TONY TANNER
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emerge as reexamination of the premises of fiction, and a possible
renewal of its forms." In a somewhat similar spirit, in a fairly recent
interview Robert Coover said that he worked from "a sense that the
apocalypse has already happened; now what do we do?; a sense that
nothing has yet begun, man has not yet been created, but now this is
possible at last." In that spirit he published a short story called
"Beginnings," which opens with a writer who, in order to get started,
shoots himself. His blood hits the wall and spells out this message:
"It
is important to begin when everything is already over."
One potential problem which can arise from this sense of the
possibilities beyond impossibility is the erosion of the distinction
between "anything is possible" and "anything goes."
If
you adopt a
posture of highly tolerant eclecticism then perhaps anything does go,
but,
to
continue in the same vein, not everything comes off. This is
clearly preferable (to me) to any kind of censorship (apart from self–
censorship, but that gets us into another large problem) and the will–
to-exclude engendered by a rigid set of fixed criteria which determines
what goes and what, as it were, does not. I know about "repressive
tolerance" but it is obviously (again to me) distinctly preferable to
repressive repression (a few weeks in eastern Europe hardly prompted
me to question this preference). Of course there is always the risk of
overvaluation in dealing with a contemporary text but then I think the
whole matter of how we do, can, should read and discuss contemporary
literature adds up to yet another large problem not to be tackled here.
As a general point, however, I would say that I think we will have to be
more consciously willing to accept the possible ephemerality of much
(all? who knows) of the contemporary literature we read. This need not
inhibit us from responding to it enthusiastically in the present mo–
ment, the context within which and for which it was produced. We
should not be cautiously trying to spot the winners, who, as it were,
will make it to the finishing line of eternity. A book may engage us
vividly now which, when looked at in ten years' time, may seem to have
lost its lustre and particular energy. Doubltless it has-which does not
mean it never had them. (This, incidentially, is why I was not very
engaged by Mimi Albert's
The Second Story Man,
which is about love
and poverty in the East Village of New York and centres on a somewhat
mythologised-to me sentimentalised-radiant failure named Florian
and his destructive relationship with a girl named Mary. As a book it
has its insights and accuracies and you can recognize the "feel" of New
York in the late 1950s-a certain kind of rather manic desperation is
caught quite well. But I felt that I had read it about, well, ten or even
