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PARTISAN REVIEW
photography, film, travel, or simply the modern quotidian) not to make us
see
those things but to test the language against them, to keep it alive to
visual experience . The pleasure of description is the pleasure of a linguistic
skill, not that of a genre painting.
*
*
*
Maintaining that an art work is true only within its own terms opens it
to a description as a beneficial form of counterfeit, forgery, fraud, or lie.
This argument is often urged with regard to fiction. Fiction is neither true
nor false factually, but only good and bad . One might say that its truth is
poetic truth: a statement of a particular rapport with reality sufficiently
persuasive that we may for a time share it. This kind of "truth" does not
depend on accurate description of "reality" but rather itself generates what
we call reality, reordering our perceptions and sustaining a vital connection
with the world, and may
be
considered on a parity with truth generated in
other disciplines that extend, reorder, and vitalize the human domain .
It
works against schizoid withdrawal into abstraction or solipsism, and at the
same time works against entrapment in its own tautologies by constantly
dissolving them in experience. The Word makes the world a poem, then
becomes
irrelevant. Even so enlightened a novelist as Raymond Federman,
who, however, still harbors a French structuralist orientation toward lan–
guage, speaks in his essay "Surfiction" of the necessary "fraudulence" of
the novel. He quotes my letter in reply in his anthology,
Surfiction:
Rather than serving as a mirror or redoubling on itself, fiction adds itself
to
the world, creating a meaningful "reality" that did not previously
exist. Fiction is artifice but not artificial.
It
seems as pointless
to
call the
creative powers of the mind' 'fraudulent" as it would be
to
call the pro–
creative powers of the body such. What we bring into the world is
per se
beyond language, and at that point language is of course Jeft behind–
but it is the function of creative language
to
be left behind ,
to
leave
itself behind, in just that way. The word is unnecessary once it is spoken ,
but it has
to
be spoken . Meaning does not pre-exist creation and after–
ward it may be superfluous .
Such writing progressively works against itself in order to move us beyond
language back into other aspects of experience . The wisdom of creative lan–
guage includes the sense of its own limitations. But one must not lose sight
of its power : creative writers deal with the enormous knowledge inherent in
language and do not need the truths of discursive communication as an
excuse for their art .
