96
PARTISAN REVIEW
The truth of the page is that there's a writer sitting there writing the
page . There's a dictum of Burroughs which goes something like "the
writer shouldn't be writing anything except what "s in his mind at the
moment of writing ," which means
to
me the same thing as "the truth
of the page ." . . . I'm not writing illusions-I'm not writing about a
fantasy that I've had, if it's fantasy, but I'm having a fantasy and
writing it down . In fact, the act of writing it down is part of the fantasy
. .. like sleeping is part of dreaming.
If the writer is conceived, both by himself and by the reader, as "someone
sitting there writing the page," illusionism becomes impossible and several
advantages are gained. First, one comes closer to the truth of the situation.
Second, for the writer, writing becomes continuous with the rest of his
experience . Third, the writer is clearly at liberty to use whatever material
comes into his head as he is writing, including the data of his own experi–
ence . Fourth, he becomes, in Wordsworth's phrase, "a man speaking to
men," and therefore continuous with their experience. Fifth, the reader is
prevented from being hypnotized by the illusion of that make-believe so
effective in the hands of nineteenth-century novelists but which by now has
become a passive, escapist habit of response to a creative work-instead he is
forced to recognize the reality of the reading situation as the writer points to
the reality of the writing siruation, and the work, instead of allowing him to
escape the truth of his own life, keeps returning him to it but, one hopes,
with his own imagination activated and revitalized. To paraphrase Robbe–
Grillet, the main didactic job of the contemporary novel is to teach the
reader how to imagine his own life . Art is not imitation; it is example .
*
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Henry Miller is for American novelists what Whitman is for American
poets . The source of his vitality is the current that began flowing when he
reconnected our art with our experience. Experience begins with the self and
Miller put the self back into fiction . For a writer the whole point of literary
technique is the fullest possible release of the energy of his personality into
his work, and when one comes into contact with that force, the whole super–
structure that one had assumed to be the point of literature begins to burn
away. Mter Miller it was possible to gather strength from Sterne, Rabelais,
Beckett-the latter's reduction of the self to the most irreducible minimum
can be seen as the complementary opposite of Miller's tendency to magnifi–
cation. Watt's cryptic word games which treat language as detached,
autonomous, hermetic, and which can be read as a parody ofJoyce , indicate
a literary difference between the friends. For Beckett, however autonomous
