|
|
|
1-Year Plan
Post 13: 3/26/05
Paradigital
Literature:
A Symposium
|
|
|
On 23 March 2005, poets and digital littérateurs K. Silem Mohammad and Catherine Daly visited Wayne State University as part of the "Diasporic Avant-Gardes" reading and lecture series. A roundtable discussion on the possibilities of innovative poetry and digital media, attended by poets, the organizers, graduate students, and one peripatetic philosopher, took place in the morning, followed by a public reading that afternoon. The conversation that took place was wide-ranging and produced numerous insights into the participants' writing practices, the interface between creativity and technology, and larger issues of authorship and intentionality. At the end of the session, I proposed that, in the absence of a tape recording, we reconvene in virtual space and re-present, in some approximate form, the major threads of our interesting discussion. In the following, which does not propose to literally repeat what was said on the occasion, each person begins with a leading question, which will be responded to by the others in turn. [Participating: K. Silem Mohammad and Catherine Daly, visiting poets; Barrett Watten and Carla Harryman, faculty, Sarah Ruddy and Austin St. Peter, graduate students, English; and Herbert Granger, faculty, Philosophy.]
Go to round 1; round 2; round 3 . . .
Barrett Watten [round 1]: Last night, Kasey spoke informally of the "paradigital" as a way of imagining the relation of his writing to its technological sources. In other words, his work does not exist within digital environments or through computational means—as might be said of some new media artists or digital poets—but works through the digital or computational as part of its authorship. Here, one could bring in the notion of a "distributed" author, as with Larry Eigner and Jackson Mac Low. There is also a sense of the "paranormal" in the "paradigital"—the ghostly voices that inhabit his work, coming from "elsewhere." What have you learned or drawn from, as a poet, in your experience with digital sources, programs, media?
K.
Silem Mohammad: In
addition to working/writing “through” the media, the para- prefix
suggests a working “beside” or “along with” it: for me, that has meant
finding spaces and shapes defined by the digital and thinking how those forms
allow me to write in new ways. With Google, which I used to compose Deer Head
Nation and which I have applied to much of my work since, a major point of
entry for me has been the spatial configuration opened up by the search
engine’s ordering of verbal fragments into phrasal selections of varying
length, number, and juxtaposition (depending on the size and complexity of the
search terms entered by the user). Google makes “decisions” for the user
based on a hierarchized set of variables, including the order in which search
terms are entered, the perceived relevance of matches, attempts to avoid
redundant repetitions, etc. When a certain number of search terms is involved,
the principles guiding the engine’s decisions to truncate matches are
necessarily projected past concerns of relevancy to an arbitrary economics of
inclusion. This is not that different from the way our own minds work: the raw
data our brains hold is capable of only limited representation in the field of
what we actually say, write, or even consciously think. This may account for the
“paranormal” effect: leftover or excluded terms hover back there somewhere
as ghosts, latent if not present.
So the three-line
paragraph constructed by the search engine manifests a crudely modulated
articulation of imagistic, thematic, and discursive possibilities. My role as
poet in these cases is to enact (or perhaps burlesque) the continuance of the
engine’s decision-making and category-building process—to treat its
concatenations of textual samples as the motivated communiqués they may
initially resemble.
In Deer Head Nation, the use in many poems of non-verbal characters such as serial colons, equal signs, ellipses, and so on as “decorative” elements akin to drop-case caps or border illustrations might signal a move in the opposite direction: to reverse the functionality of the characters in their original contexts (for example, in computer code or similar technical applications), conferring a flourish status upon them. This kind of primitivist reduction may also figure in the paranormal aspect you mention—otherwise practical symbols are superstitiously implemented as fetish-object radio signals for speaking with the dead, or at least with uncanny hovering deer heads.
Watten: Later, I suggested that the oracle Kasey may have come to Detroit to consult would have advised him, forthwith, to find a composer for a Deer Head Overture, during the performance of which a huge hologram of a deer head would materialize over the orchestra. After Herb Granger's remark that what he is interested in, as a philosopher, is "thinking the thought of Heraklitus" (rather than interpreting it), what would it mean to "think the thought of the deer head"? Is the place of the deer head the place of the unthought, or even further, the unthinkable? What can an algorithmically located string of symbols be said to represent, as thinking? Is there something out there in cyberspace thinking, as a deer head thinks?
