Reality Hunger (38 page)

In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality and appears as a practice of mediation, of selection and contextualization, a practice, almost, of reading.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing—that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair—all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties,
and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock’s (the film is complete in the director’s mind) and Coppola’s (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola’s approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident.

The problem of scale is interesting. How long will the reader stay engaged? I don’t mean stay dutifully but stay charmed, seduced, and beguiled. Robbe-Grillet’s
Ghosts in the Mirror
, which he calls a romanesque, is a quasi-memoir with philosophical reflections, intimate flashes, and personal addresses to the reader. About this length, I think: 174 pages.

You don’t need a story. The question is
How long do you not need a story?

Nothing is going to happen in this book.

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.

By incorporating materials that are inextricably linked to the realities of daily life, the collage artist establishes an immediate identification, both real and imagined, between the viewer and the work of art.

It may be that nowadays in order to move us, abstract pictures need, if not humor, then at least some admission of their own absurdity—expressed in genuine awkwardness, or in an authentic disorder.