Literature's Elsewheres by Annette Gilbert

Author:Annette Gilbert [Gilbert, Annette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary studies; comparative literature; experimental literature; institutional critique; literary theory; visual culture; Black artist; Black poet; Feminism; Women poet; activism; conceptual art; conceptual writing; avant-garde; literary work; craig dworkin; liz kotz; book art; paratexts; St�phane Mallarm�; Jorge Luis Borges; bookworks; artists� books; site-specificity; appropriation; copies; fake; forgery; originality; reproducibility; reproduction; writing; translation; autonomy; sociality; socialization; white cube; praxeology; marginality; idea art; book trade; materiality of literature; media studies; curating; editing; publishing; technology; standards; error; glitch; bias; authorship
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

“Sometimes the storm hurled clouds into the valleys and they swept through // the forest, and voices awakened on the rocky slopes, one moment like distant echoing thunder and the next like a powerful surge”

and

“then clouds again, which lay on the topmost peaks, and then slowly descended into the valley through // the forest, or else rose and sank in the sun’s rays.”31

Astoundingly, this interweaving does not destroy the coherence of the text: “because of the seamlessness of the cross-fade, the faked text connection does not immediately give its falsehood away. [ . . . ] The false linearity is developed in the text almost unseen, replacing the real linearity.”32

Graham thus generates a loop structure that—four times in the first edition and eighty-four times in the second edition—keeps sending Lenz through the forest over and over again, and condemns the reader to an unusually intensive close reading of the first dramatic pages of the novella. In Graham’s Reading Machine for Lenz (1993)—in which, next to the first, permanently mounted page of Lenz, there is a rotating frame with the next double pages (figure 11.8)—the loop can even be endlessly reproduced. This entrapment in the loop mirrors the disorientation of the main character and the hopelessness of his situation. As Dagmara Kraus writes in the Afterword, the protagonist Lenz in Graham’s print version has, an unbearable eighty-four times, thus “been visited by ‘nameless fear’ and ‘unnameable fear’; 84 times, but potentially infinitely often, he has ‘thrown himself into the fountain’ at night in the course of a psychotic attack (or rather, was thrust there by Graham without once even turning around to take the pusher to task . . .); 84 times, Lenz has become ‘empty,’ while the pages have been filled around him—with an empty loop, a well-calculated empty loop.”33

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