For the Deer Head Overture, perhaps the music would be derived from a Google Music Search, as yet undeveloped, that would search identical strings of three notes in world music. Twelve-tone and harmonic strings would equally be accessed, leading to unique combinations of the rigorous and the sentimental. Raymond Roussel, I think, intended just such a music for the zither he describes in Locus Solus. Jackson Mac Low, it may be said, made musical forms precisely on the basis of combinatorial possibilities—and then staged them, so that this effect might be heard.
Daly: I think "paradigital" is a great idea. I am focused on exploiting technology and techné. While a lot of what I write relies on information available through the internet, and while I still haven't made anything creative that is a sample of my technology work, I found many of the texts and translations I used in DaDaDa online, but even more in books. Like everyone, I do tend to use the internet to put types of information and learning into poems that would take an enormously long time to find if researched otherwise. I like to use now-ubiquitous desktop software and techniques in an effort to make it plain the opportunities that're available to anyone.
My opportunistic efforts—I'll get bored somewhere and fiddle around with my cell phone until I get a poem out of it—I don't know that I would call that distributing authorship so much as using a tool or an object for a purpose, however whimsical. I try to build in an authorship which allows the reader to author, of course. There is a poem I haven't finished called Seedbed/Controller which is different ways of programming game controllers for Nintendo (from the hotel room guides to the games—I'm too cheap to buy the games, but not to spend hours reading the user guide). The idea was to 1) write the poem, 2) steer it through some wacky gardening texts and see what controlling the different objects and characters would do, 3) make a game out of it from a game engine like those you can buy at a big box store.
I think my Hello Kitty poem could be paradigital—I started writing Hello Phantasm/She Has no Mouth using internet searches rather than free association. Maybe I will "translate" it using different search engines [I used to mostly use Alta Vista during the time it was the leading technical search engine, for example, and am still fooling around with various engines.]
While writing some of the poems in DaDaDa, I did have a sense of a collaboration with the dead.
An aside—one of the thoughts I had was that Hazel Hall might be a 1920's female poet version of Eigner in some way. She could not walk, and was confined to a third floor of a family home in Portland, OR, earning her family's keep by embroidering (lingerie, etc.) until she went blind. She had a wide correspondence, including one with Vachel Lindsay (she had a terrible crush on him). Her poems use sewing, but they also are limited to things she knew from looking out her window at passersby on a small portion of sidewalk by using an angled mirror. Two weeks before she died in 1924, she had a dream forecasting her death. In those two weeks, she wrote a final manuscript. Her poetry was conventional, but the way her process and content was related to her professional knowledge and personal experience—her information—was not. There are plenty of writers who are, oh, editors, whose poems have nothing to do with the process of writing and editing. Readers seem to have completely ignored Hall's situation, which is obvious from reading her poems.
I don't know how much I've learned from digital media about poetry. Very little. I don't think poetry has taught me much about digital media, either. What I like to do is to apply what I know as variously as possible and see what happens. I have been thinking that the poems were applications, but they're not. They are not experiments either, or at least not yet. You can see how quickly I resort to examples of things I've written, because I do write to learn the ways in which writing tests different ideas as I'm writing them. You can also see why I haven't gone out and bought x software and spent a lot of time using it to realize a project. And that chimes with Kasey's paradigital. Some of those fetish object radio signals too!
I wonder how much the three-note search would differ from three-consonant meditation. I wonder how different it would be from multi-player Name That Tune. My sister and I used to try to play Name That Tune on long car trips. The trick was to hum the notes poorly. I wonder about the algorithms of the Google search and the formal aspects of flarf, since form and experiment can also be algorithmic.
Carla Harryman [round 2]: Catherine, I'd like to open with a question about eros and system. Your writing thematically and affectively offers the reader entry, part way, into the work through a language of desire. At the same time, it features technology, logic, and system (verse making would be included in this) as a kind of virtual event. What is the relationship between the erotic and the system?
Catherine Daly: The poem in which I attempted to use Barthes in DaDaDa is one I'm still really uncomfortable with, the Angela de Foligno poem. Her erotic (erotic, fetishistic—as most of the Free Spirit Franciscans, I read) system of belief and practice is still opaque to me—where I understand it, it is so dark it is difficult for me to follow enough to relate.
