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symploke 14.1/2 (2006) 330-333

Beannacht libh
Michael Joyce
Vassar College

What kind of conversations surround the present one, or the present moment, or our presence to each other? This kind of verbal slippage is, of course, the signature moment of the writing under question here, the convolution and complication of like terms, a sly elision into something like rhyme but not it, text in motion or tender buttons, recurrence and, as, recollection. It is thought too easy and at once too difficult, which is to say too much to ask. Of whom? The market, the reader, other writers, perhaps, but there is a more general malaise which underlies (or underlines–there! again, damn you, that easy gesture, that glissando) all such exchanges these days under the current regime. We are weary of each other because weary of ourselves, perhaps even (ever) weary of our words.

I have my own version of the Franzen-Marcus conversation if it can be called that, theirs or ours, mine with my colleague David Means, friend to Franzen although by inclination, and—he reports—in conversations between them, finding Marcus' ideas about fiction and audience congenial. David's and my talks are less substantive largely on account of all we dare not say about the gulf between us, partly a matter of the difference in decades and stages and prospects of our respective writing lives, but also profoundly, despite all we share (years in Michigan, the community college writing classes, a suspicion of smartasses, and so on), a difference in what it is we think we do and a deep-set, but unacknowledged, sense that it does not matter whether we [End Page 330] ever come to terms about it. Still we have lunch on occasion and greet each other with hugs in the Xerox room at the end of summer. Yet at the center of the cafeteria table is a black hole we keep our elbows and silverware away from, and the polished drum of the Xerox machine mirrors ghostly images of writers, old and young, coming and going, whose wraith-like shadows stain the margins of the workshop submissions, making them vaguely unpleasant for the young writers to handle although they cannot say why.

It is hard to know what is at stake in these disputes or what audiences find their feet wetted as their successively diminishing waves reach increasingly distant shores. Neither Franzen nor Marcus (nor me nor Means nor any of us in this colloquy) are likely to go to jail for what we think or do, not in Pisa or the former Peking. Not, that is, for being drastically wrong (or right for wrong reasons); not either for being right in the face of an unassailable wrong (though we are indeed). Not that we lack courage, and not certainly that what is central to what we do is not a critique of power, but rather because, despite us, what we say or think has little purchase beyond those channels (like cable shopping networks) where the conversation is held.

I recall talking once with Ben Marcus at a literary festival at Brown called "Unspeakable Practices," and I once met Jonathan Franzen at the dinner following his reading where I teach and to which I had managed to secure admission for a young woman, a student writer, who had begged me to do so and who, his eyes told me and events later proved true, had stalked him on previous occasions. This is celebrity journalism of a small-time, small world (and small-town) sort. So, too, one fears is the confrontation before us, or, indeed and more frankly, disappearing into the rearview mirror of a vehicle traveling at light speed. Two guys by the side of the road stirring dust from cinders.

The young woman left here under tragic circumstances, but that is another story.

All the words seem the wrong ones: status versus contract authors, difficulty versus populism, everything perhaps save Marcus' coinage of "alien artisans," with "the collective cultural pull of an ant" (44). We are all aliens...

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