Reality Hunger (36 page)

Renata Adler’s collage novel
Speedboat
captivates by its jagged and frenetic changes of pitch and tone and voice. She confides, reflects, tells a story, aphorizes, undercuts the aphorism, then undercuts that. If she’s cryptic in one paragraph, she’s clear in the next. She changes subjects like a brilliant schizophrenic, making irrational sense. She’s intimate: bed talk uninhibited
by conventions. Ideas, experiences, and emotions are inseparable. I don’t know what she’ll say next. She tantalizes by being simultaneously daring and elusive. The book builds: images recur, ideas are interwoven, names reappear. Paragraphs are miniature stories. She’s always present, teasing things apart, but not from a distance. There’s very little that’s abstract. I can feel her breathe. “The point has never quite been entrusted to me,” she says, and so we must keep reading, for we know there will be another way of looking at everything. In many ways the book has suspense and momentum. She’s promising us something; something is around the corner. How long can she go on this way? I don’t know, but timing is everything. She has to quit before we do and still give an oblique, sly sense of closure, of satisfaction. You can see her working hard on that in the last paragraph.

A great painting comes together, just barely.

A mosaic, made out of broken dishes, makes no attempt to hide the fact that it’s made out of broken dishes, in fact flaunts it.

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

I look at melody as rhythm.

All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music.

I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers—the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.

—the shapely swirl of energy holding shattered fragments in place, but only just.

Collage is pieces of other things. Their edges don’t meet.

Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp’s “Fountain”—urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.

You don’t make art; you find it.

The main question collage artists face: you’ve found some interesting material—how do you go about arranging it?