Davenport, Ernst Machs Max Ernst

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Ernst Machs Max Ernst Author(s): Guy Davenport Source: New Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 1, Self-Confrontation and Social Vision (Autumn, 1977), pp. 137-148 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468442 . Accessed: 09/07/2014 16:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.205.136.30 on Wed, 9 Jul 2014 16:09:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Transcript of Davenport, Ernst Machs Max Ernst

Page 1: Davenport, Ernst Machs Max Ernst

Ernst Machs Max ErnstAuthor(s): Guy DavenportSource: New Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 1, Self-Confrontation and Social Vision (Autumn,1977), pp. 137-148Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468442 .

Accessed: 09/07/2014 16:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.

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Page 2: Davenport, Ernst Machs Max Ernst

Ernst Machs Max Ernst

Guy Davenport

R. RICHARD PEVEAR, the gifted poet and translator, has re- marked of my book of stories Tatlin! that although it con- tains "a wealth of narrative invention, the invention does not

go outside the limits of fiction."' He is making a valid, if troublesome, distinction between storytelling and fiction, between narrative that is openly an invention (Apuleius, Malory, Rabelais are his examples) and narrative that is so plausible and lifelike that it is indistinguishable from an account of reality (Mrs. Gaskell, Balzac, Proust). He feels that storytelling is native to the human spirit, congenial, and social, rich in "interruption, quotation, dialectic."2 Fiction, on the other hand, casts a spell, is narcotic and propagandistic; it is an art of "continuity, coherence, persuasion."3

It is Mr. Pevear's observation that my writing keeps coming close to breaking out of fiction into storytelling, but that it never does. I read his article with much interest and a great deal of puzzlement. We had a long and instructive correspondence on the matter, which I ini- tiated, as I had not once thought about the distinction while I was writing the stories, and because critical attention of such thorough- ness and intelligence was something I could scarcely have anticipated.

Talking about oneself, said Menander, is a feast that starves the guest, and I hope in this essay to keep to the subject I was invited to consider, the confrontation of self in imaginative writing. I accepted the invitation with a wry trepidation, out of curiosity to see what could be discovered. My writing is primitive and contrived, and I have never written about myself in any conscious way: my stories are all set in places of which I have no personal knowledge and usually in times when I did not exist. I was forty-three when I wrote my first story since undergraduate days, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia,"4 in which Kafka attends in the company of his friends Max and Otto Brod an airshow of archaic flying machines.

Kafka's account of this event is his first published writing, and as he could not in 1909 know the significance of what he had seen, I com- bined his newspaper article with Brod's memory of the occasion in his biography of Kafka, and with what I could discover of other people (D'Annunzio, Puccini) who were there, as well as of people who might well have been there (Wittgenstein). To realize certain details I studied the contemporary photographs of Count Primoli, read his- tories of aviation, built a model of Blkriot's Antoinette CV25, and col-

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lected as rich a gathering of allusions to the times as I could. I pre- sided over the story like a playful Calvinist God who knew what would happen in years to come. I knew that Kafka's first entry in his notebooks that led to writing The Castle was made at Merano, where he would have been gazing at the castle in which Ezra Pound was living at the time I was writing. What kind of symbol (if any) this constructs I do not know, but I felt that something was inside the image. It can be said of all my involucra that I hope there is a meaning inside, but do not necessarily know. I trust the image; my business is to get it onto the page.

A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. In the stories "Tatlin!" and "Robot" drawings appear as inte- gral parts of the text: sculpture by Tatlin that probably no longer exists, drawn from poor photographs in bad reproductions; icons of Lenin and Stalin; quotations from Lascaux. The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky), a page of Pound, a Brakhage film.

A writer's own sense of influences is spurious and frequently pre- posterous. When an influence dyes the mainstream it is all too obvi- ous, disastrous, and tyrannical. As a true tributary it adds its lot and disappears into the flow. Who would suspect the influence of Dela- croix on Van Gogh, of Dickens on Kafka, of Harriet Beecher Stowe on Tolstoy? My literary models (Kafka, Joyce, Flaubert, Welty) probably go unsuspected because of the ineptitude with which I have followed them, but my pictorial models are more deeply integrated, and perhaps more of an instigation than literary ones.

