The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts

[Erik T. Burns]

i think part of what WG is working with is the importance of the author to
the work. for Gaddis, the author is not important. or rather, he is
important as a man, but the art is something more than that, something
ephemeral, something transmitted and received. the original Flemish masters,
the "source" of all these forgeries, were painted by schools, in the style
of, and so on. proving authenticity, thus of an author, is difficult, often
impossible (thus facilitating the fakes). I think the real sin for WG is the
modern tendency to focus on the author, rather than the work; thus the
embarrassing reality of the art market, where wealthy idiots pay top dollar
for fakes -- because they care more that it's an "authentic" Van Eyck than
that it's any good.

"What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What
do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any
artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it
around?" (pp95-96)





On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Jed Kelestron <jedkelestron at gmail.com>wrote:

> The interesting thing about the Borges story, "Pierre Menard, autor
> del Quijote," is not that Menard reconceived Quijote without reading
> the original, it is that he wrote it identically, line for line,
> without reading the original, and that literary criticism
> 'reconceived' or re-interpreted those same words through a different
> historical lens.
>
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