In one way, what I am trying to do in the poems in DaDaDa is to make each poem a system using a different process. Each poem has another system as a source and an application of that source. What separates the poems into sections is the sort of source and the suite of methods I use to approach that source: canonical or quasi-canonical text, women's writing or testimony (in the case of the Inquisition testimony, generally recorded by men), or lives and works and collage. Viewed in this way, the erotic seems either incidental, emergent, or applied as do the IS/IT "bells and whistles."
However, the erotic is the system in the minnemystics in the HERESY section and end of READING FUNDAMENTALS, as it is in bhakti in Hinduism. In medieval Christianity and in pre-modern Hinduism and Buddhism, there's an idea that you pursue knowledge or truth or information intellectually, emotionally, or practically, and the emotional way is the one open to women. The erotic system in the poem isn't necessarily the same one in the source, though. I wanted to survey erotic systems. One reason is that the sources are so very censored.
I didn't survey information systems so much as use some of the artifacts of working in an environment of technology as tools or games for pursuit of knowledge or truth or information. For example, there's a truth table embedded in "In Medias Res." Also, I chose fading to white/erasing for fairly obvious reasons. In Marguerete Porete's allegorical play, she had characters named Sophia, etc., so I used words like Humility as names. It is interesting to note that her work has been turned into a number of digital projects, including one edited by Marjorie Luesebrink/MD Coverley and an early version of Anne Carson's libretto that used to be up at U. of Michigan Ann Arbor.
Because questions about relationships among the erotic, communication, information, knowledge, and technology are part of the foundational questions for the poems, though, the poems are contradictory about this on the surface.
Back to your question, I'm not sure I understand what a "virtual event" is. But it is interesting that in systems design and in literature there are different definitions of it. The most interesting ones to me seem to be the way you can make a fake event and then associate real events with it in system design and the way that in interacting with the literary various sorts of events can seem to have occurred or to be made to occur.
With the Palm and the siting of e, I was trying to conflate the environments (writing on a computer). So there seems to be something in common with writing the erotic, belief systems, and these sorts of virtual event.
Sarah Ruddy: "I long to be dissolved and united." For Catherine, primarily, but I pose the question in general and I have a feeling that everyone might have something to say about this. Fortuitously, I just received an email from a friend of mine who studies "New Media," inviting me to check out a game she has recently crafted. Now, I have an ongoing and long standing beef with "New Media," but that might be neither here nor there. In any case, my friend’s game requires players to link up via chat, and then a certain number of players "perform" an arbitrarily chosen gender while the others try to guess which gender they are performing and then which gender they "really are." I think that you can probably see the number of levels on which this is troublesome. My friend bills the game as being about gender and performativity, and, for one thing, I’m not sure I understand what the need for "new media" is here, except that it provides for the anonymity (another touch-point of our original discussion) of the players in the service of the second part of the game, although even this seems to go against the very idea that gender is performed by confusing biological sex with constructed gender. In any case, my biggest question about the game is this: Can one perform gender virtually? How can the virtual space of untouching, which is something that I can see employed in your poetry (Catherine), or of information, facilitate an extension of the body that enables performativity ("digits where the public used to be")? Is this an "erotic system?" Because I read performativity as connected to the reciprocal relationship between bodies and space. Is the virtual performance of gender a performance of one’s relationship to information (although one has a relationship to information on many levels, not reducible to gender, so I guess my question should be, is the performance of one’s relationship to information one way of performing gender in virtual space?). This interests me in terms of the various woman saints and martyrs who speak in your work, and, as you point out, whose words are often recorded by men (inquisitors, etc.) and also in terms of the performance of a re-appropriation of Spenser’s "Amoretti" in "Adorata." What is the nature of performativity in virtual space?
This also relates to my questions about both blogging and Deer Heads, which I will post when time permits.
Daly: It might be useful to mention fan fiction—which to my mind is similar to wondering what Emma Bovary was thinking at points when those thoughts aren't written by Flaubert—if you write it down—and the Chinese Room at the same time. I wonder how different these are from writing characters of another gender. I hated James Dickey's Puella. Maybe I should reread it. I could rewrite it if I had some time to waste.
There are so many online sex games, like Gor games, and IRC chats used to play them, and the proportion of women playing them is small while loads of female characters are played. These make your friend's game seem ironic. Is it?
I'd also like to mention that technical gadgetry is not only commercial but corporate, and to me, a great deal of the D/s, controller/slave, etc., relationships seem inherent, given, related to the predominantly male predominantly capitalistic/institutional nature of the objects, those who make and use them, and those who consume them. Even a MAC I had had a slave floppy drive.
