Somewhere in his essays, William Gass says that in reply to the foolish question, ‘Who do you write for?’ he says ‘The ear.’
This recurred to mind this week while perusing American Religious Poems: An Anthology, which I had gotten for my mother-in-law and which now served as fresh reading material for me, away from my own books. What a satisfying reading experience it was, and how easily conflicts over different compositional methods — say, Gjertrud Schnackenburg vs. Michael Palmer — are subordinated to a similar goal: addressing the pure and perfect Ear.
Even in circles where religious sentiment is taken to be a kind of failure of imagination (”middlebrow”), it’s hard to escape the air of transcendence that hovers over literature. I mean, delete the references to God in Annie Dillard and you practically get W.G. Sebald. Yet their audiences probably don’t overlap that much.
I found this Gass quote in a Paris Review interview…
Posted By: Chris L on July 25, 2007 at 1:40 pm“I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you in speed-reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see if lowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, J.R. was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear; that’s the way I’d like to write. I can still admire the other– the way I admire surgeons, bronc busters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.”
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Hi Chris – Honestly, I’m not sure what he means by this “new mode” neither performative nor auditory. He doesn’t give examples.
Posted By: Ange on July 25, 2007 at 10:07 pmIt sounds terrible.
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