First, you need an ordinary sentence:

The cat wants to jump up on the table.

Next, you replace whichever words in that sentence that you like with their dictionary definitions. For now, let’s just do the nouns—although note that you can do this with any word and part of speech:

The small domesticated carnivore, bred in a number of varieties, wants to jump up on the article of furniture consisting of a flat, slablike top supported on one or more legs or other supports.

And that’s it! (I told you it was simple—so simple that I doubt I’m the only one to have devised it.)

The technique is of course recombinant, and can get out of control rather quickly:

The small domesticated animal that eats flesh, bred in a number of kinds or sorts, wants to jump up on an individual object of movable articles such as tables, chairs, desks or cabinets, required for use or ornament in a house, office, or the like, and consisting of a flat, slablike uppermost or upper part or surface and supported on one or more somethings resembling or suggesting in use, position, or appearance a leg or other something that serves as a foundation, prop, brace, or stay.

And again:

The small domesticated member of the kingdom Animalia, that has a well-defined shape and usually limited growth, and that can move voluntarily, actively acquire food and digest it internally, and that has a sensory and nervous system that allows it to respond rapidly to stimuli, and that out of preference or nutritional necessity eats the soft substance of humans or other animal bodies (said substance consisting of muscle and fat), and that is bred in a number of classes or groups of individual objects, people, animals, etc. of the same nature or character and that are thus classified together because they have traits in common—that member wants to jump up on an individual thing that is visible or tangible and that is relatively stable in form, and what’s more is movable—such as a seat, especially for one person, usually having four legs for support and a rest for the back and often having rests for the arms—or an article of furniture having a broad, usually level, writing surface, as well as drawers or compartments for papers, writing materials, etc.—or a a piece of furniture with shelves, drawers, etc., for holding or displaying items—or even a table—and that is required for use or ornament in a building in which people live, or a room, set of rooms, or building where the business of a commercial or industrial organization or of a professional person is conducted, or the like, consisting of a flat, slablike uppermost or upper portion or division of a whole that is separate or distinct, or rather an outermost or uppermost layer or area, and that is in its totality supported on one or more somethings resembling or suggesting in use, position, or appearance either of the two lower limbs of a biped, as a human being, or any of the paired limbs of an animal, arthropod, etc. that support and move the body, or some other something that serves as the basis or groundwork of anything, such as a stick, or a rod, or a pole, or a beam, or any other rigid support that imparts rigidity or steadiness by holding parts together or in place, such as a clasp, or a clamp, or a bracket, or a lock, or a nipper.

Indeed, you could write a whole book using nothing but this technique! I thought once of doing so, but lost interest. Instead, I simply used the technique here and there to mess with some sentences, although not in anything I ever published.

This is, of course, pure defamiliarization, not unlike Tolstoy’s story narrated from the point of view of a horse.

See also:

• “The Spell Check Technique” (a way to generate text)
• Another way to generate text: “Backmasking” (now with bonus Batman/Beatles content)
• Viktor Shklovsky wants to make you a better writer, part 1: device & defamiliarization

& enjoy!

Directed by Meggie Green
Words by Richard Chiem
Music by Kale Ogle

YOU PRIVATE PERSON, Chiem’s first collection of short stories, is forthcoming from Scrambler Books (2012).

If you haven’t caught Tao Lin on twitter since his declaration of “no longer trying” during the last ~48 hours, it’s been pretty fun/funny/interesting. Besides watching his unflagging dedication to the whim during the migration of hundreds of followers following the often several times a minute posts re: boredom, racism, music, being unfollowed, retweets forming a “Best American Tweets” anthology (during which I received ~45 notification emails), I think my favorite part so far was when he had “cybersex” with some dude from some band. It’s all getting deleted June 1st. Have you been watching?

The Ravickians

The second volume of a trilogy of novels exploring the crumbling, war-torn imaginary country of Ravicka, The Ravickians is less an exploration of the people and culture of Ravicka than it is a breathtaking book-length meditation on loss. The book moves through what it means to be lost, to get lost, to lose connection with your fellow humans and surroundings. This is all done in a brief novel divided into three parts: 1) a first person account of a day spent wandering by The Great Ravickian Novelist Luswege Amini; 2) a poetry reading that same day given by Amini friend Zäoter Limici; and 3) 52 pages in twelve sections of unascribed dialogue spoken during a night out in the broken down capitol city of Ravicka that includes Amini, Limici, other writer colleagues and some new characters not mentioned earlier in the text.