I'd like to address your more difficult-to-respond-to questions after thinking more, but one thing is that I read "Adorata" at a grad conference at USC called "Monster & Critic." Not virtual space. Marjorie Perloff gave the big talk, which I skipped; Daniel Tiffany (Toy Medium) was supposed to be moderating my panel, which he skipped. I had attempted to apply to read the poem, not to be empanelled. But, it being a conference, they invited some random poets who had nothing to do with monsters or criticism to read, and then put the on-topic poets on panels. I introduced the poem, the critical message (of Spenser's poem), and the creation of the monstrous Elizabeth Boyle (and EB as the bride of the monster) as arising from "play." The audience was pretty confused by that idea.
Ruddy: I can safely say that I am 100 percent sure that my friend's game is NOT meant to be ironic. I don't think it's in enough dialogue with other games and the culture of online gaming to engage in the kind of metadiscourse about its own existence that would render it ironic. Perhaps (I hope) I am wrong about this. But now that I think about it, this does bring up a (sort of) interesting question about metadiscourse. It offers up a different level of engagement with information, and I wonder if that nonlinearity of transmission is something like the "play" that so confused your listeners when you read "Adorata"? How might one represent that kind of nonlinear (multidirectional) transmission of information in poetry, on the page? Am I just asking a (less well formulated) question about "paradigital poetics"? (Kasey If you don't feel like you have already answered this question, I'm certainly directing it toward you, too.)
Daly: "the virtual space of untouching." I am so glad you have a beef and not a venison with new media. I want to say that the "space" (I don't think it is "space," but it seems useful) added to the experience? practice? deliberate habit? of writing, even writing on a scrap of paper with an eye pencil, after the ubiquity of electronic devices, may have changed the "page" or the "act" forever for those who experience the ubiquity of those devices and also write, and write using implements that are "to hand." I think that writing the way I wrote DaDaDa and am still writing on those series, wrote OOD and am still writing on those series, and am devising the next, was an experience of freedom, which is why the liber (book, liberty) etymology is I hope important in some way in Confiteor. And the experience of writing was an experience of freedom in "the virtual space of untouching." I would distinguish it from the experience of dealing with a page. Even though I've done paper craft, because I have a different sort of duty in a "digital space," because it is impersonal in the way a page for making marks is not, I can be the meta me instead of the mini me. Anonymity? Not just anonymity, or perhaps opportunity rather than true anonymity. Which is why, in this project, the freakin' "deer head" keeps rearing?
"in service of the second part of the game." The second part of the game is gender, and the first part of the game is chat serving gender, which is a problem with the game. It is not a bad problem! Another problem with the straw game is that it is in a sexualized, performative, interactive environment with a history and seems oblivious to that.
What is an erotic system? Systems have eros. Assembling a system, making a semblance, intention and writing involves yearning and frustration. It makes sense to me to offer this as a way to enter into interpretation, to include it. What I meant by "erotic system" may merely be the synapsical relationships among elements of a system and aspects into, onto it. Thus, the overstarred is significant, erotic; touch one object, the rest respond. So virtual performativity is an erotic system, according to this definition.
Herb Granger [round 3]: The historian of philosophy, as I like to think of myself, tries to get at the opinions of the author of the texts the historian is trying to make sense of. In the case of Heraclitus of Ephesus we have some hundred and twenty fragments, mostly in the Ionian Greek of Heraclitus, and some testimonies about his beliefs from other ancient authors who had read his book and who write about it. In some cases these authors may have lived a thousand years or so after Heraclitus. It's exciting to think that one might think one's way into the thoughts of someone from so long ago, in a dead language no less (which I, more or less, read), from a 'culture' no longer around. Still, we can make sense of what's written in the dead language, and since we are trying to understand the thoughts of another human being, a person perhaps not too different from ourselves, we hope to make some progress in making sense of what he has written, however strange it might seem to be. Others have offered their interpretations, and one might argue with those interpretations, as a way of orienting oneself. The basic presumption here, I suppose, is that persons are close enough in nature, even over different languages, cultures, and in different historical periods, so that they may make some approximate sense of one another. Special study may be called for as well. For instance, in reading Heraclitus one needs to appreciate some important things about the tradition of the Pythian Apollo, since for his own enterprise Heraclitus draws our attention to the peculiarities of this god when he writes, "The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but gives a sign" (frag. 93). Some have thought that H. intends to draw a parallel between himself and Apollo about their common mode of communication, or between Apollo and the nature of things, because in another fragment H. says, "Nature loves to hide" (frag. 123). I like to think that he intends both interpretations.
