Facing Texts: Encounters Between Contemporary Writers and Critics - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822308185 ISBN 13: 9780822308188

Publisher: Duke University Press, 1988

Synopsis

This selection of fiction by many of America's best writers, each coupled with a distinguished critic's response, is designed to defy the chronological secondariness of critical interpretation. During the creation of this book the majority of the contributions, chosen by the writers themselves, were as yet unpublished, providing an unmediated encounter between author and critic. Every reader extends what editors, authors, and critics have begun by adding to the imaginary space in which all texts may be woven together. This process serves as metaphor for the changing nature of any latter-day encounter with one's own literary tradition. The interfacing of texts not only illuminates the fiction, and the relationship of fiction to critics, but also informs our conceptions of text, criticism, and fiction itself.

About this title

From the Back Cover

This selection of fiction by many of America's best writers, each coupled with a distinguished critic's response, is designed to defy the chronological secondariness of critical interpretation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Facing Texts

Encounters Between Contemporary Writers and Critics

By Heide Ziegler

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1988 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-0818-8

Contents

PREFACE, 
INTRODUCTION, 
HEIDE ZIEGLER FACING TEXTS, 
PRELECTURE, 
STANLEY ELKIN THE 1987 ELIZABETH AND STEWART CREDENCE MEMORIAL LECTURE: WHAT'S IN A NAME?, 
PATRICK O'DONNELL THE THICKET OF WRITING: ON STANLEY ELKIN'S FICTION, 
STORIES, 
DONALD BARTHELME BASIL FROM HER GARDEN, 
ALAN WILDE BARTHELME HIS GARDEN, 
ROBERT COOVER AESOP'S FOREST, 
MARC CHÉNETIER IDEAS OF ORDER AT DELPHI (THOUGH AT FIRST THIS COMES OUT, "DISORDERLY IDEAS FELL"), 
GUY DAVENPORT THE JULES VERNE STEAM BALLOON, 
JOSEPH C. SCHÖPP "PERFECT LANDSCAPE WITH PASTORAL FIGURES": GUY DAVENPORT'S DANISH ECLOGUE À LA FOURIER, 
SUSAN SONTAG DESCRIPTION (OF A DESCRIPTION), 
RICHARD HOWARD A DESCRIPTION OF "DESCRIPTION (OF A DESCRIPTION)", 
CHAPTERS FROM NOVELS, 
WALTER ABISH IS THIS REALLY YOU?, 
CHRISTOPHER BUTLER WALTER ABISH AND THE QUESTIONING OF THE READER, 
WILLIAM H. GASS THE SUNDAY DRIVE, 
TONY TANNER ON READING "SUNDAY DRIVE", 
JOHN HAWKES THE EQUESTRIENNE, 
CHRISTINE LANIEL JOHN HAWKES'S RETURN TO THE ORIGIN: A GENEALOGY OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS, 
JOSEPH MCELROY CHOOR MONSTER OF THE LONG WHITE MOUNTAIN, 
ROBERT WALSH "A WIND ROSE": JOSEPH MCELROY'S WOMEN AND MEN, 
POSTLECTURE, 
JOHN BARTH THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION, 
MANFRED PÜTZ JOHN BARTH AND THE CHALLENGES OF THE IMAGINATION, 
CONTRIBUTORS, 

CHAPTER 1

STANLEY ELKIN

The 1987 Elizabeth and Stewart Credence Memorial Lecture: What's in a Name?

Professor Adams, thank you for your kind introduction. You're very generous.

Chancellor Jones, Dean Smith, members of the faculty, students, ladies and gentlemen....

As Professor Adams has already told you, my name is Stanley. Could you be mugged by a Stanley? Could a Stanley rape you? Tops, I might molest your kid, but you'd never know it, and neither would she. What, a little suntan lotion rubbed along the bottom of her swimsuit like a piping of frosting around a birthday cake? What, a spot of spilled tea on the sunsuit, my finger in the bespittled handkerchief moist from what it wouldn't even occur to you was drool before it was saliva, and vigorously brushing across what won't be breasts for another half dozen years yet, my grunt the two- or three-tone guttural hum of deflection, nervous and oddly dapper as the tugs, pats and twitches of a standup comic, distracting as the shot cuffs of magicians and cardsharps, all random melody's tangential rove? Because how could you ever even guess at my intentions and interiors, my inner landscapes and incisor lusts, the thickening at my throat like hidden shim, the ponderous stirrings of my ice-floe blood, deep as resource, buried as oil in my gnarled and knotty groin, my clotted sexual circuits? Could put it past you plenty, believe me, holding the kid's shoulder, the little girl's, for the leverage, drawing her within the fork of my white old thighs, a pervert like a master artisan, fixing her there like a piece of carpentry. Or violating her in absentia, my eyes on her kindergarten picture, my snoot in her laundry, in her eight-year-old grimes. All contacts troubled, gone off, amok but deceptive, accidental, clever as a pickpocket's.