This may sound somewhat disjointed or tough, especially the dialogue, and even given Gladman’s clear plain prose some of the dialogue is impossible to follow, but all of it is tied together through Gladman’s constant complex return to absence and loss. And it’s not just different kinds of loss or absence experienced by Amini in the novel’s longest segment but loss as intimate as a loss of words that shutters a conversation between strangers or as widescreen as the violent destruction of architecture. Architecture is a more readily apparent ongoing concern than loss in the book–characters are obsessed with the architecture of Ravicka, write about it, and define themselves against it–but the surface play of dwelling on the decaying infrastructure of Ravicka is less important than loss when it comes to an idea and an act revisited again and again in the text as story and as performance. I’ll get to “performance” in a second but first, as story, loss dominates both the day narrated by Amini and the writing in the poems presented in the novel’s second part. One example of a two-fold loss happens when Amini visits a local bookstore she likes only to discover that, in the alphabetized bookstore, all of section A is missing, allegedly sold to a collector. Since Amini’s books fall under A this is a loss for both her and the bookstore, one she wonders at:

Loss gets encountered by Amini throughout the first section, and maybe the most compelling section is when she loses herself, purposely, boarding a train with no destination in mind and riding it until the last stop, then wandering into a large field of tall grass, lying down, and losing herself to sleep. And it isn’t so much that Gladman is trying to present a thesis about loss as absence is refracted through the prism of the three-part book.  Another important loss is the loosening of a decades-long relationship between Amini and Ana Patova, a relationship now mostly conducted by a courier who brings Amini messages in languages she cannot decipher. There are more examples, but you get the idea; the pleasure of reading this book isn’t in its characters or story but in how Gladman keeps returning to loss in dozens of interlocking ways.

As for performance: the second and third parts of the book are performances by Gladman and her characters that give a voice to the loss Amini encounters during her wandering.  In the second section, poet Limici reads muted, oblique elegies to the loss of buildings and monuments:

Here Gladman’s meditation on loss is echoed by Limici’s writings, a voice through which Gladman can re-write a fictive/poetic text in another voice. What Amini experiences in the first section gets rendered into poetry and delivered, performed on the page.

It’s the final section of the book, though, that’s at once both the most frustrating and the most audacious, compelling, and by the end of the book terrifying. At first, because the dialogue is completely unascribed it becomes clear who’s lost: you, the reader. This works great as a concept but doesn’t initially seem like enough to justify over 50 pages of stuff like this:

At first this may seem daunting but eventually the partial or minor losses of the character’s lives re-enter the book in a massive, chilling way that they can barely comprehend, much less articulate, and are helpless to do anything about but bear witness.  This is all Amini and Limici can ultimately do, and it’s also all you can do as the book progresses more by accumulation than by narrative arc.  The novel and the various things that happen in it are so expertly laid out by Gladman and so compelling moment by moment that even if you might have to have patience to fit the different fragments of loss and language together, it’s a novel whose theme and variations are worth bearing witness to.

When I was finishing up my Master’s degree at ISU, I worried that I still didn’t know much about writing—like, how to actually do it. My mentor Curtis White told me, “Just read Viktor Shklovsky; it’s all in there.” So I moved to Thailand and spent the next two years poring over Theory of Prose. When I returned to the US in the summer of 2005, I sat down and started really writing.

I’ve already put up one post about what, specifically I learned from Theory of Prose, but it occurs to me now that I can be even more specific. So this will be the first in a series of posts in which I try to boil ToP down into a kind of “notes on craft,” as well as reiterate some of the more theoretical arguments that I’ve been making both here and at Big Other over the past 2+ years. Of course if this interests you, then I most fervently recommend that you actually read the Shklovsky—and not just ToP but his other critical texts as well as his fiction, which is marvelous. (Indeed, Curt has since told me that he didn’t mean for me to focus so much on ToP! But I still find it extraordinarily useful.)

Let’s talk first about where Viktor Shklovsky himself started: the concepts of device and defamiliarization.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) was, among other things, one of the founders of the intellectual movement that we today call Russian Formalism. (Other participants include Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and Yuri Tynianov). Broadly speaking, they wanted to understand artworks by breaking them down into their constituent parts, or devices (priem)—what we might call tropes or techniques or mechanisms. Different members of this circle studied different devices, and they didn’t always agree as to which devices mattered most. Rather, what unified them was their dedication to identifying devices, then explaining how those devices worked in concert with one another—as well as how those arrangements changed over time.

