Reality Hunger (37 page)

The question isn’t
What do you look at?
but
What do you see?

—plunged into a world of complete happiness in which every triviality becomes imbued with significance.

—the singular obsessions endlessly revised.

The task is not primarily to “think up” a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, and that give apparent form to the story but actually obscure its essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.

I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. I like work that’s focused not only page by page but line by line on what the writer really cares about as opposed to work that assumes that what the writer cares about will magically creep through the cracks of narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels. Collage works are nearly always “about what they’re about”—which may sound a tad tautological—but when I read a book that I really love, I’m excited because I can feel the writer’s excitement that in every paragraph he’s manifestly exploring his subject.

As a moon rocket ascends, different stages of the engine do what they must to accelerate the capsule. Each stage of the
engine is jettisoned until only the capsule is left with the astronauts on its way to the moon. In linear fiction, the whole structure is accelerating toward the epiphanic moment, and certainly the parts are necessary for the final experience, but I still feel that the writer and the reader can jettison the pages leading to the epiphany. They serve a purpose and then fall into the Pacific Ocean, so I’m left with Gabriel Conroy and his falling faintly, faintly falling, and I’m heading to the moon in the capsule, but the rest of the story has fallen away. In collage, every fragment is a capsule: I’m on my way to the moon on every page.

The very nature of collage demands fragmented materials, or at least materials yanked out of context. Collage is, in a way, only an accentuated act of editing: picking through options and presenting a new arrangement (albeit one that, due to its variegated source material, can’t be edited into the smooth, traditional whole that a work of complete fiction could be). The act of editing may be the key postmodern artistic instrument.

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic—not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.

—the transformation, through framing, of outtakes into totems.

This project must raise the art of quoting without quotation marks to the very highest level. Its theory is intimately linked to that of montage.

I hate quotations.