with literary    high class     the flow of clichés the flow of platitudinous     trash is interrupted primarily by   self conscious    reflexive       high class prose    that enters into the flow    one thing    was flowing and it was nonsense    but it was at least flowing     after that    there were second thoughts     and third       thoughts and fourth thoughts   balzac criticizing balzac     getting smarter learning little bits and pieces of junk      embedding a mosaic of   early 19th century   cleverness       going    swedenborgianism     going sociology     going     real worldism    going whatever     to take away the   embarrassment of this fluent trash    which flowed all the way     through unrealized and absurd clichéd scenes      followed     largely by modifications that add respectability and slow down    the pace of the prose     till finally   in what?    the     22nd proof sheet we have the brokenbacked mosaic of a balzac      novel     a monster                          what we have is    a fluency of utterance         and energy broken and restrained in a disastrous mosaic     which is an image of what    an image of class an image    of mentalism an image of whatever      it was the now nearly    worthless currency of 19th century hip that had value then      for that reason     that it was their currency    and there are        strata in balzac  and all the strata appear together    pressed in various sized fragments onto the surface of the      text   a balzac novel is an archeological trove   its not so    much a work    as it is a series of self conscious reflections on    his inability to let his talk fall where it fell    because he     wanted to be great                        its very bad to want to be great   because      theres no reason in the world why you should be great  until    the world decides that you are great      which is all that     greatness consists of    now i didnt start from a critique    of balzac and im not interested in laying balzac open to this    critique   that could apply almost as well to so many other      writers   but balzac is an enormously interesting case     for the reason that he is so typical of the arrogance of    literature   as a construction that will eventually claim to     equal the career of a progressively accumulated intelligence    that the world had just come to call science    and this new   career would be something like a science    a quasi science of     the real world                    what "real world"    the world of common      sense made to seem as if it was more than common sense?        or less than common sense?    the world of if A then B    the truth table   its the plausible world of the marriage novel     the plausible world of the money accumulating novel   the   plausible world of the success story   its all plausible   but     its plausible    but its plausible only afterwards   because   before that what is it    its an opera or a fairy tale    because     balzac writes   basically    a romance or an opera which he then      subjects to a somewhat cynical critique    a 19th century    critique of this romance   and the critique is called realism                                              now theres a      kind of comedy to this   because the critique is a kind of    afterword   its as though balzac expects to be judged   why     does he expect to be judged    its an interesting question      he expects to be judged because hes going to have an object    in front of the world and the world will have the leisure and     the desire to examine it    once    and then examine it      again    and then examine it again    and then again   and   its as if he was back in school and he was preparing to face     a board of examiners    and he was turning in his examination    booklet that this board of examiners was going to scrutinize      over and over slowly turning its pages to see if they pass                                                    now theres one     issue in a book    its that a book is always reinspectable      when you recall a passage it is always the same    which is    unlike talk    which you can also recall but is never the         same    and is never reinspectable    except in your       memory     that is     you may believe that its the same     but you have no certainty that its the same    and the talk      goes out into the world and its gone    and its not worth      any more    than anyones confidence in you   or confidence in   their ability to perform the interpretive act     upon the discourse        with you    because the discourse     is the one thing       that youre sure of     theres a situation and you respond to it