78
PARTISAN REVIEW
Leonard Michaels:
That is exactly correct in regard to my life and in
regard to the way I wrote the entries, and also in regard to what I did
in preparation for this talk, which was written long after the entry.
What is left out is very old-but I'm not going
to
repeat what you said.
Victor Kestenbaum:
Just a thought about self-consciousness in writing
about oneself. Certainly, since the time of Socrates, it's been considered
a good thing to seek self-knowledge, but we tend
to
be impatient with
elaborate displays of self-consciousness. Maybe both of you, or all three
of you, could talk about how one attends to oneself, or makes an object
of oneself to oneself, without being self-indulgent.
Leonard Michaels:
Kafka is probably my favorite modern writer. I can
think of no writer in prose who is a greater genius in regard to form. A
brief example, a quote, and I hope I get it right: "A cage went in search
of a bird." That's one sentence. You can talk about that sentence for–
ever. Is there something more profoundly self-conscious in any other
writer in the modern age?
If
there is, I don't know where it is, and it's
just the form. There isn't a load of factual matter associated with it. I
know it sounds like nothing, but think about it for a while, and you'll
see it's a remarkable statement and says a great deal about Kafka, his
way of being, his life, and so on, and it a lso says something about his
death, I think.
Other people must know these terse and remarkable bits of writing.
I don't want to argue. I would just like to suggest that I don't think I
presented a position that has a lot of important implications beyond my
personal case. This is how I feel, and I can cite examples from a writer
like Kafka, or an American writer like Flannery O'Connor, who to me
is also a genius. This thing that I am so interested in, which I call the
expressive angular form, is salient.
Norman Manea : I
will very briefly answer your question about self–
indulgence. I think it's a very important question, especially when you
write a memoir. Following up on what L.eonard said about Kafka, I will
refer to another quote from Kafka, in which he says:
In
the fight, in the
struggle with the world, always take the side of the world against you.
Now, it's difficult to avoid self-indulgence when you are under siege.
Experiencing, unfortunately, again and again, another type of siege, it
was my fee ling when I rewrote the story that I have to struggle for
detachment, to try to avoid the posture of victim and prosecutor. One
way out may be irony, self-irony, which always helps.