Heraclitus is real, though he lived long ago, and he's left us some clues about his thoughts. Emma Bovary is a fictional character, but I find it perfectly reasonable to try to reconstruct her thoughts too. About how she thinks about herself and those around her, what's of value to her, even crudely her `philosophy' or her attitudes about this or that. She has a character, which we know a great deal about, and a history, and in this history there are some gaps; not everything is told us about what she thinks, and sometimes the narrator says he doesn't know and gives us a couple of possibilities he has in mind. What did Emma think e.g. about Charles on their wedding night? What sorts of opinions did Emma have about her mother? Thinking about these things might be helpful in making better sense of Emma, and how she ended up just the way she did. And so on.
But what about the thoughts of the deer head? Well, if it were the thoughts of Mr. Deerhead, whose character becomes vivid enough, and who has some story that I'm told, then I might consider what he might be thinking about this or that. The deer head must be a person to have any conceivable thoughts, which he might share with the rest of us, or which we might infer, in the way we infer anyone's thoughts.
Watten: It's no accident that poets since time immemorial have been concerned with the meaning of "mine auctor," their source in a text authored by someone not immediately available to them. Chaucer infers the authority of his source, but the text opens up possibilities of meaning for at least two voices, poet and "auctor." Therein lies an open field of interpretive possibility, a site for construction, and Chaucer was very aware of it. Spin doctoring may have arisen at exactly the same moment, and the discipline of literary interpretation founded. The romantics, German or otherwise, founded their critical methodology precisely on this gap, and there wouldn't be modern poetry, or an English department, without them. Pound famously caught up with such possibilities in his translation of the Sapphic fragment "spring . . . / too long . . . / Gongula . . . ," leaving open exactly what "Gongula" might signifying (or not). What is interesting in Kasey and Catherine's work is the way that technology has become the oracle, the "nonauthor" that is the source of meanings as yet to be determined. The use of the nonauthor is precisely the inculcation of an openness of interpretation—the promulgation of what Keats called "negative capability," the ability to admit to contradictions "without any irritable reaching after fact and conclusion." As a poet, Keats understood precisely how negative capability was a necessity for poetic speech, a capacity that is not simply expressive but founds a much larger interpretive and ethical practice.
One question here is, Is reading Heraklitus like knowing Emma Bovary's thoughts on her wedding night—which, I think, very strictly exist in the form of an oracular utterance channeled by Flaubert, but not in the mind of any intentional subject (except Flaubert in his transmission of them); or is reading Emma Bovary like establishing the text of Heraklitus? Isn't there a possibility that Heraklitus, also, was simply "made up"—that he's really the Deer Head as author of oracular utterances?
Granger: Instead of a 'non-author,' I'd recommend what lies beyond the author, or the extra-authorial authority, which is still an 'authority.' Flaubert sets loose a character, Emma Bovary, whom he develops up to a point, within fictional space and time, within the confines of her fictional story, of the fictional events that go into the makeup of her fictional life. Some things we know; some we don't. Some things we infer, make a reasonable inference to the best explanation, in filling in some gaps in our knowledge, about what Emma believes, or how she may have behaved or reacted to something not depicted in the novel. Emma has a life of her own that goes beyond the immediate dictates of Flaubert. He may be thought to create something that goes beyond his immediate intentions, and after a point is beyond his control. The fictional life becomes a life. Although it's not particularly an issue for the story, we know enough about Emma to know that she would never wear a bright, red dress to any ball (unlike the character Bette Davis plays in the film Jezebel).
Something of a similar sort works for those who write up or develop arguments, say, philosophical arguments. The author produces something beyond his control, an argument that leads to a conclusion he might not be too happy to embrace. Yet that's how the argument goes he's started rolling. The characters in a (good) book have a similar autonomy. A powerful imagination can produce characters in a story with enough depth of character so that the characters in effect dictate to the author what their reaction will be to a given situation, which the author might imagine. The author must submit to the authority of his characters, just as the author of an argument must submit to the logic, and thus the authority, of his argument. (As an aside, I'm often struck, dismayed, by what I've written. I reread an article I've written, and it's as if I'm reading the work of someone else often I must figure it out in just the way I figure out the intention of other authors. I may even ask someone else; 'Is this what is meant?').
