A critical essay of mine appears in the inaugural issue of a new triannual festschrift celebrating the work of lesser-known European writers, published by Verbivoracious Press. This first issue fêtes Christine Brooke-Rose, an innovative British writer, critic, and theorist who played with language and form in her fiction, often employing constraints to assist in thematic exploration. My essay discusses her treatment of language ambiguity in the novel Xorandor, a story in which two precocious preteen twins narrate their discovery of and subsequent interactions with a rock-like being that is feeding on the nuclear waste stored at a facility managed by their father. The 320-page issue includes a wide range of responses to Brooke-Rose’s work, including homage, parody, imitation, and analysis. Copies of the festschrift in hardcover, paperback, special hand-made edition, and via eBook subscription are available for order here. The issue will be published on March 21st, 2014, the two-year anniversary of Christine’s death.
All posts in category writers
forthcoming publication
Posted by sean on March 13, 2014
https://sd-stewart.com/2014/03/13/forthcoming-publication/
observation without judgment
She walks fast, and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, and now to notice nothing.
—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
The greater the capacity for judgment, the greater the wariness. Our wariness slowly permeates everything.
—Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles
Speed operates independent of concentration. What moves past looks more interesting than what stands ahead. It is a simple matter to feign sight, as it is to appear unaware. Perhaps the only proof of either is in the details, in one’s ability to report them.
(Does she not notice, or only appear to not notice.)
Seeing everything makes it impossible to focus on the narrow. The truth of the world’s incongruities shatters that focus knob into splinters. White-out conditions descend. A heart cannot expand to fill this wide a field of vision. All-consuming observation is a form of slow death, even as it deepens awareness.
(Does she walk fast because she does not want to be noticed.)
Moments of clarity pierce the cotton wool with no warning. The inherent lack of preparation precludes gain, and the resultant thatching into solid theory. With no philosophy to peddle, no brilliant answers to impossible question(er)s, there is only ostracism.
(For the impartial observer must embrace anonymity.)
From the outer edges objective observation appears to alienate the observer from others. Yet it is important not to judge, to strike with this tinder an internal corruption. Consumption by inner judgment brings another form of death, slow but more painful than all-consuming objective observation.
(The myth of universal truth shelters beneath the canopy of only what we see.)
Objective observation necessitates separation from the self. Motion away from the self occurs with judgment. The two are dissimilar, separation and motion away. One observes but does not compare to the self. This is static separation. One judges, compares to self, and in so doing increases distance from the self. This is motion away. Observation without judgment preserves the self. Observation with judgment disparages it.
Posted by sean on February 26, 2014
https://sd-stewart.com/2014/02/26/observation-without-judgment/
lydia davis on fragments
To work deliberately in the form of the fragment can be seen as stopping or appearing to stop a work closer, in the process, to what Blanchot would call the origin of writing, the center rather than the sphere. It may be seen as a formal integration, an integration into the form itself, of a question about the process of writing.
It can be seen as a response to the philosophical problem of seeing the written thing replace the subject of the writing. If we catch only a little of our subject, or only badly, clumsily, incoherently, perhaps we have not destroyed it. We have written about it, written it, and allowed it to live on at the same time, allowed it to live on in our ellipses, our silences.
—from her essay ‘Form as Response to Doubt’ in HOW(ever) Vol 4, No. 2 (October 1987)
Posted by sean on January 7, 2014
https://sd-stewart.com/2014/01/07/lydia-davis-on-fragments/
alain robbe-grillet
Speaking of his autobiography in a 1985 interview with The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
Some people like the theory of literature contained in the book above all.
ROBBE-GRILLET
Indeed! Which is the continuation of what is in my novels and my theoretical works. None of these points is indifferent to me, at the same time none really interests me. What does interest me is the weaving of all these different elements in the book; the way they mix in movement, constantly shifting and changing, as if they were fragments of me. When I think of myself, I feel that I am made up of fragments in which there are childhood memories, fictional characters I particularly care about—such as Henri de Corinth—and even characters who belong to literature and with whom I feel I have family ties. Stavrogin of The Possessed and Madame Bovary are related to me exactly as my grandfather is, or my aunt. So it is the way all these figures move and refuse to be fixed that excites me. Well, at least that is what I say today. Another day I might say something different!
