(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities

Contents

Preface: Occasions and Opportunities

1. Does The Writer Exist?

Beginnings
(Woman) Writer: Theory and Practice
The Art of Self-Criticism
The Dream of the "Sacred Text"
Does the Writer Exist?
Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature
Against Nature

2. Wonderlands

Wonderlands
Frankenstein's Fallen Angel
Jane Eyre: An Introduction
Moby Dick: An American Book of Wonders
Looking for Thoreau
"Soul at the White Heat": The Romance of Emily Dickinson's Poetry
Pleasure, Duty, Redemption Then and Now: Susan Warner's Diana
Jekyll/Hyde
Kafka as Storyteller

3. In The Ring

Mike Tyson
Blood, Neon, and Failure in the Desert
Tyson/Biggs: Postscript

4. A Miscellany

Annie Johnson: A "Lost" New England Artist
"Life, Vigor, Fire": The Watercolors of Winslow Homer
George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings
The Hemingway Mystique
"Food" as Poetry
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and Smooth Talk: Short Story Into Film
"State-of-the-Art Car": The Ferrari Testarossa
Budapest Journal: May 1980
Visions of Detroit
Meeting the Gorbachevs

5. Selves and Pseudonymous Selves

Five Prefaces
1. them
2. Bellefleur
3. Mysteries of Winterthurn
4. Marya: A Life
5. You Must Remember This
Pseudonymous Selves

Acknowlegements

Reviews

• Booklist, June 15, 1988, p1704
• Publisher's Weekly, June 17, 1988, p52
• Library Journal, July 1988, p81
• New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1988, p21
• Washington Post Book World, July 31, 1988, p10
• Antioch Review, Fall 1988, p522
• Chicago Tribune Books, September 4, 1988, p4
• World Literature Today, Winter 1990, p28
  

Excerpt

From "Against Nature"

The writer's resistance to Nature.
Wallace Stevens: "In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination."

Once, years ago, in 1972 to be precise, when I seemed to have been another person, related to the person I am now as one is related, tangentially, sometimes embarrassingly, to cousins not seen for decades—once, when we were living in London, and I was very sick, I had a mystical vision. That is, I "had" a "mystical vision"—the heart sinks: such pretension—or something resembling one. A fever dream, let's call it. It impressed me enormously and impresses me still, though I've long since lost the capacity to see it with my mind's eye, or even, I suppose, to believe in it. There is a statute of limitations on "mystical visions," as on romantic love.

I was very sick, and I imagined my life as a thread, a thread of breath, or heartbeat, or pulse, or light—yes, it was light, radiant light; I was burning with fever and I ascended to that plane of serenity that might be mistaken for (or is, in fact) Nirvana, where I had a waking dream of uncanny lucidity:

My body is a tall column of light and heat.
My body is not "I" but "it."
My body is not one but many.
My body, which "I" inhabit, is inhabited as well by other creatures, unknown to me, imperceptible—the smallest of them mere specks of light.

My body, which I perceive as substance, is in fact an organization of infinitely complex, overlapping, imbricated structures, radiant light their manifestation, the "body" a tall column of light and blood heat, a temporary agreement among atoms, like a high-rise building with numberless rooms, corridors, corners, elevator shafts, windows. . . . In this fantastical structure the "I" is deluded as to its sovereignty, let alone its autonomy in the (outside) world; the most astonishing secret is that the "I" doesn't exist!—but it behaves as if it does, as if it were one and not many.

In any case, without the "I" the tall column of light and heat would die, and the microscopic life particles would die with it . . . will die with it. The "I," which doesn't exist, is everything.

But Dr. Johnson is right, the inexpressible need not be expressed.

And what resistance, finally? There is none.