The recurring interaction between a writer (indirectly present)
and a reader takes place through writing and reading. It is
proof of the practicality of the literary experience and an
expression of its degree of necessity. The extent of the
interaction is thus the expression of the part of the practical
experience that is shared, and for what purpose. This is
illustrated by the uses we give to literature: education,
indoctrination, moral edification, illustration, or
entertainment. Becoming who they are, the writer and reader
project themselves in the reading through a process of dual
reciprocal constitution, changing when circumstances change,
objectified in the forms through which literature is
acknowledged. It has a definite learned quality, in contrast to
the arts of images, sounds, and movements, in which the natural
component (as in seeing, hearing, moving) made the art possible.
Accordingly, artistic writing has an instrumental characteristic
and exercises virtual coordination of the experience of assigning
meaning. In some ways, this instrumental characteristic begs
association to music. To someone watching how the process
unfolds, it seems that the recurrent interaction is triggered
less by the dynamics of writing and reading, and more decisively
by what comprises the act of instilling meaning of the
objectified practice of the poem, play, script, novel, or short
story. The fact is that language, more than natural systems of
signs, pertains to an acquired structure of interactions, as
humans progress from one scale to another, within which meaning
is conjured. Language is influenced by the conditions of
existence (human biology), but not entirely reducible to them. It
constitutes as many domains of interaction as there are
experiences requiring language, a subset of language, or
artifacts similar to language.
The claim made from the perspective of literacy was, and still
goes strong, that the universality of language is reflected in
the universality of literature, and thus the universality of
conveying meaning. Actually, to write literature means to
un-write the language of everyday use, to empty it of the
reference to behavior, and to structure it as an instrument of a
different projection of the human being. It means understanding
the process through which meaning is conjured as human
self-constitution takes place. While it is true that when
someone reads a text for the first time, the only reading is one
that refers to the language of that particular reader's
experience (what is loosely called knowledge of language); once
the convention is uncovered, personal experience takes second
place, and a new experience, deriving from the interaction,
begins. The acquaintance makes the interaction possible; but it
might as well stand in the way of its characteristic unfolding
as a literary experience. Sometimes, the language of artistic
wording establishes a self-contained universe of self-reference
and becomes not only the message, but also the context. The
practical experience of writing is discovery of universes with
such qualities. The practical experience of reading is populating
such a universe through personal projection that will test its
human validity. Both writer and reader create themselves and
ascertain their identities in the interaction established
through the text.
It goes without saying that while literature is not a copy
(mimesis) of the world, neither does it literally constitute
something in opposition to it. In a larger framework,
literature is but one among many means of practical human
experiences resulting, like any other form of objectification,
in the alienating process of writing, reading, criticizing,
interpreting, and rewriting. Alienation comes from giving life to
entities that, once expressed, start their own existence, no
longer under the control of the writer or reader. For as long as
language dominated human praxis according to the prescriptions of
literacy, we could not understand how writing could be an
experience in something other than language, or how it could be
performed independent of language-based assumptions. Since the
turn of the century, this situation has changed. Initially, there
was a reaction to language: Dada was born when a knife was used
to select a word from a Larousse dictionary. Between the action
and its successive interpretations, many layers of practical
experiences with language accumulated. The literature of the
absurd went further and suggested situations only vaguely
defined with the aid of language, actually defined in defiance
of language conventions. There is more silence in the plays of
Beckett and Ionesco than there are words.
Before becoming what many readers have regarded as only the
expression of the poetics of self-reference, the experience of
concrete poetry attempted to make poetry visual, musical, or
even tactile. Happening was based on structuring a situation,
with the implicit assumption that our domains of interactions are
not defined only through language. The modern renewal of dance,
emancipated from the condition of illustration and narration,
and from the stifling conventions of classic ballet; the new
conventions of film facilitated by understanding the implicit
characteristics of the medium; and the expressive means of
electronic performances only add to the list of examples
characteristic of a literature trying to free itself from
language and its literate rules. Or, in order to avoid the
animistic connotation (literature as a living entity trying to
do something), we should see the phenomena just mentioned as
examples of new human experiences: constitution of the literary
work as its own language, with the assumption that the process
of appropriation would result in the realization of that
particular language.
A realization, in literature as much as in science, is a
description of a system which would behave as though it had this
description. Accordingly, the day described in Joyce's Ulysses
(Thursday, June 16, 1904) was not a sequential description, but a
mosaic in which rules of language were continuously broken and
new rules introduced. There is no character by the name of
Ulysses in the book. The title and the chapter subtitles were
meant to enforce the suggestion of a parallel to Homer's Odyssey.