As a scholar I have always kept literature and painting together as a compound subject, the one complementing the other: Milton and Diirer, Joyce and Tchelitchew, Apollinaire and Picasso, Kafka and Klee, Whistler and Henry James.

I first saw a way to plot stories by studying the films of Stan Brakhage, where an architectonic arrangement of images has re- placed narrative and documentation. What Brakhage is doing in his films is an invention that brings cinema close to poetry like the odes of Keats or the ideogrammatic mode of Pound, Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson, all of whom Brakhage claims as masters. How one art learns from another is a question better asked as what one art learns from another. The process begins in inspira- tion, which we might call the aesthetic will. Whistler's nocturnes and harmonies are a response to subject matter. His paradigmatic influences (Hiroshige, Degas, Velkzquez) must fit into this process, along with symbolism and iconology, and the tacit and unsuspected dictates of vogue and epoch. Brakhage, I know, is writing a poem and

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composing a piece of music (his films are for the large part silent), at least, when he is making a film. He knows the history of film as well as Joyce knew that of literature or Picasso that of painting.

Things become quite complex, then, when we start looking at what activates the aesthetic will. And I suspect that the elements to be considered most profitably to understanding are the ones so familiar that curiosity passes them by in innocent stupidity. Words, for a be- ginning. Though I admire styles in which words are deployed in a practical economy (Bunyan, Caesar, Agassiz), my heart is with styles controlled by artifice. The prose of Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta is the most consistently interesting that I know, and his Dawn in Britain is a poem I read often, not only for the severity and archaic beauty of its diction, but also because it is the only epic in English.

My intent, then (to begin to answer Mr. Pevear's query as to whether I am a storyteller or fictioneer), has been to emulate Doughty in an artificial diction. Fiction demands a concealed and inconspicu- ous style; storytelling, a mimicry or a postured manner. Compare the Tentation with Madame Bovary: both styles are hallucinatory. The Ten- tation, however, is at every point a fabrication which we attend to because of its formal and imaginative qualities. We read Madame Bov- ary with quite different eyes.

The subjects I chose for the stories in Tatlin! are all in the position of being, as fact, almost not there. The story "Tatlin!" is built out of a mere handful of doubtful certainties. There is no biography of the man; his work is hidden or destroyed. All my information was at least thirdhand. The same is true of a day in 1909 at Brescia, of the discov- ery of Lascaux (no accounts agree, and though I have talked with Jacques Marsal one beautiful July evening in Montignac, we did not talk about the discovery of the cave but about the tragedy of its having to be closed because of microorganisms growing under the twenty- thousand-year-old paint). Of Herakleitos' life no one knows anything. The story about Poe is a lie Poe told, which I take at face value, and there is no biography of Adriaan van Hovendaal, whom I think I saw one morning in Amsterdam fifteen years ago.

It is my sense that I am always telling a story rather than projecting an illusory, fictional world. I am aware of the trap in argument whereby we can seem to square a story with reality, and I felt wonder- fully helpless when various critics jumped on my "mistakes." One brave Boston soul swore he was at that air show in Brescia, that Kafka wasn't there (the crowd was estimated by La Sentinella Bresciana to be 50,000), and that Bl6riot did not look like my description. A Russian has written to know why I have Lenin speaking in a dialect he wouldn't have used. And so on.

After the book was published, I had the strange and exciting ex-

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perience of talking with a man who had known Tatlin. I heard details I would like to have known before: Tatlin's love of children, who were invariably fascinated by his own childlikeness; his atheism (which still shocked my interlocutor); his mistresses ("just women, one of them very beautiful"); his friendship with the watercolorist Bruni; his sing- ing; the whiteness of his stark rooms in the bell tower of the New Maiden Monastery in Moscow. I learned that he never joined the Communist Party, that his eyes were slate gray, that he was a dark blond, that his voice was baritone, and that "he was a very complicated man, restless, disillusioned, silent, stubborn."