According to the terms of their bequest, the Elizabeth and Stewart Credence Memorial Lecture is given in odd-numbered years of even-numbered decades of odd-numbered centuries. The 1987 lecture was delivered on March 24, 1987, at Case Western University.

Protected by reputation, see, my triumph of the human-spirit spirit, that heart of gold which I don't possess but people attribute to me anyway, mistaking cholesterol for karats, hypertension for love, innocence by association, by stereotype, dismissing me finally, all the world waving me through Customs like that guy in the audience at the night club whose lap the chanteuse sits in, kissing his bald spot, pinching his cheek, and telling folks what a good sport he is, leading the applause.

Protected finally by all my grotesque cuddlies— the limp, the cane, my toothless, grampsy ways, my fatty's belly and threatless aura, my ducky's waddle and feeble's klutz, my Stanleyness on me like a wimp heraldries. Hey, I'm kidding. Only offering credential here, only flashing badge, showing my hand, franked under the ultraviolet like a kid's at the dance.

Stanley is as Stanley does and you are what you're called.

Stanley is your brother-in-law, your CPA, your cousin in Drapes. He collects stamps, washes his car, belongs to Triple A, and keeps a weather eye on the gas mileage. He is, that is, as all of us are, the fiction of his sound, all his recombinant glottals, labials, fricatives and plosives. He's his flaps and trills. He's his spirants, I mean. He is, I mean, the vibrations of his name.

For great characters demand great names. (Of writers I admire, only Henry James—itself a fine name—lumbers his characters with bad ones. I'm thinking of Henrietta Stackpole, I'm thinking of Ralph Touchett, of Fleda Vetch and Milly Theale. I'm thinking of Madam Merle, of Casper Goodwood, Pansy Osmond, and Hyacinth Robinson. I'm thinking of Margaret Thatcher.) Here's a roll call for you. Beowulf and the Wife of Bath. King Lear but not Titus Andronicus. Hamlet but not Garp. Snow White, Pinocchio, and Mary Poppins but not Cinderella. Peter Pan but not Captain Hook. R2D2, Han Solo, C3PO, and Obi-wan (Ben) Kenobi but not Princess Leia. Leopold Bloom but not Stephen Dedalus. (Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try. Rodgers and Hammerstein but not Weber and Rice.) Harry Morgan, Harry Bailey, Harry Angstrom, Harry Lime. J. R. Phil Esterhaus. Babbitt. Mr. Toots. John Jarndyce. Mr. Tulkinghorn. Flem Snopes. Will Varner. V. K. Ratliff. Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby. My Uncle Toby. Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon. Jiminy Cricket. Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker. Hazel Motes. Becky Sharp. Captain Dobbin like a reliable horse. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Julian Sorel. Swann and the Guermantes. Vautrin. Hans Castorp. Levin. Father Zossima. Bartleby. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Angel Clare, Old Goriot, Elizabeth Bennett and her four sisters. All the not-to-be-pronounced names of God.

I want to speak to you this evening about Louis Paul Pelgas, the first Director of Admissions at any school in the Thirteen Colonies Conference, but before I begin it will be necessary to provide you with some sometimes dense, and often apparently trivial, historical background.

Clifton College is, as many of you may know, a small liberal arts college in what are, quite literally, the outer edges of Pennsylvania. It is out of the way even for Norbiton, Pennsylvania, even for Chapel County. Look at a map. Surrounded on two sides by West Virginia in the extreme southwestern corner of what—it's that close to the West Virginia line, that close to the Ohio one—is referred to by its inhabitants as the "state" rather than the "commonwealth" of Pennsylvania (possibly to lend a little aura of the average to what is uncompromisingly an atypical part of the nation), Norbiton, like a heel in an old shoe, exactly snugs the perfect right angle in the tight corner where its western and southern borders meet.

