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"I was floundering. I so sly as a rule." Writing about writing about writing is the process by which I hope to attain some semblance of coherent comments on Samuel Beckett, via Maurice Blanchot, via Welch Everman, peppered with the influences of my other studies: pedagogical process, Leslie Marmon Silko, two handfuls of teaching assistants, twenty something young college writers, Sesame Street and other early childhood issues; Dave Barry, South Park, Russell Banks, and unnameable newly discovered interests. Enough studies. I will follow Malone's lead and make a list. Perhaps it will organize things for me. I will get the mind of my mouth around the idea of writing about writing about writing and will write about it. But it's not really the mind of my mouth because I'm not speaking. Perhaps it is the mind of my fingers which are typing on the keyboard, at least seven of them, I'm not exactly sure which ones as they peck so quickly. I'm amazed that the words that I think appear on the screen before me nearly as quickly as I think them and that I can think them through my fingers and into virtual print, then close up this laptop computer like a two inch notebook, and walk off with all of the pages tucked neatly under my arm. So, yes, it must be the mind of my fingers I must wrap around the idea of the possible non-existence of literature. Pity, I'm losing my list. After I write about it, I will read it, hoping to determine my level of success in squeezing myself into the literary tryst among Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Welch Everman, and the bare bottomed notion of literature. "Literature is not granted the writer as a truth and a certainty," Blanchot wrote. Not writing about Beckett, wrote Everman, but he could have been. Whether he was or not, Blanchot makes a valid statement, as literature doesn't exist as literature until enough time has passed since its creation that it can be viewed in retrospect. Literature describes constructed bodies of writing, anthologized and studied hopeful of gleaning the unnamable prize of collecting old words. Contemporary literature, while celebrated, is suspect. It might be a fad. A passing phase that seemed intelligent at the time, but in retrospect, turned out to be crap. A working author like Stephen King might be adored by his audience, well criticized in the media, and prolific in his writing, but the study of his work as literature is not taken as seriously now as it will be in another fifty years, when King and every character he ever wrote into existence and often killed out if it, will be dead, and his writing will exist as a surviving monument to his time. But that is a future that will be enacted by the audience, not the author. No writer writes literature. It is a label of prominence attached to a work once it is written and distributed. Literature grows from the product of the writing process and belongs to the world. Through the process of gathering readership, criticism, acclaim, and attention in the right intellectual circles, writing becomes literature. |
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