“ In effect, Roubaud requires us to move beyond the “age of suspicion” that Nathalie Sarraute declared open in 1946, then to move beyond the age of aesthetics, and to acquire and practice virtues as readers that mirror the spiritual exercise practiced by the author of TGFoL through the rules that govern his writing.
“ An emotional attachment to an object, place, or person cannot exist without a narrative to go along with it; hence the essentially ethical stance of much metafiction, which makes us consciously aware of how storytelling affects our everyday lives.
“ It is useless to appeal to the author’s intention, not because we… are limited to the text, but because [it has] been in a continuous process of translation along with the writing as it evolves.What existed in the beginning, and at every point to [the work’s] completion, is a continuum of difference that moves both forward and back.
“ If the character has to duck under a low doorway, my own shoulders sidle through an imaginary frame. A day is a succession of the littler stories we tell ourselves, and those stories make less sense to me without the gestures and grimaces to annotate them, to in some cases produce the meaning in my mind.
Karl Blitz devoted himself to devising a logical system of universal symbols that would make it impossible for Hitler-style propaganda to succeed—”inconsistencies and falsehoods would be instantly exposed.” There was no response, and it looked like his life’s work was a failure. Then in the late 1960s Shirley McNaughton, a teacher at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Center who despaired of reaching the children who couldn’t speak, ran across a copy of Bliss’s book and gave it a try: “Kids whose communicative worlds had been defined by the options of pointing to a picture of a toilet, or waiting for someone to ask the right question, started talking about a car trip with a father, a brother’s new bicycle, a pet cat’s habit of hiding under the bed. Kids who were assumed to be severly retarded showed remarkable ingenuity in getting their messages across.”
—Languagehat on In the Land of Invented Languages
“ …thereafter, various theorist-adventurers would find what they wanted, asking their question into the cave’s echo and receiving their echoing question which they took for an answer. And so with the [critic]: is it not some clue to her- self? As though [those] upon whom she writes were other versions of her, ahead of her.
“ Fiction” is free to distort the “real” in whatever way provides the work its integrity, at whatever length, in whatever style or form. [A]t least it could [be] if we didn’t insist “fiction” is “story.” [It] has moved closer to its origins in poetry, away from nar- rative toward other arr- angements and rearr- angements of language.
“ [At this point Ginsberg offers to show Lofton how to meditate. Lofton agrees but asks Ginsberg if he plans to take off his clothes. Ginsberg says no. They meditate. They resume the interview.]
— John Lofton
interviews Allen Ginsberg, Harper’s Magazine. H/t: Daily Dish
“ Content is wed to form; with each project the shape has to be reinv- ented; this requires the willingness to experim- ent. I am more interested in producing a flawed, mortal document than something that is just a nod to convention. I also tend to favor writing that is an event not just the record of [one].
