V.,wherefore such silence? Whither goest thou?

[alice wellintown]

In this chapter young P has one foot on the platform of Modernism and
one foot on the train-lightning of post-Modernism,

so the emphasis on subjectivity in writing and in all the arts,

and an emphasis on how perception and perspective, multiple and
multiplying, mixing memories and moral positions with desire, as the
sounds of sullied sirens and as the flurries of fused furies bend the
outrageous fortunes of tortured manikins , spin genres into genres,

so poetry is documentary or history or both and prose fiction more
magically poetic, less linear, lotz and lotz more Looming.

All are fragmented forms, not fragments of Chaucer or Aristotle or the
pre-Socratics, who planned unities but died with unfinished
manuscripts in their hands or finished manuscripts but left them dying
in the flames of invading North winds howling,

but discontinuous narratives, and random broken spilled choked
collages collecting detritus and differences in dumps and vacant lots
discarded by a tentative not totally taciturn tendency toward awkward
reflexivity and self-consciousness about the how of the production of
the works of the arts,

so that each work looks inward, some monks naval gazing at what a
piece of work is Man

and calls attention to its own place as a production, as something
constructed to be consumed in conscious and unconscious and perhaps
particular places.