("A beautiful title," wrote Furetière almost 300 years ago, "is
the real pimp of the book.") Language-rather, the appearance of
language-provided the geometry of the mosaic. For Joyce, writing
turned out to be a practical experience in segmenting space and
time in order to extract relations (hopeless past, ridiculous
tragic present, pathetic future), an aesthetic goal for which
the common use of language is ill equipped. The allusion to the
Odyssey is part of the strategy, shared in advance with the
critics, a para-text, following the text as a context for
interpretation. But before him, Kafka and others, following a
tradition that claims Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model, seemed
no less challenged by the experience of designing their own
language, ascertaining characters who transcend the conflict put
in words, of using the power of para-text. Dos Passos, Laurence
Sterne, and Hermann Hesse are examples from the same tradition.
Gertrude Stein was a milestone in this development. In poetry,
designing a language of one's own is strikingly evident,
although more difficult to discuss in passing (as I know I am
doing with some of the examples I give). Many poets-Burns comes
easily to mind-invented their own language, with new words and
new rules for using them. Others-and for some reason Vladimir
Brodsky comes first to mind-wrote splendid para-texts (political
articles, interviews, memoirs) that very effectively framed
their poetry and put it in a perspective otherwise not so
evident.
The experience of artistic writing does not happen in a vacuum.
It takes place in a broader frame. To realize and to understand
that there is a connection between the cubist perspective,
Joyce's writing, and the scientific language of relativity theory
will probably not increase reading pleasure. It will change the
perspective of interpretation, though. The connection between
genetics, computational models, and post-modern architecture,
fiction, and political discourse is even more relevant to our
current concern for literature. Recurrences of interactions come
in varieties, and each variety is a projection of the individual
at a precise juncture of the human practical experience of
self-constitution as a writer or reader. Language split, and
continues to split, into languages and sub-languages. Rap
frequently subjects the listener of its rhythmic stanzas to
slang. Gramsci, the Sardinian leftist philosopher, suggested the
need for a language of the proletariat. Pier Paolo Pasolini, an
admirer of Gramsci and a very sophisticated artist, wrote some
of his works in the Friaul dialect and in the argot used by the
poor youngsters of the streets of Rome. His argument was
aesthetic and moral: corrupted by commercial democracy, language
loses its edge, and people living in such a deprived language
environment undergo anthropological mutation. Art, in particular
literature, can become a form of resistance. A new language,
reconnected to the authentic being, becomes an instrument for
new literacy experiences. Tolkien wrote poems in Elvish; Anthony
Burgess made up a language by combining exotic languages (Gypsy,
Malay, Cockney) and less exotic languages (English, Russian,
French, Dutch). An entire magazine (Jatmey) publishes fiction
and poetry written in Klingon.
In a broader perspective, it is clear that in order to
effectively create literary domains, people need instruments and
media for new experiences. Meta-fiction is such an experience.
It unites special types of illustrated novels, photographic
fiction (which proliferates in South America and the Far East),
and comic books. In Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey offers a
documented journey in order to recapture the spirit of the
sixties. Images (including some from Allen Ginsberg's
collection) make the book almost a collective oeuvre. Using
similar strategies, a text of meta-fiction first establishes the
convention of the text as a distinct human construct made up of
words, but which behave differently from informative,
descriptive, or normative sentences that we use in interhuman
communication. The strategy is to place the domain of the
referent in the writings. The writer thus ensures that the
potential reader will have no reason to look for references in
empirical reality. This act of preempting the practice of
reading, based on reflex associations in a different systematic
domain, is not necessarily a warranty that such associations
will not be made.
There are many people who, either due to their cognitive
condition, or to their relative illiteracy, take metaphors
literally. However, the writer makes the effort to establish new
kinds of recurrent, inter-textual, and self-referential relations
that signal the convention pursued. When the act of writing
becomes, overtly or subvertly, the object of the writing
experience, writers, and possible readers with them, move from
the object domain to the meta domain. The writer knows that in
the space of fiction, as much as in the space of the empirical
world, people write on paper, tables are used to set dinner on,
flowers have a scent, subways don't fly. But artistic writing is
not so much reporting about the state of the world as it is
constituting a different world, along with a context for
interactions in this world. The validity and coherence of such
worlds stems from qualities different from those that result
from applying correct grammar, formal structure of arguments,
syntactic integrity, and other requirements specific to the
practice of language within the convention of literacy.
Writing as co-writing (painting as co-painting, composing as
co-composing...)
The post-modern practice of creative writing involves the
intention of interaction in ways not experienced in the
civilization of literacy. The written is no longer the monument
that must not be altered or questioned, continued, or summarized.
Reading, seen in part as the effort to extract the truth from
the text, takes on the function of projecting truth in the
context of text interpretation. Actually, the assumption of this
practical experience of co-creation (literary, musical, or
artistic) has to do with different languages in the practice of
writing and reading (painting and viewing, composing and
listening, etc.), and even of co-writing (co-painting,
co-composing, etc.).
