Joseph Tabbi Answers R M Berry

Abstract

Berry continuedfrom previous page It is this metaphor of a culture as a delimited space that connects in ultimately fatalistic fashion Rob's search for a cultural alternative with Frank's enactment of a sexist, racist plot. My aim in writing Frank was to disclose the violence ofthis metaphor, and my hope was that, if any reader ever saw what I saw, he or she would also see freedom literally materializing from the novel's first words. I have nothing to say on the question of whether or not Frank succeeds in its aim. but I will say that, if George Bush ever tries to tell us he simply didn't know the Iraqis would resist Westernization so fiercely, no one should believe him. This isn't what a lack of knowledge looks like. Even if Victor Frankenstein had read Mary Shelley's novel, he would've done exactly as he did. R M Berry is also the author of Dictionary ofModern Anguish and Leonardo's Horse (both FC2). Joseph Tabbi Answers R M Berry If I were to choose among the theoretical alternatives R M Berry sets out in response to my review, I'd go with Wittgenstein: in a culture that insists on endless accumulation and perpetual change, there's solace in Wittgenstein's insistence that "philosophy leaves everything as it is." I can appreciate, also, the appearance right now of so many novelists who want to rewrite, or "unwrite," classic fictions, to escape the past by repeating it (or, really, by acknowledging it completely, letting it have its way). Wittgenstein is important to Berry's project because the philosopher , not aspiring to add something new to the store of knowledge, instead reorganizes knowledge and (like a novelist) makes the familiar world seem strange, "untamed," less literate, and, in a way, more literal. That's a stringent ground for a literary practice , perhaps a rougher foundation than most novel readers want, but more satisfying than the claims I keep hearing from small and alternative presses that literary authors and "outsider" artists are somehow politically subversive, that they possess some special knowledge or unique "voice" other than the voices that reach every one of us every day via multiple media. The only special knowledge a literary author can have is knowledge of literature, and so I accept Berry's characterization of a circularity in my argument —that novelists do well by attending to the lived reality that their own activity is. And critics, too. Reflexivity in literature, though, does not mean a separation from the social or political world, and solidarity, though desirable, does not need to be the solidarity of mass culture. Group identity doesn't have to promote group-think along racial, gendered, or nationalist lines, not when the identity that writers do share, generally, comes in the first place from membership in (or aspiration to) the professional classes that maintain the current world-system. Wallerstein, no less than Wittgenstein, should be required reading in literary seminars and writing workshops because the loss of an "outside" and the appearance of new constraints on creativity are not exclusively philosophical propositions. (See Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction |2004J.) Rather, the discovery ofa "surprising ," "untamed," literal, and worldly presence is happening everywhere, equally among scientists, artists, novelists, military strategists, and politicians. In various ways, commentators in each field have been arriving at a common realization that the material world is itself more creative and communicative than we might have thought. Involution, rather than outright resistance, could be a more effective way ofbringing about changes; there's no reason to perpetuate a modernist compulsion to innovate, endlessly and mindlessly. As a critic, I'm not trying to legitimate some knowledge of my own apart from the works I'm writing about. Rather, my purpose is to discern a commonality and a sense ofdirection in a number of contemporary currents ofthought. I'm not very interested in narratives, fictive or otherwise, that proclaim their political resistance or outcast status, not when there are so many material transformations going on in so many different fields, from the cognitive and ecological sciences to the integration of literary arts in electronic environments. If...