But verisimilitude of the kind invented by Scott and Flaubert, which achieved its apotheosis in D. W. Griffith's and Cecil B. De Mille's movie sets, I had sidestepped at the outset, trying instead for Kafka's description of America (skyscrapers symmetrically placed in wheat- fields, the Statue of Liberty with a sword in her hand), for Rousseau's meticulous and pedantic mistakes. Euripides has the Egyptians living in pyramids; a character in Jardiel Poncela perversely consults a map of Barcelona to locate streets in Madrid; and I saw that my best hope of a sustained reality would be one like Max Ernst's world, which is always of verifiably real things that are not, however, where they are supposed to be. Surrealism knows no mistakes.

Writing in the twentieth century has for its greatest distinction the discovery of the specific. "Things," Proust said, "are gods." Compare Henry James and Joyce, Monet and Ernst. One could write a history of the specific and the vague; it would probably turn out to be a history of attention. If, as Barthes says, writing is an excess of historic intelligibility,5 what writing is about and how it is written, especially with what regard to detail, constitute a parallel, companion history. We are aware of this kind of history, though much history has been written without instruction from it: Gibbon, for instance, in whose greatest of histories everything metamorphoses into style before our eyes. All is Gibbon, Gibbonesque. All is shaped in deference to polish, to a regularity of surface.

And all styles must do something like, or fail to be a style at all. I am not aware of having a style (hence my claim to primitiveness), but I am intensely aware of style when I write. I know how Joyce broke out of neoclassical rules, while seeming to obey them; how he dared to be angular, eccentric, barbaric. Style, "the man," remains unexplained, like different handwritings. It is imitation that has progressed into individuality; it is a psychological symptom kin to tone of voice and personality; it is a skill, an extension of character, an attitude toward the world, an enigma.

Let us say that style in writing is a subdivision of manners, its clarity

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solicitude to be understood, its form deference, and its choice of words decorum. This would be a classical definition. We know how Romanticism modified it. With Realism came the mot juste and the rendering of description in the diction of the characters (Ford, Con- rad, Joyce). The logical development of this would be parody and quotation, the stylistic program common to Joyce, Pound, Mann, and Eliot.

It is also the stylistic program of Max Ernst, who, like Joyce, discov- ered that quotation can be eloquent beyond its original statement, and can release meanings concealed in the original. Ernst discloses a nightmare presence in vernacular advertisements and illustrations; Joyce, an unsuspected wealth of psychological nuance in popular fic- tion (Doyle, Corelli, Dodgson).

This autopsy of writing by writing corresponds to Ernst Mach's disturbing and fruitful analysis of science as a psychological history of scientists. Theories, he argued, and even the laws of nature as we know them, are rooted in individual psyches, like works of art. The theory of relativity is in the genius of its conception and in the style of its expression as much a projection of the uniquely individuated mind of Einstein as Jerusalem is of Blake's. A door thus opened admitted both Einstein (who regarded Mach as the liberating force that led to his great discoveries) and Joyce, who needed to see that the mind, whatever its activity, is a unity, its concerns all interdependent.

My understanding, then, of where writing's frontier was when I dared to try a contribution to it (rather like piping along on a pen- nywhistle while listening to Beethoven's Ninth), saw Joyce as a culmi- nation, in the sense that Homer was a culmination of archaic Greece, Plato of the classical world, Plutarch of the Hellenistic, Dante of the medieval, Shakespeare of the Renaissance. One can learn everything from Joyce except how to emulate him. Pound, Proust, Mann: the same holds true of them.

There are, however, corridors around these mountains. One is the hard path Kafka blazed. Another is the discovery by Ernst that Sur- realism need not be Freudian: the raw, unexplained dream still has its power; the dream with legible symbols is a spent force. Hence the liveliness of Ernst, the dullness and triviality of Dali.