Recent literary work in the medium of hypertext-a structure
within which non- linear connections are possible-shows how far
this assumption extends. A structure and core of characters are
given. The reading involves the determination of events through
determination of contexts. In turn, these affect the behavior of
characters in the fictional world. This can unfold as a literary
work conceived as a game, whose reading is actually the playing:
The reader defines the attributes of the characters, inserts
herself or himself in the plot, and the simulation starts.
Neither the writer nor reader needs to know what programs stand
behind the ongoing writing, and even less to understand how they
work. The product is, in all of these cases, an infinite series
of co- writing. The reader changes dialogues, time and space
coordinates, names and characteristics of participants in the
literary event. No two works are alike. Characteristics of
self-ordering and self-informing-such as "X knows such and such
about Y's peculiarities," or "Group Z is aware of its collective
behavior and possible deviations from the expected"-allow for
the constitution of an entirely artificial domain of fiction,
with rules as interesting to discover as is the mystery behind a
suicide, the complexities of a character's philosophy, or the
existence of yet unknown universes.
This extreme case of the literature of personal language-of
languages as they are formed in the practice of creative
co-writing-was anticipated in the various forms of fantastic
literature. Voyages (anticipated in Homer's epics), explorations
of future worlds, and science fiction have paved the way for the
writing of meta-fiction. This probably explains how Jorge Luis
Borges constituted a meta-language (of the quotes of quotes of
quotes) for allegories whose object are fictions, not realities.
There is no need to be literate to effectively appropriate this
kind of writing, although at some level of reading the literate
allusion awaits the literate reader (at least to tickle his or
her fancy). To a certain extent, it is almost better not to have
read Madame Bovary, with its melodramatic account, because the
constitution of Borges' universe takes place at a different
level of human practice, and in a context of disconnected forms
of praxis.
Co-writing also takes the form of using shared code as a
strategy of literary expression. The many specialized languages
of literary criticism and interpretation- such as comparative
studies, phenomenological analysis, structuralism, semiotic
interpretation, deconstructionism-as difficult and opaque to the
average literate reader as scientific and philosophic languages,
are duplicated in the specialized language of creative
post-modern writing. Reading requires a great deal of
preparation for some of those works, or at least the assumed
shared understanding of the particular language. The writings of
Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Barthe are not casual
reading, for sheer enjoyment or excitement. Mastery of the
language, moreover of the language code, as part of the
practical experience it facilitates, does not come from
studying English in high school or college, rather from decoding
the narrative strategy and understanding that the purpose of
this writing is knowledge about writing and reading. The
epistemological made into a subject of fiction-how do we know
what we know?-makes for very dense prose. This is why in this
new stage, it is possible to have readers of a one and only book
(I am not referring to the Bible or Koran), which becomes the
language of that reader. Alice in Wonderland is such a book for
quite a few; so is Ulysses; so are the two novels of William H.
Gass. In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience the
emergence of micro-readership attracted to non-standard
writing. Efficiency considerations are such that the non-standard
practical experience of writing is met by a non-standard
experience of reading books, and other media (including CD-ROM)
that address a small number of people.
The effort to recycle (art or literature) is part of the same
co-writing strategy. The co-writers are authors (recycled) and
readers whose past readings (real or imaginary) are integrated
in the new experience. Recycling (names, actions, narratives,
etc.) corresponds to, among other things, the attempt to
counteract the sequentiality of writing, even the literate
expectation of originality. Taking a piece from a literary work
and using it in its entirety means to almost transform the
language sequence into a configuration. That piece resembles a
painting hung in the middle of a page, or, to force the image,
between the parts of a sonata. It entails its own history and
interpretation, and triggers a mechanism of rejection not
dissimilar to that triggered by organ transplants. The
convention of reading is broken; the text is manipulated like an
image and offered as a collage to the reader. The seams of
different parts sewn together are not hidden; to the contrary, a
spotlight is focused on them. Gertrude Stein best exemplifies
the tendency, and probably how well it synchronized with similar
developments in art (cubism foremost). W. H. Gass masterfully
wrote about words standing for characters, object, and actions;
he invented new worlds where the writer can define rules for
their behavior. Concrete poetry, too, in many ways anticipated
this type of writing, which comes from visual experiences and
from the experiments in music triggered by the dodecaphonic
composers. In concrete poetry, one can even discover the
expression of jealousy between those interacting in the
systematic domain of abstract phonetic languages, and those in
the domain of ideograms. Japanese writers of concrete poetry
seem equally eager to experience the sequential! The effort to
recycle, interpret, visualize, to read and explain for the
reader, and to compress (action, description, analysis)
corresponds to the ever faster interactions of humans and to the
shorter duration of such interactions. The reader is presented
with pieces already known, or with easily understandable images
that summarize the action or the characters. Why imagine, as
writers always expected their readers to do, if one can see-this
seems to be the temptation.