Theory of Prose was originally published in 1925, but not published in English until 1991. (You can read a lot of it online, here.) It begins with a literal account of the above paragraph: “Art as Device.” (This title is sometimes translated as “Art as Technique”; this is of course that word priem—прием—which means many different things, including chess strategy.) Shklovsky spends some time discussing other accounts of art that people before him have proposed, mainly so he can dismiss them. (He was a fierce critic.) And a lot of new readers get tripped up in these first few pages, but the essential point is that Shklovsky is defining art as device: an artwork is, formally speaking, the sum of its techniques. What’s more, those devices are artistic devices:

In a narrow sense we shall call a work artistic if it has been created by special devices whose purpose is to see to it that these artifacts are interpreted artistically as much as possible (2)

In other words: art for art’s sake! (We don’t judge or evaluate a sculpture by the same criteria we judge other objects—such as iPads, which, despite whatever aesthetic qualities they might possess, ultimately have mundane, utilitarian functions.)

Shklovsky next proceeds to a broader defense of art, and an argument as to its purpose. This is the most famous thing he ever wrote. First, Shklovsky relates a passage from Tolstoy’s diary, in which the author recounts how, after dusting his living room, he couldn’t remember whether he’d cleaned his sofa. This causes Tolstoy to wonder how much of one’s life is lived unconsciously:

If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been. (5)

Shklovsky next draws a distinction between “recognition” (“automatized perception”) and “seeing.” Recognition occurs when we look at things without seeing them—when dusting the sofa has become so familiar, we tune it out. (“I know I drove home from work, but I don’t recall doing it.”) Seeing, in contrast, happens when something makes us to look again, and regard a thing as though we’re encountering it for the first time. An example I’m fond of is that I lived in Chicago for five years, riding the CTA Blue Line constantly during that time, before noticing (actually seeing) the wood paneling that lines the inside of its train cars.

OK. Shklovsky next asks how we might escape recognition—whose dull teeth are ever at our throat—and return, time and again, to seeing. He goes on to write the most-quoted passage from Theory of Prose:

Held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war. [...] And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “enstranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.” The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to its fullest. (5–6)

Art is art because it shakes us out of our complacency, reminding us that we are alive and that things don’t have to be the way they are. It reminds us that anything is possible, despite the fact that we routinely convince ourselves that things are just as they are—the way we’ve inherited them. It is the job of the artist, therefore, to imagine what exists outside of prescribed reality. In a certain sense, art becomes a kind of experimental living.

But it’s important that we note how art, in fact, does this in Shklovsky’s account. Here we must return to our concept of device. Because, remember, for Shklovsky, art is device. And these devices can be cataloged and inherited and imitated—they can even assume the insistence of dogma. (“Show, don’t tell.”) They routinely get assembled in conventional ways—familiar patterns. How, then, can a thing as solidly formulaic as an artwork ever produce something other than automatic recognition?

Shklovsky’s answer is defamiliarization, or ostranenie (which is also often called “estrangement” or “enstrangement”; the Russian is “остранение”). And this is a concept that has been much misunderstood. (Here are two examples of literary critic James Wood completely botching it; mistaking it as being akin to metaphor.) Another common misunderstanding is that defamiliarization is anything surprising or novel in art (“Put the painting on the ceiling!”). But defamiliarization, at heart, is both simpler and much more powerful: it is the manipulation of an artwork’s devices such that the artist disrupts mere recognition.

Shklovsky provides an example from Tolstoy (his favorite author), the story “Kholstomer,” told from a horse’s point of view. What Shklovsky likes about this is not the narrator’s equinity (i.e., not some gimmick), but rather how that conceit enables Tolstoy to defamiliarize everyday customs and objects (and aspects of language):

Many of the people, for example, who called me their horse did not ride on me. Others did. These same people never fed me. Others did. Once again, I was shown many kindnesses, but not by those who called me their horse. No, by coachmen, veterinarians and strangers of all sorts. As my observations grew, though, I became increasingly convinced that this concept of mine was invalid not only for us horses but also for human folk, i.e., that it represents nothing more than man’s base and beastly instinct to claim property for himself. A landlord, for instance, says “my house” but never lives in it, concerning himself only with the structure and maintenance of the house. A merchant says “my shop,” “my clothing shop,” yet he himself does not wear any clothes made from the fine material displayed in it. (7)

Shklovsky then notes—crucially—that “the horse is killed off long before the end of the story, but the mode of telling the story, its device, does not change” (ibid). What matters is Tolstoy’s novel use of a stock literary device, which he pursues to the extent of warping both the story and our impression of everyday life.