This tiny portion of Pennsylvania had been unofficially a "state" since antebellum days when, feeling itself both physically and spiritually closer to the gravitational pull—Chapel County was the only county in Pennsylvania where it was legal to keep slaves although, due to the impossibility of cultivating crops in its harshly alkaline soil, except for the handful of "house niggers," exchanged as a sort of gag gift between one local merchant and another, there was never any appreciable slave population there—of its Virginian and West Virginian anti-abolitionist neighbors than it was to Harrisburg, 357 miles distant, or Philadelphia 369 miles off, or even to Pittsburgh, which though less than 100 miles away was, for 80 of those 100, accessible only through what John James Audubon himself has described in his notes as "wilderness so cluttered and remote that its very sky is uninhabitable by the birds of the air, wilderness so cluttered and remote that that sky is itself wilderness." "A dry hole," he remarks in an 1847 journal entry,

which for all its varied vegetation, succulent berries, meaty nuts and abundant fruit, is as zoologically lifeless as the moon. I cannot sketch there. My inks, oils and water colors go off like stale milk and lose their ability to congeal or adhere to paper. My pencil leads liquefy and my lines melt and run. There is a liquorish rifeness in the air so profound it lasts the autumn and can burn holes in the snow, or make—so viable is the halflife of the fermented spirits of all its fierce flora, its growth and undergrowth, its leaves and barks—an illusion of its "frozen" streams and lakes, of ice apparently 2 and even 3 inches thick which is not only impossible to stand upon but worth your hat to set down on its obdurate-seeming surface. It is a wilderness so impregnable that no jack rabbit, dog, possum, coon, turkey or even insect, let alone any animal as fragile and exotic as a bird, could possibly get close enough to it to thrive.

Nor is any of this typical John Audubon hyperbole. After a failed late-nineteenth-century attempt to survey the 1,000 or so square miles of this "queer, thick country"—Audubon's phrase—Phil and Pembler Roberts released foxes, dogs, and other small mammals at the margins of The Thicket. (Called "The Thicket" at the Chapel County end and "The Woody" at the Pittsburgh one, one recalls Pembler Roberts's famous comment: "Viewing the unspoiled, unnibbled trees, leaves and grasses in 'The Thicket' is as different from viewing them in 'ordinary' nature, a sylvan woodland or forest, say, as gazing at the defined, beautifully articulated stars in the country is from looking up at them in town.") Seeing them founder and return to their release points they seemed, in Phil Roberts's analogy, "like confused, guilty hunting dogs who have lost the scent." (The experiment has been successfully repeated for seventeen years in Professor Roger Barr's Psychology 101 classes. Julia Rayburton, while still a junior at Clifton College, devised a variant of the Pembler and Barr experiments. Wishing to test the very letter of Captain Audubon's 1847 journal entry, Ms. Rayburton stood at the edge of The Thicket—now, with the advent of bulldozers, trenchers, and the introduction of other heavy earth-moving equipment, reduced to a plot no larger than a decent-sized park in a medium-sized city—and scattered kernels of white corn, the favored food of all agrarian birds, into it in full view of three hungry bluejays who'd been kept in cages and deprived of food for more than eight hours. The jays who had carefully and even rather slavishly followed the short trajectory of the corn—Rayburton is lefthanded but tosses corn with her right hand—were-unable to retrieve any of the kernels. They flew up and around but never entered the air space above "The Thicket," thus offering proof of Professor Barr's speculations regarding "Density theory," the psychological-cum-sociological postulate that "All bodies repudiate areas smaller than the space required to provide their egress!" The implications this has for America's crowded prison system are, of course, immense. Professor Barr's and Julia Rayburton's findings have already been cited in four court rulings and must be sub judice in who knows how many more.)

If this isolated and somewhat remarkable edge of the commonwealth had unofficially chosen to think of itself as a state since, you'll recall, the mid-nineteenth century, it ought to be said that no one really knows why the citizens of Chapel County preferred one designation over another. (What's in a name, eh?) Even as late as 1837, when Chapel and Green counties split off from each other (for reasons, incidentally, which had more to do with the close identification of The Thicket with the town of Norbiton than they did with slaver or anti-slaver sentiments), the term commonwealth, not state, was the legal nomenclature in each of the seventeen articles of incorporation. In fact, Chapel County has only officially been designated part of the "state of Pennsylvania" since Maurdon Legurney, both Mayor of Norbiton and County Supervisor, was chosen to represent Chapel County at the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1878, about a year after the Congress of the recently reunited states of America had put an end to the period of reconstruction. The Convention, referred to in the newspapers of the day—even Horace Greeley sent a correspondent to cover it for the old New York World-Examiner—as "The New Reconstruction," was convened at the instigation of the people of Chapel County but was equally the brainchild of Legurney's political protégé, Governor Lamar White, a native of Norbiton who, when Legurney put his name into nomination at the Democratic Convention in St. Louis in 1880, was the first politician ever referred to as a "favorite son," though his family had removed from Norbiton when White was only two years old.