Thus I don't think I'd object to a parallel between reading the fragments of Heraclitus, trying to put together his opinions into a more-complete account, of what he took to be the nature of reality, etc., and reading the story of Emma Bovary, trying to fill in any gaps there might be in the story, as an effort to try to understand Emma more fully as she is in herself. But it's not because the two are equally `made up' whether made up or not, Emma has a nature, and the thoughts of Heraclitus have their nature. This we try to discover, not invent.
Watten: A fork in the road—are we talking about the thought of Being as universal (Heidegger's reading of Heraklitus, say), or Bobby Fischer's greatest chess games as rule-governed? Perhaps what unites them is the notion of the "author in eternity," i.e., the form of the author as universal, Blake's notion as interpreted by the poet Robert Duncan as a Great Conversation (perhaps we have seen this on PBS) in which Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost chat up Heraklitus, Heidegger, Freud, Nietzsche, and Gertrude Stein. And we know pretty much what they would say. Emma Bovary could be at the table, too, as a Great Character in the Great Conversation.
What about contingency—even radical contingency, as in the case of a Google Search? What does this have to offer our account of authorship? Remembering that for modern authorship, Baudelaire spoke of the "transitory and the eternal," an important grounding in historicity else there is no evocation of the possibility of the eternal or universal. So—the Deer Head arises out of a cloud of mesmeric ciphers to instantiate the author as radical contingency.
Granger: I don't know what Barrett means by a 'fork in the road', some sort of existential distinction, which my comments precipitate? Emma never existed; Heraclitus existed, and so did his philosophical beliefs. In the case of H. we try to discover through our somewhat speculative interpretation his thoughts or judgments from the evidence that survives from his lost book. In the case of Emma, we try to discover what she said in her conversation, say, with Monsieur Bidet, which we learn about from the view from the window of Bidet's neighbor, Madame Tuvache, who with her friend are spying on Emma and Monsieur Bidet. Emma and Bidet do speak to one another in the story, and thus they must have said something to one another. We can imagine how their conversation would go in much the way we would imagine how a real conversation observed from afar might have gone, or for that matter a conversation we read about in a history book about real, but long-gone people, between Henry James and his cousin, the alleged model for Millie, on the topic of marriage. We may know the circumstances and a great deal about the characters of the persons involved, and thus we may make a reasonable surmise. Of course, Emma may be said to exist in only a counterfactual cosmos. Not so, for the thoughts of H. or the historical, but unknown, conversation we knew took place between, say, James and his cousin.
As for contingency in creating a piece of art in the use of a Google Search, would it be any different from the contingency Ford Maddox Ford tells us about in his memoir when he was writing letters to friends, etc. on a typewriter? Sometimes he'd hit the wrong letter and then from that mistake he'd change the word or even the content of the sentence so that the mistake would be mended into a new word or thought (and he wouldn't have to go to the trouble to retype the letter!). This strikes me as a reasonable form of improvisation based on a more-or-less random event. But haven't artists made use of this sort of improvisation for some time in one form or another, since the days of dada, since surrealism, and beyond? Does the computer provide just another way to exploit contingency for the sake of creativity?
Daly: In fan fiction based on books, characters, scenes, and worlds created by an author are used by a contemporary writer. Some of these are faithful to the original text but fill in gaps in the manner Herb discusses, but these, on the sites I just checked, were mostly the results of high school writing assignments. I do not think it is an accident that this type of character, for fan fiction, is most commonly seen by the fan fiction writer in film or on TV. I think it is interesting that traditional character development in fiction (where the character is said to speak the story, dictate it to the transcribing author) seems to have something in common with this.
Celebrities are used as characters in fan fiction as well. Lots of the fan fictions based on television shows are just unsold episodes written on spec—each long-running show has a show bible so that writers can track things characters have done or are likely to do. It is easy to imagine a story of the "Emma Bovary Visits Vietnam" ilk. I have never written any fan fiction.
The two things I've done with Flaubert are 1) a mostly failed attempt at putting translations of the Madame Bovary dream sequences into alexandrines (I tried to put the famous dream sequences in Crime and Punishment and Don Quixote into meter as well), and 2) for a longer prose project called Les Grandes Horizontales, I have tracked down the writings of a series of courtesans, mistresses, etc. (mostly blackmail books, but it is not as though tons of women were writing other types of books in this period). One is Apollonie Sabatier, and there are Baudelaire poems to her (he proposed), letters to and from Flaubert, and more than a few paintings which include her figure. This aura of material around an author and an author's characters is different from the use and criticism of classical texts—the way fragments survive in quotation.
