Stamelman
here seems to have in mind the "novel" the modernists challenged... seeking to replace it with the "book" ...
The novel [Jabès] explains [...] is the very opposite of the book. While the novelist exercises control over the writing, while he or she turns the space of the text into the space of the story to be retold, the writer of the book allows the writing to dominate. The book 'recounts' or, more precisely, activates not a story but the movement of writing.
The novelist masters his or her writing in order to put it at the service of the characters. By imposing on the novel a word that is manifestly exterior to the writing, the novelist assassinates the book. Ignorant of the rhythm and respiration puncturing the book's circular and enigmatic writing, the novelist is word-deaf. He or she does not know, as does the writer of the book, how to listen to the page and to the reverberations of its whiteness and silence.
The true writer, who is not a creator but a listener, is sensitive to the book's orality, to its freedom as uninterrupted language, to the void and silence that hide within it, to its rejection of closure, and, above all, to the invisible, forgotten, absent, always virtual book it shelters.
Richard Stamelman
yes... yes... yes...
I am so glad that both Laval Subjects and Spurious are posting again, after a too long winter break!
Is he saying that novels are really in the end always and already about the novelist and not the story? I suppose I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of labeling novelists bad and writers of books good - why the fuss over that distinction?
ReplyDeleteIf we look at the etymology, the word novelist means someone who is writing something fresh, new, something never seen before. Not all individuals we currently call novelists do this, so do we only grant the title to those that do?
However, this:
The true writer, who is not a creator but a listener, is sensitive to the book's orality, to its freedom as uninterrupted language, to the void and silence that hide within it, to its rejection of closure, and, above all, to the invisible, forgotten, absent, always virtual book it shelters.
is absolutely right on.
Verbivore,
ReplyDeleteMy sense of this quote is that Stamelman is not contrasting two genera, but defining a larger class, "book," that includes writing of all classes--as long as they meet that description. No defense of the "novel" as such necessary.
If you remember my exchange with Tata, I didn't think some of the novels he named (Richard Powers, being one) were of a kind with what Mark Thwaite has been calling Establishment Literary Fiction. As I've argued here in a number of posts, I don't think the line should be drawn between realist narrative as such, and work that unambiguously rejects realist conventions and story telling. For me, Stamelman's distinction, as one that transcends genre, is a better fit. A novel that doesn't ask me to forget that it's a novel, that it's made of language, that it is imbued with a unique voice, but, as Stamelman says, folds all this into whatever conventions it employs--be they those of realist narrative or otherwise, succeeds as a "Book." Do I think this is a qualitative distinction? Absolutely: the distinction that makes all the others meaningful.
Hmm, that's a good way to think about it and I would agree that the important distinction isn't about genre at all, but about the writing and the book's language. I'm interested to read Stamelman's book at this point.
ReplyDelete