[…]
I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of “real” life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.
Posted by sean on December 1, 2013
https://sd-stewart.com/2013/12/01/alain-robbe-grillet/
malone dies
[…] but I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
I myself am very grey, I even sometimes have the feeling that I emit grey.
—Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
Posted by sean on November 30, 2013
https://sd-stewart.com/2013/11/30/malone-dies/
somewhere else
Dallas
Sunset
American White Pelicans
(with Am. Coot in background)
Bonus Photo (note: closer to home than above)
To the Lighthouse (V.W.)
Somewhere Else (SE) constitutes a removal of oneself from fixed behavior chains, thought patterns, and/or emotional states. SE does not necessitate a change in physical place, although such a change can certainly strike flame to tinder.
(Photos taken with crappy cell phone camera. Pelican photo taken through binocular lens.)
Posted by sean on November 19, 2013
https://sd-stewart.com/2013/11/19/somewhere-else-3/
a knoblike process
Creeping crepuscule, descrescent light, harbinger of dreaded return to EST, where darkness dampens day’s early end. Decumbent drone diminishes daily, drowsy in the drawing room. Sip long from murky melodies, muddy froth spilling forth in rivulets, dirgeful delights diverging in drone’s ear canals. Mellifluous miasma of musical melancholia!
Dismantling of outdoor seating commences! Desperate attempts to affect staring at nothing continues. Doctor Chumply the Mouth Breather appears, Mickey D’s in hand, heart-attack-in-waiting, following with tiny aggrieved steps the trail of nitroglycerin tablets strewn across the decking. Take the elevator, not the stairs, for they are locked, despite the sign in the kitchen encouraging good health through stairs-taking. O, Dr. Chumply, what will become of you, will you follow those tablets to the Haunted Wood™ where the witch stokes her stove as she awaits your fleshly delights.
[But Christine, what of loneliness, standing there behind the invisibility cloak, always working, always writing, what did engagement mean for you, O Invisible Author, did you drape yourself in a duvet woven with words…]
Glossary
lumpfish: Any of various fishes of the family Cyclopteridae, especially Cyclopterus lumpus of North Atlantic waters, having pelvic fins united to form a suction disk and a body bearing prominent tubercles.
tubercle: A small, rounded prominence or process, such as a wartlike excrescence on the roots of some leguminous plants or a knoblike process in the skin or on a bone.
Quick now! Homophone challenge question: would you rather your words resonate or resinate. Think about it while staring into the clouds.
Nod to From your favourite sky
Posted by sean on November 6, 2013
https://sd-stewart.com/2013/11/06/a-knoblike-process/
testing…testing…
From an infinite distance, I saw the floor. Ofélia. From afar, I tried to reach the heart of that silent girl, in vain. Oh, do not be so frightened! Sometimes people kill for love, but I promise you that one day you will forget everything, I promise you! People do not know how to love, do you hear me, I repeated as if I might reach her before, in refusing to serve truth, she should proudly serve nothingness. I who had not remembered to warn her that without fear there was the world. But I swear that this is breathing.
—Clarice Lispector, “The Foreign Legion”
Posted by sean on November 5, 2013
https://sd-stewart.com/2013/11/05/testing-testing/
thomas bernhard poem
Beyond this black forest
I stoke this fire of my soul
flickering with the breathing of the cities
and the blackbirds of fear.
With bare hands I kill these flames
that climb the air into my brain
and shiver in my name.
My heart drifts as a cloud
over the rooftops
along the rivers,
until I return, a later rain
deep in the fall.
—Thomas Bernhard, In Hora Mortis / Under the Iron of the Moon (p. 103)
Posted by sean on July 17, 2013
https://sd-stewart.com/2013/07/17/thomas-bernhard-poem/
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