In 1995 Geoff Dyer wrote his essay “Unpacking My Library”, which is a very literal homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same title published first in 1931. In his essay Dyer recalls Benjamin’s belief that “the nicest way to acquire books…is to write them.” “I think not”, continues Dyer, “the books I care least about in my collection are my own. In a sense they’re not in my collection… they’re replaceable in a way that others are not…” So then what would be in Dyer’s collection alongside, for instance, D.H. Lawrence and John Berger, on whom he has written extensively? Certainly, with his identification and borderline obsession with American culture, including Jazz and photographs of the American landscape, there are many books by American authors there. The following is an excerpt from his wonderful essay “Pounding Print”: “In a culture predicated on the idea of everybody having the potential for getting on—for winning—much of the best American writing has pledged itself to the idea that it is by following the downtrodden, the losers, the beaten, that we find, to adapt a title of Raymond Carver’s, the path to the waterfall of truth… Since Hemingway, and especially since Faulkner, one of the main projects of American fiction has been to forge the authentic literary register of illiteracy… For such an undertaking, the type, encountered in Hemingway’s story [The Pugilist at Rest], of the punchy boxer is obviously, as they say in the fight game, pretty useful. The fighter becomes the dramatic projection of the writer’s own enterprise… To succeed, to score points, language has to break itself up. Its clarity and precision are synonymous with its propensity for self-maiming. Its power is inextricably bound up with and dependent on its capacity to damage itself… It is perhaps not too fanciful, then, to suggest that Hemingway’s boxing metaphor for literary ambition has been unconsciously absorbed to the extent that the opponents, in both cases, are those undefeated heavyweights Hemingway and Faulkner. One way or another, American writers—white male ones at any rate—are still busting their hands on them.” #TFTraces All quotes from Geoff Dyers book of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 03:23:23 +0000
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