This is the cover of writer Anna Kavan’s novel Sleep Has His House. Peter Owen Publishing Company writes of Sleep:
A largely autobiographical account of an unhappy childhood, Sleep Has His House startled with its strangeness in 1948. Today it is one of Anna Kavan’s most acclaimed books.
A daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation, Sleep Has His House charts chronologically the stages of the subject’s gradual withdrawal from all interest in and contact with the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence and youth are described in what Kavan terms ‘night-time language’ — a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations. The novel suggests we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams, but these thoughts can only be sharpened, or decoded by contemplation in the dark.
Anna Kavan maintained that the plot of a book is only the point of departure, beyond which she tries to reveal that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye, but which dreams and drugs can suddenly illuminate. She spent the last ten years of her life literally and metaphorically shutting out the light; the startling discovery of Sleep has His House is how much these night-time illuminations reveal her joy for the living world.
This is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read, and it’s one of my favorites. Anna Kavan is acclaimed as an experimental writer - comparisons to Djuna Barnes and Anais Nin, who tried to start an epistolary correspondence with Kavan, are frequent - but history seems to have forgotten her. As it is, there aren’t too many women in the canon of earlier twentieth century experimental literature; I think Kavan deserves wider recognition.
From Kevin S. Fitzgerald’s “The Negative Eschatology Of Maurice Blanchot”
In his seminal work The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature, Jean Paulhan asked, “What is literature?” In response to this question, Blanchot published late in 1941 the essay “How is Literature Possible?” (BR 49-60).[1] With this essay, Blanchot commenced upon an investigation into the ontology of literature that reached its apex within the pages of The Space of Literature. After the Liberation, Sartre likewise began to respond to the question of literature. He did this primarily through essays he authored and published in his new journal Les Temps modernes. In 1947, Sartre collected these essays, which espouse the necessity for politically committed literature (littérature engagée), into a volume entitled, What is Literature? In this work, Sartre writes:
The function of a writer is to call a cat a cat. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words. It is perfectly all right to write ‘horse of butter’ but in a sense it amounts to doing the same thing as those who speak of a fascist United States or a Stalinist national socialism. There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which resound about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning (228).In this passage, Sartre takes a phase that Bataille used in the Inner Experience to champion Surrealism, “horse of butter,” as the epitome of the poetic vagueness he despises. Invoking the call for referential directness Boileau made in his first Satire, “j’appelle un chat un chat et Rolet un fripon” (I call a cat a cat and Rolet a rascal), Sartre attacks the autotelic stance that informs Bataille’s phrase.[2] Sartre attacks the autotelic or art for art’s sake stance because poets of this school, such as Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, largely approached literature as an autonomous space, one that remains exempt from the ethical considerations of the world. It is predictable that Sartre would attack such a stance, for literature or art created for its own sake more often than not resists committing itself in an overt manner to political action and engagement. Sartre also dismisses autotelic writing because he contends that its meaning relies largely upon private association. Finding it incapable of the direct and clear communication required by political writing, he regards Surrealism as representative of the frivolous nature of poetry in general. Believing that prose alone possesses the capacity to directly use the word for political causes, Sartre states, “the poet does not utilize the word, he does not choose between [its] different sense” (WL31).
In opposition to the Sartrean program of littérature engagée, Blanchot published in the January 1948 issue of Bataille’s Critique his important essay, “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” (Literature and the Right to Death (WF 300-344)). By polarizing or dichotomizing in this longish essay the space of literature and the political action of the world, Blanchot defends poetic ambiguity against Sartre’s denunciation. Speaking of the equivocal nature of the written word, he responds to Sartre: “the cat is not a cat, and anyone who claims that it is has nothing in mind but this hypocritical violence: Rolet is a rascal” (WF 311). In this manner, rather than view the double meaning that coalesces around the written word as a sickness the writer must combat, Blanchot implies that ambiguity alone allows the reader to develop a sincere dialogue with the text, via interpretation. Standing Sartre’s argument on its head, he states, “deceit and mystification not only are inevitable but constitute the writer’s honesty” (WF 310).
Unica Zurn (6 July 1916 in Berlin-Grunewald - 1970 in Paris) was a German author and painter.
She is remembered for her works of anagram poetry and exhibitions of automatic drawing.
Unica Zürn, Hexentexte, 1945
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”
“Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny - very tiny, content.” - Willem De Kooning, in an interview “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” - Oscar Wilde, in a letter 1 The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself. Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “imitation of an imitation.” For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate trompe l’oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions. In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory. The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such - above and beyond given works of art - becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory. Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is … ,” “What X is trying to say is …,” “What X said is …” etc., etc.) read more: http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-againstinterpretation.html
In Praise of Mina Loy
DIE in the Past
Live in the Future.
THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.
IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.
AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.
THE straight line and the circle are the parents of design, form the basis of art; there is no limit to their coherent variability.
LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.
OPEN your arms to the dilapidated; rehabilitate them.
YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.
BUT the Future is only dark from outside.
Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.
FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself—
FOR the smallest people live in the greatest houses.
BUT the smallest person, potentially, is as great as the Universe.
WHAT can you know of expansion, who limit yourselves to compromise?
HITHERTO the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small.
BUT in the Future, by inspiring the people to expand to their fullest capacity, the great man proportionately must be tremendous—a God.
LOVE of others is the appreciation of oneself.
MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.
THE Future is limitless—the past a trail of insidious reactions.
LIFE is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself.
TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.
THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.
HE can compress every aesthetic principle in one line.
THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.
LOOKING on the past you arrive at “Yes,” but before you can act upon it you have already arrived at “No.”
THE Futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative exploration; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.
THERE are no excrescences on the absolute, to which man may pin his faith.
TODAY is the crisis in consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.
CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.
(from Aphorisms on Futurism)
Mina Loy was so great. I think it’s a darn shame that her work hasn’t been made more widely available.
Mina Loy, Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays.