Ernst shares with Mach the phenomenological doubt that we wit- ness anything except in agnosis. What we understand of an event is very little compared to our ignorance of its meaning. The greater our sensibility, the sharper our skepticism, the more we are aware of the thinness of the light that is all we have to probe the dark. Ernst's surrealism dislocates our skilled, habitual reading of phenomena, awakening childish wonder, metaphysical dread, engaging us in a

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relationship with the world that forces us to confront that Heraklei- tian logos (what nature, desire, design, and God are saying) which we are free to ignore, "like men in a stupor," or to work with.

My little vision, then, could be generated by taking a few verbs and nouns of the logos (which, Herakleitos warns us, is wordless and re- quires translation from a language of harmonic design, trees, light, time, consciousness, attractions like gravity and reproduction) and speaking a simple statement. My first concern was to follow Mach and Ernst and see that the logos hides in technology in our time. Tatlin! begins with the invention of an archaic flying device, recognizable in other technological dialects as Pegasus, Chinese kites capable of reach- ing the moon, Daedalos' wings, the Wright Flyer, Eros as a pteros or winged phallos, da Vinci's ornithopter.

Tatlin! ends with Commander Neil Armstrong stepping onto the dust of the dead moon. The book therefore spans the history of flight, a sustained symbolic web woven throughout with images of birds, pteroi, machines-eight of the nine sentences in the first paragraph of "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" allude to things that fly, or to things like smoke and flags that seem to.

Composition as I understand it must be both a concrete and abstract continuum. It is not enough in a work of art to narrate; the narration must be made of words that constitute an inner and invisi- ble harmony. The blossoms on the cherry, lyric white and as beautiful a sign as nature gives, must also be seen as a thousand new cherry trees in potentia, as a variant statement of the logos tree, a machine (in the language we now speak) that manufactures carbohydrates with sunlight and atoms.

One of my sure guides is Mother Ann Lee's Herakleitian dictum that every force evolves a form, together with the injunction from a Shaker hymn that we must "love to lay a good foundation/In the line of outward things." This rhymes with the Dogon understanding, more rigorously platonic than Plato, that forms exist in God's mind, realize themselves first in the world as points (the four corners of a house, the four corners of the universe: two solstices, two equinoxes), then as connected points (what we call a blueprint), and then as three-dimensional schemata filled in with matter. They await, like Blake, the apocalyptic day when this scheme will turn itself inside out and disclose an ultimate harmony as yet hidden by God for His own good reasons.

This Dogon sense that man is a forager trying to find God's com- plete plan of the universe instructs (I hope) every page of Tatlin! (both Herakleitos, in the story named for him, and the Dutch philosopher Adriaan van Hovendaal, in "The Dawn in Erewhon," are made to be

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aware of this inner consistency of all dialects of the logos; Kafka and Wittgenstein in "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" have an intuition of it, as do the Abbe Breuil in "Robot," Poe in "1830"). A later story, "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,"6 isolates this theme of foraging and proceeds like an Ernst collage to involve seven themes, or involucra, which when opened disclose the theme of foraging in various senses (Gertrude Stein and the Cubists; wasps; the Dogon and their forager god Ogo; Charles Fourier and his utopian New Harmony; the flying machine, a bionic wasp, as developed by Blkriot and the Wrights; the French photographer Lartigue who made all his masterpieces with a child's intuition before he reached adolescence; and myself). That "myself' means nothing more than that I wanted to include a conver- sation of Samuel Beckett's about Joyce, and felt that this poignancy belonged to the pattern I was making and not to autobiography. The inscription on Fourier's tomb had been copied down in the cemetery at Montmartre the afternoon of the same day that I talked with Mr. Beckett at the Closerie des Lilas (in chairs once occupied by Apol- linaire, Joyce, Picasso, Jarry, Braque); the story, or assemblage, was generated by this moment, with courage derived from the encounter. The sixteen drawings that are meant to be integral with the prose of this story (one hears a lot of the logos with one's eyes) turn the text into a graph ("to write" and "to draw" being the same Greek verb).

