Writing Theory

[Thomas Colin]

  Speaking about the text that is all that is the case, as opposed to 
searching the writer's mind for clues through scraps, writer's secret 
intentions, unpublished juvenalia, first drafts, u.s.w., a few remarks:
  1)If genetic criticism is occasionally interesting, it is also very often, 
in my opinion,  a pretext not to deal with the text we have (cf the endless 
quest for the "sourcebook that Pynchon used to write this or that passage," 
or the wobbly psychological speculations induced by the study of a 
manuscript's corrections, sucessive drafts of a same text, etc.). Doing 
this, we always end up studying the author, not the text. This is 
personnally not what I'm interested in.
  2)The case of Melville reminds me of the French writer Georges Perec, 
whose was a member of the OULIPO and whose work is in many ways admirable. 
Perec's production ranged from creating crossword puzzles, listing words, 
and other mindless pleasures, to writing incredibly complex novels (the most 
famous one is La Disparition, which was written without using even once the 
letter "e," that is the most common letter in French. Even more incredible, 
this book was translated into English, keeping the constraint, but that's 
another story). Now that Perec is dead, EVERYTHING he has ever written is 
being published, which as a result seems to bury his masterpieces under a 
pile of "junk" (I would not be surprised if the the next Perec book to be 
posthumously published was made of the notes he jotted down on some loose 
papers while on the phone...). I'm not sure this serves the cause of 
literature. I even wonder if it's not a major offense to the memory of 
Georges Perec.
   3) I warmly recommend anyone to read W.K Wimsatt's "The Intentional 
Fallacy" (in The Verbal Icon, Kentucky U P.), written some 50 years ago but 
still very actual. Wimsatt is not someone I would usually identify with, but 
this one article is to my mind essential to ask oneself the good questions, 
and forget about the more or less specious ones.
  Tom.

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