| ISBN: |
1-882022-39-4 |
| TITLE: |
The Words after
Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean Paul |
| AUTHOR: |
Carla Harryman |
|
$12.00 |
Description: 1999,106 pages
In
this challenge to the separation of literary genres, Carla Harryman takes as her points of
departure two entirely disparate texts. Exploding Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideal of
imagined autonomy, in his autobiography The Words, and inspired by the grotesque
play of Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, Harryman begins with her own account
of an impossible and contemporary childhood. In a world of recollected futurity,
nihilists, chairs, amazons, ghosts, and spool babies, “We, the stranded”
concoct their illusions of spontaneous creativity.
The
Words
is not one novel, but many. Its economics are libidinal, luxuriant, and layered: part roman
fleuve, in which the first generation born in the “artificial jungles” of
the Cold War comes of age “on the border that separates the absurd from the socially
constructed reality,” part roman a clef, in which every word will instantly
recognize itself and every fly allusion find its author in eternity, and part
philosophical romance in the mode of the later Wittgenstein, who proposed that “the
double cross and the duck-rabbit might be among the spots [on] a wall covered with
spots.” And, because “shadows dream in their niches,” this is finally a utopian
novel, everywhere transforming “defeat into rapture.” In (and with) The
Words, Carla Harryman has written a postmodern classic. It’s the book to take
along to that proverbially deserted island.
— Ted Pearson
At
last, children’s literature has been liberated, liberated into fiction! Carla
Harryman’s Words is a fiction in which the mischief is perpetually unnaming
names in an ongoing discursive cross-wind beneficial to hybridizing texts. Bold and
subversive.
— Marjorie Welish
Winesburg,
Ohio
through a convex eye. Dismissing romanticization and exposé,
Harryman opts for the multidimensional properties...
—
Sarah Schulman
In
The Words, Harryman playfully examines the family, the suburbs, daily life, the
position of woman, while boldly undermining notions about character and plot. There’s
a ferocity to her wit, a cunning to her deconstructions — and always a devotion to
language, its elasticity and limits. I admire Harryman’s rare mind, its gleeful
feminism, broad intelligence, and anarchic inventiveness.
— Lynne Tillman
Language
Poetry still makes nearly everything else in the contemporary scene seem like overplayed,
lobotomized Motown compared to its stringent hip-hop. But there's a dizzying variety of
tendencies under the Language Poetry tent, ranging from Zaum-like pure lyricism to the
sort of FrankfurtSchool-meets-John Ashbery tendency found in the work of poets like
CarlaHarryman.THE WORDS AFTER CARL SANDBURG'S ROOTABAGA STORIES AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
istypical Harryman: intelligent, sardonic, and elliptical to the point ofdelirium.
Essentially three long, disjunctive prose poems, this is not a"novel" in any
conventional sense. "Variations on a theme" is more like it,since there's no
plot per se, though there are recurrent images and themes.THE WORDS is
"after" Sandburg and Sartre not in the sense of homage or loosetranslation;
rather, Harryman turns to the earlier texts as ideologicalimagebanks whose fever dreams
she exposes, then rifts along with andrecodes. Here, for instance, she takes up the pitch
and syntax of Sandburg'ssmarmy children's book (Rootabaga Stories) and leads it off into
ametacritique: "Watch out has never been reported in the newspaper to havebeen seen
dancing on a dancing spool in the sky, but when we read, weimagine the pressperson writing
down words ejaculated from the fraught and frozen voices of a world as if they were the
observations of a fully neutralinterlocutor and we say watch out." One pleasure to be
had in this sort of writing is the rather ascetic one ofremaining awake to the ruses of
language and history.... But if this isprofoundly disenchanted stuff, it's precisely
Harryman's wised-up relationto the ideological dimension of culture that provides the
stage for herhard-won bursts of lyricism: "one can't see the mirror on the tip of
theflower."...
Village Voice, —Thad Ziolkowski
Copyright © 2002 O Books