I do not know that this continuing of a theme through picture and word "works"; it is perhaps a skill of reading that has been abandoned for so long that we can't accept it. The method is implicit in Ernst (whose pictures are all texts to be read) and in the history of art: the prancing tarpan in Lascaux which I use as the first sentence of "Robot" has a glyph above it that clearly says "horse."

Inside the theme of a technological logos I see a question which I translate from both Samuel Butler's Erewhon (following van Hoven- daal's essays on that astounding involucrum of a book) and Fourier; namely, is matter alive or dead? My symbols here are the living, green earth and the dead moon. Each of the stories states the question in its own way, and the final, long story, "The Dawn in Erewhon," brings all the statements together.

And here my primitiveness as a writer asserts and defines itself, for I could manage no other way of exploring the theme of live earth and dead moon than to keep stating it with an imagistic inarticulateness that helplessly puts whole faith in the ability of the symbols to speak for themselves. The most meaningful of facts about nature seems to me to be that of the ten planets only the earth is alive. Next to this parareligious fact is the machine, which seems to be alive, but isn't. Hence the double theme from Fourier, who redesigned society so that

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we could make the best success possible of being alive on the only living planet, and from Butler, who with wise satire first claimed the machine as a living thing, showed its rivalry to natural evolution, and imagined a people who valued life enough to kill the machines.

Neil Armstrong's step onto a dead planet was the most pressing statement of the question as to the life of matter. He was a human being carried in a machine to posture as if in a charade (the photo- graphs of him standing by that insectlike spacecraft, the American flag starched into a semblance of flying in a wind, the unerasable footprints, and none ever to be discovered of a Friday there before him, the absolute uniqueness of the event, dreamlike, had been an- ticipated by hundreds of Max Ernst drawings and paintings). The meaning of that charade is not only unknowable, it is unaskable.

The first appearance of the moon in "The Dawn in Erewhon" (the Ernst-like description of which is derived from the descriptions of an otherworldly landscape in Wyndham Lewis' Childermass) is intercut-Brakhage-fashion-with scenes of Dutch children, in a set- ting of sterile sand that seems lush beside the dust of the moon, discovering the sexual attraction of each other's bodies. The human body in this story is a countersymbol to the machine. Butler, I feel, would have done much more with this in Erewhon if Victorian prudery had not stood in his way. I felt free to be as explicit as I could, for we have so misunderstood the animality of our bodies that we may de- serve, as I have an Erewhonian Villiers de l'Isle Adam say, to have machines do our living for us.

"The Dawn in Erewhon," whose title is that of a Wyndham Lewis painting (an allusion by Lewis to Doughty's "The Dawn in Britain") is set in the Netherlands (the nether land, Hades), and the recurring images of the moon, where Plutarch and apparently the Pythagoreans thought Hades was, supply visions of a wasteland. Adriaan van Hovendaal (Hadrian, the garden keeper, i.e., Epikouros) is in one dimension an Orpheus in the underworld trying to reclaim Eurydike, by whom I mean (following Ruskin, Proust, Pound, and Joyce, among others7) a spirit lost to the world. What this spirit is-some liveliness, some principle of regeneration and care (I equate it with civilization)-has been the concern of Western literature since around 1830. Hence a story with that title, and my endeavor to make Poe a nameless spirit identified with Byron, Novalis, and others who seem to record the rape of a Persephone or the death of a Eurydike. (Clau- dian wrote the de Raptu Proserpinae the year after the Goths burnt Eleusis; in 1830 the locomotive and other steam machinery began to appear-Hades' black horses in their Aetnaean smoke.)

Van Hovendaal's vision of a lost Eurydike is of both kor6 and kouros,

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because what he is recovering in his philosophy is an archaic under- standing of the world, like his contemporary Wittgenstein. One is Kaatje, one Bruno. Each is meant to be a being from the world of Fourier's New Harmony, free of the restrictions and evasions of "civilization" (Fourier's name for what we call the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution). They are epigonal extensions of Adriaan: when he is Fourier, they are members of the Little Hordes; when he is Higgs the traveler in Erewhon, they are Erewhonians. Together they illustrate a spontaneity and elasticity which a money-valued society must quickly breed out of our young in order to keep the world going in its murderous, despairing, narcotic way.

