Summary
Scott defines writing as a conversation that is no doubt linked to early militant years, when many of people could not, would not, separate the struggle for changing the world from the struggle for finding the appropriate language to engage that world. Among other things, if a story operates some kind of conjuncture between affect and the social, then, in terms of expressing our evolving subjectivities, both the question of the shape of the sentence and the relationship between sentences are crucial. Furthermore, people are in the habit of advancing mid the contradictions of languages clashing or float hysterically over: Locomotion is a little derailed by the back-and-forth of constant translation.
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Extract
The Sutured Subject
That for me writing is conversation is no doubt linked to early militant years, when many of us could not, would not, separate the struggle for changing the world from the struggle for finding the appropriate language to engage that world. My own conversation with writing and writers began m Québec in the '80s, at the height of the Québec independence movement; the language was French, and post May-'68 French theory naturally reigned. Remarkably, one aspect of this early conversation-a question, really-still recurs when I meet formally innovative prose writers anywhere on the continent: Why has the space for formally "avant" fiction not opened, in the wider world, in step with dance, independent cinema, visual art, music?
I like a good story as much as anyone. But so many good stories today seem told in the mode of yesterday's news. This situation is, of course, not independent of the critical milieu-notably (but not only) the mainstream press-where narrative is generally brutally foregrounded, is the ultimate measure, to the detriment of the formal elements that drive the prose form, that give it air, texture, poignance, relevance. Virginia Woolf said nearly a century ago that new sentences were needed to c...See the full content of this document
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