My big project includes a variety of thoughts about identity and naming, and about the confessional and autobiographical, and it uses women's writings and writings about women as source material. There are the Legendary collage poems which pull through biographical and critical material to conjure a person. These are unlike, say, Vachel Lindsay's poems to film stars because he was doing his to leverage populism. During the original discussion, we concentrated more on the idea of anonymity, and I talked about some "cut ups" I was doing and how they had a specific purpose, but how they were strangely anonymous. I mentioned (and read) from Palm Anthology, which uses bits from the Greek anthology. I wondered about Anne Carson (just heard her read for the first time) during our earlier talk, but didn't feel like talking about her work, so I didn't say anything. But she uses characters (and authors as characters) from classical material, certainly. Just so we don't have to talk about archetypes or her religious belief.
Granger: I find Catherine's project of putting Emma's dreams into Alexandrines enchanting. How about those of Charles? There's a point in the story, when in the evening they are 'daydreaming' at the same time, side by side, about very different futures for the each of them. I appreciate Catherine's comments on 'fan fiction'—about which I knew little or nothing—which helps me put more sharply my thoughts. The kind of fiction my comments could concern goes beyond fan fiction, I think. In his epic Virgil goes well beyond the material he inherited about Aeneas in depicting the latter's adventures, and Dante picks up interestingly the thread of Homer's Odysseus, when in the Inferno he has Ulysses recount his last voyage, into the rough waters around the peak of Purgatory on the other side of the world. For that matter, I like to think (with others) that James Joyce's story of a day in Mr. Bloom's life is an account of a day in the obscure life Odysseus picks for himself, as Plato reports in Republic 10, for his next reincarnation. I agree with Catherine that cases of fiction of this sort, which are based upon an author's characters, are markedly different from the criticism that goes into the appreciation of the fragments of a philosopher's lost book. But when I was reflecting on the fictions we might spin about Emma Bovary, I was not thinking so much of another story about Emma, in the way writers will continue to tell stories about Sherlock Holmes in stories Conan Doyle never had in mind. Rather, I was thinking of what we often do in reading a given story in trying to have a better appreciation of the characters in that very story. My understanding of Emma's character is tested, perhaps enhanced, when I surmise what she was talking about with Monsieur Bidet. Or, better yet, I may develop a more accurate understanding of Emma by considering what she would be like if her husband Charles had suddenly come into a great deal of money, and Emma could have all the expensive things she ever desired. I think it's important to see that Emma would still have something close to the same sorts of problems she actually has in Flaubert's novel and that her plight has nothing essentially to do with money or credit capitalism, contrary to what some readers have insisted. This act of imagination is not the composition of a new story about Emma, but an effort to get a better understanding of Emma, just as she is in Flaubert's novel. I think we perform much the same sort of 'thought-experiment' with people whom we know, in trying to get a better idea of them through imagining them in different circumstances—e.g. of some neighbor we might wonder if she would be any happier if she did leave her husband after all, etc. There is a truth about Emma, which the reader is trying to get at, just as there is a truth about what Heraclitus thought about the nature of reality, which his interpreter is trying to get at. Here is where there may be a parallel between 'thinking Emma's thoughts' and 'thinking those of Heraclitus', where we have textually little to go on. And here is where something like the issue of the author's anonymity might come into the discussion again, or, not so much anonymity, as the eclipse of the author, in which the authority of the character in the novel comes forward. I certainly don't think that the death-of-the-author doctrine makes any sense, but I do think the authority of the author can be exaggerated. The author is discovering or uncovering something, as well as creating something, and in that respect the author is secondary. What the author is dealing with, shall we say, is bigger than the author. Poets of antiquity had a pretty strong sense of this when they felt they were under the obligation of the Muses. It's interesting to note that Homer never names himself, although he'll occasionally refer to himself in the first person. Not so in the case of Hesiod! He makes a big fuss about himself, and I wonder if he may be the first in Western writing to do so. But really that was not so long ago.
[Posts received to 4/16/05.]
Catherine Daly, Catherine Daly's Blog.
K. Silem Mohammad, {lime tree}.
[Text copyright © the authors 2005. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]