To achieve a richness of meaning I could manage no other way (again, primitively) than of constant rhyme in images, and of transla- tion of meaning from one image to another, so that somewhere in the textum a thread would become vivid, or a portion of the design would become clear and lead the attentive reader on into the rest. On the surface I had only a sense that a page could be dense in various ways: through a knitting of sound patterns ("voluble pines and yellow villas of the Via Ponale"), through a knitting of imagery, and by evoking the names of people and things (there are ninety-three historical person- ages named in "The Aeroplanes at Brescia").

For making these particulars cohere I tried to learn from certain highly elliptical writers how much can be omitted from the texture of a page. If it is of any interest, the styles I find most useful to study are those of Hugh Kenner, Osip Mandelstam, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Charles Doughty. All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses. From Viktor Shklovski I saw how narrative can be suggested rather than rendered, and how anything can be made startling by taking it out of "its series." Shklovski (and other formalists) felt that art served a purpose by "making the familiar strange," a process of regeneration (of attention, of curiosity, of intelligence) the opposite of narcosis.

One of my concerns was to let nothing of myself get into these stories, whether for Flaubertian detachment or a reluctance to make copy of myself or anyone I know, I can't say. Yet a friend who is also a very great critic has remarked with a degree of irony and wit that all the stories in Tatlin! are self-portraits. What he is perceiving is my engagement with the materials and people of which the stories are made, some as scholarly research, some as lines of inquiry crossing a diversity of activities: the story about Tatlin grew out of a political stance I took some years ago and have since modified, and out of a backtracking study in search of the origins of modernism in painting

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and sculpture; "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," "Robot," "Herakleitos," and "1830" all developed from studies of Kafka, prehistoric painting, early Greek writing, and Poe which exist in other forms (essays, criti- cal studies, translations).

There is another sense in which autobiography enters into writing that is ostensibly objective far deeper than the coloration of attitude and characteristic attention. This entry is secret, sometimes personal, but not hidden (no one, for instance, could find it). In the story "Tatlin!" there is a grandfather to give some reality to, so I gave him details of my own (fused with the grandfather in Gogol's "Old World Landowners"), and gave Tatlin in his childhood activities and emo- tions I knew from my own childhood. This kind of piecing out (always to fill a vacuum of information) is in all of the stories. I confess that these minor details have a peculiar satisfaction for me; it is as if I had a fund of resources to be drawn on only when I could locate nothing in history. I could fill these lacunae with made-up material, except that I mistrust made-up material. This sounds like a paradox, but I have an incident to guide me here. Once, praising J. R. R. Tolkien to his friend Hugo Dyson, I was surprised to hear Dyson say that Tolkien would be a much better writer if he "hadn't made it all up." The lesson to be learned from this is that the writer assembles, finds, shapes. There is nothing to be gained by displacing the authentic. (And I would not agree that Tolkien did: the romantic epic is a game, and we do not confuse games with reality).

There is, however, more to be seen here. My Tatlin is not Tatlin, nor my Poe Poe. But my stories are stories about them. We have lived for some two centuries now in a historical glare to which we are perhaps not yet, as a world, accustomed; we can no longer mythologize events. We do not know anything else to do with people. The Civil War is not a myth, but Lincoln is. Tatlin! begins with the last historical event-the Russian Revolution-to be mythologized by its participants. Into this soft place in the iron ring of history I moved my wedge. By ironically handling the Revolution I hoped to have the purchase to sustain a mythologizing of events, in order to have the advantage of storytelling (while keeping enough of the conventions of fiction to ward off a vatic tone), of the high hand that qualifies as "an excess of historic intelligibility."