Reconstruction had been, of course, a time of ad hoc law, a period of makeshift legislation when some of the most bizarre laws in the history of this or any other nation were passed, almost, it seemed, as a kind of willed whim. It's largely forgotten now, but from 1865 to 1877 when this odd chapter in our history closed, Congress forbade the raising of orchids and carnations. It prohibited the sale of calves' liver in quantities under three pounds and made it a Federal offense, punishable by a mandatory seven years in prison, for women to fish from a pier. The statute was vaguely worded, perhaps deliberately, and in the five years it was on the books, no one was actually sent to prison. Ironically, it was the vagueness and unenforceability of the law which gave rise, during the period, to its public flouting and introduced the term fishwife into the American vocabulary. (Less whimsical, but far more dangerous, was a peculiar law of evidence introduced just after the Civil War. This, of course, was the infamous "Mixed Race Witness Rule," which, when crimes were alleged against persons of one race by persons of another, made it obligatory for prosecutor and defense alike to produce witnesses of both races to the crime. The rule was obviously directed against the defeated South—it did not apply in non-slave states on the dubious grounds that Negroes were less populous in the North—by a piqued, if victorious, Union. What is perhaps more astonishing than the rule itself is the fact that during the dozen years before its repeal it was five times sent up to the Supreme Court for "challenging," and five times adjudged constitutional!)

As indicated earlier, the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention was convened in 1878 by a governor who, though he'd been a mere toddler when he left and had never been back, was born in Norbiton. As was also indicated, this was barely a year after the nation had junked the notion of Reconstruction, that queer period of back-scratch law when all that was necessary to get a law passed was a quorum of cronies who would do unto each other what they would have each other do unto them. As in all periods to which there is an inevitable reaction, that reaction, when it finally came, was a lulu. What were demanded now were unarbitrary and entirely righteous rules of order, logic and sequentiality— a return, if you will, to 1837, when Chapel County quietly signed seventeen articles of incorporation, each of which designated the new county as continuing to belong to the "Commonwealth" rather than to the "State of Pennsylvania." (That people in Chapel County held slaves was merely a fact of home rule, of little more significance at the time, really, than the local option that governs the sale of alcohol or is responsible for the blue laws.)

Now, however, there was, at least on the parts of the people of Chapel County, Governor White, and Maurdon Legurney, White's political guru and hand-picked emissary from Chapel County to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, a reaction to the reaction to the reaction. If America wanted sequentiality again, some apostolic succession of convention and right reason, Chapel County, on the very verge of The Thicket, that then still 1,000 square miles of all waivered, rebuffed, exempt and repudiate Nature's lush and pointless, extended bramble, wanted, yearned for, and actually demanded the return of the random, even if they had to invent a legitimate, legal, due-processed pandect of de jure and prescribed code under the fiction of a rigged Constitutional Convention.

Here's what happened:

The people of Chapel County got to Maurdon Legurney, Maurdon Legurney got to Lamar White, and Governor White got a Constitutional Convention for his commonwealth that was in all respects (save for that first cause like a wicked itch that convened it in the first place) splendid, making Pennsylvania a paradigm of justice and good sense that became a model of high democracy. With this exception—the little legalistic eye-teaser buried in the middle of chapter VII, article 42, section 12, subsection 9, paragraph 19, line 5: "All territory south of 79°, 30' longitude, 39°, 45' latitude, and north of 80°, 30' longitude, 40°, 45' latitude, and all peoples residing within said territory, shall henceforth, to the contrary notwithstanding, upon receipt of a vote of the majority in any constitutionally convened poll or public plebiscite as defined in chapter III, article 18, section 34, paragraph 1, line 1, not to be interpreted as incorporating the provisions of chapter IV, article 9, paragraph 1, line 16, in accordance with the doctrine 'inclusio unius est exclusio alterius,' have the right to designate itself, and themselves citizens of, in perpetuity, subject to no contingent remainders or to conditional limitations or any other encumbrances, the State of Pennsylvania."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Facing Texts by Heide Ziegler. Copyright © 1988 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822308185
• ISBN 13: 9780822308188
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277
• Editor: Ziegler Heide