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PARTISAN REVIEW
fifteen, years ago and it didn't do very much for me now.) Nevertheless
there is clearly the danger of admitting some very slack and ill–
considered writing on the "anything goes" principle.
If
no
constraints
are posed or recognised, no focussing problems addressed, no binding
aims accepted, then a writer really
is
a "creature at the mercy of
language" (to adopt Lacan's somewhat extreme formulation) no
matter how much he may think he is disrupting the rubricising
tendencies of conventional usage by turning hi text into a linguistic
playground-since how can he choose one word rather than another?
The words will choose him, or rather the noise will. There are a few
pieces in
Statements
which seem to me to have been chosen by the noise
side by side with some splendidly unusual pieces which can displace,
disturb and delight us without having recourse to mere incoherence.
One novel which seems to be written on the "anything goes"
principle-though certainly not written by the noise-is Clarence
Major's
Reflex and Bone Structure.
"I want this book to be anything it
wants to be. A penal camp. A bad check. A criminal organization.... I
want the mystery of this book to be an absolute mystery. Let it forge its
own way into the art of deep sea diving. Let it walk. I want it to run
and dance. And be sad.... This book can be anything it has a mind to
be." This must be a deliberate echo of Ishmael Reed: "no-one says a
novel has to be one thing.
It
can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville
show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by
demons"
(Yellow Back Radio Broke Down).
But that is all part of the
way the book has a mind
to
be, since it is full of echoes just as it is in
part a haze of images which pour out of the TV and the cinemas,
endlessly constituting and reconstituting whole areas of contemporary
consciousness. ("I watch television.
It
slushes back and forth before me.
In the afternoon TV is dull shit and it lodges you in its dullness; yet it
gives you a weird sort of vegetable sort of copout security." "We leave
the theater. The screen follows us.") The writer/ narrator confesses that
he would very much like to be
"out
of his mind"; as it is he is too much
in
it and there's too much in there with him. He is writing his own
kind of mystery story concerning a black actress and two other figures
who are all, as he keeps reminding himself, simply his lexical inven–
tions (some of whom he likes better than others-fair enough). He
works in and with fragments (Barthelme echoes can be heard) and some
sense of the precariousness of his undertaking seems to be inscribed in
the inserted comment-"You're figure skating near the border. You're
arrested for being too fragmented." In a sense he is trying to keep his
composure in the present ("all around me is terror and in it people