So if we go back to the fiat of these stories, there is nothing there but the author, his aesthetic will, and the grist he needs for his work. I hope that every selfish expedient obeyed its explicit exclusion from the feast. All creation is so completely self-expression that the phan- tom, "the self," its quarrels with the world, its confessions, its admira- tion of its image in nemoral pools, should be unwelcome for what it is,

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a guest-invited guest, an intruder. The self, in any case, is a vacuum: nothing until it is filled. Continuity of perception, Mach said, is all we can call mind. A story, then, might be blatantly what it is under vari- ous guises of drama, propaganda, social significance, example, "entertainment"-an atomic spray of essences. The essences I choose (from forty years of attention to the world) can be displayed in words and pictures only, so already we have essences of essences, an absurd- ity, and must fall back and admit that stories are made of words: writing.

Far from wanting a word to be invisible, unassertive, the makeshift vehicle for something else ("idea," "thought"), I want every word to be wholly, thoroughly a word. If reality can be pictured in words, words must be seen as a set of essences in parallel series to the world. This sounds platitudinous until we notice how words are locked into the formulae of parole, paralyzed in cliche, and used without a regard for color, tone, diction. Joyce brought writing closer to speech than it had ever been before, and at the same time distinguished writing from speech and returned it to its lost place among the arts that require genius and labor for their execution. The tenet of Romanticism that art can accommodate and be enriched by the vernacular has by now grown out of all proportion into the belief that the vernacular, un- skilled, spontaneous, and unhindered by any discipline, is the only style natural to writing.

If I have a sensibility distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly artificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, the con- versations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hinze, his cat, sitting by his plate.

All I have done in Tatlin! is to forage among certain events with multiple causes and effects, and to mythologize them as Max Ernst pictured the world in a temporary agnosis, to induce a stutter of recognition. My diction is labored and chiseled, out of a Shakerish concern for the built, and out of a desire to make it as sensitive as I could to "the pat of a shuttlecock, or the creaking of a jack" (a phrase recorded by Johnson in the Dictionary).

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY

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Page 13: Davenport, Ernst Machs Max Ernst

148 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NOTES

1 Richard Pevear, "Tatlin!, or the Limits of Fiction," The Hudson Review, 28 (Spring 1975), 141-46. For other studies, see Alan Williamson, "A Lateborn Modernist," Shenandoah, 26 (Spring 1975), 87-90; Richard Wertime, "Tatlin!" The Georgia Review, 29 (Winter 1975), 948-57; and John Wilson, "Tatlin!: The Renaissance of the Archaic," Master's thesis, California State University, 1975. 2 Pevear, p. 141. 3 Ibid. 4 Guy Davenport, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," The Hudson Review, 22 (Winter 1970), 567-85. (The text in Tatlin! is slightly revised.) 5 Roland Barthes, SadelFourier/Loyola, tr. Richard Miller (New York, 1976), p. 10. 6 Davenport, "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," The Georgia Review, 29 (Winter 1975), 801-41. 7 Davenport, "The Symbol of the Archaic," The Georgia Review, 28 (Winter 1974), 642-57; and "Persephone's Ezra," in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Eva Hesse (Berke- ley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 145-73.

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VOtUME XXXV WINTER 1976 No. 2

Worlds of Works of Art-Nicholas Wolterstoryf Defining a Literary Work-Stein Haugom Olsen Aesthetics Consciousness: the Ground of Political Experience-Hilde Hein Quattrocento Dematerialization: Some Paradoxes in a Conceptual Art- Jonathan Goldberg The Aesthetic Status of Forgeries-Mark Sagoff Some Implications of the Aesthetic Theory of Camus-Ramona Cormier Plato, Visual Perception, and Art-George Kimball Plochmann Hume and the Foundations of Taste-Carolyn WH. Korsmeyer

.ft ierwords: Art and Rationality: A Response to Peter Kivy-James Manns

Metaphor and Falsity-Monroe C. Beardsley Some Further Suggestions on Novelty and Creation-Carl R. Hausman

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