For Shklovsky, then, art—while always a matter of conventional devices—demands that the artist resist automatic recognition by means of defamiliarization—that he or she make some unconventional employment of one or more of the artwork’s devices. Since he was a writer and literary critic, his concern is how this is done in literature. And so he spends much of the rest of the chapter discussing how euphemisms, erotica, riddles, and poetry produce this effect by impeding recognition:

In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, involving both the arrangement of words and the semantic structures based on them, we discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact that has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized perception. It is “artificially” created by an artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text. (12)

Poetry, thus, is not “thinking in images,” as others before and after have claimed, or even a prescribed way of writing. It is not metaphorical language, as many lyric MFA students have been taught; nor is it writing that resists semantic closure and thereby forces the production of meaning onto its audience, as the Language Poets would have it. Nor is it writing that is above all else sincere, as the New Sincerists and Muumuu House would have it; nor is it allegorical writing that results, mechanically and residually, from a motivating concept or procedure, as the Conceptual Poets would have it.

It is instead all these things and more; it is “the language of impeded, distorted speech. It is structured speech” (13). N.B. that structure and impedibility are not antitheses! The impeding is a function of the structure—indeed, it is impossible to make the reader pause without structure.

This principle gets at the very heart of my disagreement with Chris Higgs, seen most sharply here and here. (The rest of our debate is forthcoming!) It also underlies my criticisms of James Wood, and my many, many critiques of Christopher Nolan. I will try to summarize it as simply as I can:

1. Art is formulaic; it is comprised of devices and patterns of devices.
2. We desire, however, that art defamiliarize.
3. Thus, the artist must employ some of those devices toward defamiliarization—through addition, subtraction, or substitution.
4. That said, in order for us to be able to feel the effect of defamiliarization, it’s essential that other devices in the artwork be conventionally employed. (Total innovation is indistinguishable from noise. If everything bucked convention, how would we know we’re in the presence of an artwork?)
5. Furthermore, we can never prescribe which devices should be altered, or in what way. What can be done with an artwork to make it “feel stony” is entirely contingent on the artist’s time and place.

Shklovsky is adamant on this last point, and concludes the chapter by addressing it:

There is such a thing as “order” in art, but not a single column of a Greek temple fulfills its order perfectly, and artistic rhythm may be said to exist in the order of prose disrupted. Attempts have been made by some to systematize these “disruptions.” [...] We have good reason to suppose that this systemization will not succeed. This is so because we are dealing here not so much with a more complex rhythm as with a disruption of rhythm itself, a violation, we may add, that can never be predicted. If this violation enters the canon, then it loses its power as a complicating device. (14)

Christopher Higgs and James Wood are of course very different critics, but I’d argue that, as well-intentioned as they both are (they promote the writing they think the most artistic, which is noble), they both effectively make the same mistake. Chris (it seems to me) desires that writing be anti-Aristotelian, some hybrid of fiction and poetry that employs the devices he considers “experimental.” (Meanwhile, he considers other devices and patterns non-experimental.) James Wood, conversely, thinks the best writing to be realist prose, which he likes best when it’s written in the third person limited, employing free indirect discourse. These preferences lead Higgs and Wood to overstate the artistic importance and effect of what they personally like, to the point where those respective things are all that count for them as art.

[Christopher Nolan is a different animal entirely. I think he wants to be an artist—I believe he really does aspire to make today's Godfather: Part II—and he even has some decent innovations (e.g., "tell the story backward"), although they're never as defamiliarizing as he seems to think they are. But his real problem is that he relies too much on familiar convention, the commonest film techniques of the day, making movies wherein his 1% defamiliarization gets drowned out by the 99% of his rote, uninspired cinematic language—to the point where his innovation essentially becomes a gimmick. (Put another way, he thinks it cool that the narrator is a horse.)]

Returning to Higgs and Wood: it’s fine to have favorites, and I don’t fault them their preferences. But art has no favorite way of being made, and there are no experimental devices. One can only experiment with devices. There also aren’t any realist devices—rather, there are devices that, in a given time and place, produce the effect of realism. (This is why today’s most convincingly realist art is tomorrow’s stylized artifice. Can you believe that audiences once couldn’t see the artifice in classic Hollywood cinema?)

Furthermore, art is (necessarily) always a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar. That mixture is not preset; nor is it a recipe or a formula that one follows. Any aspect of the artwork can be bent toward defamiliarization—and, in time, should be! Because what counts as art right now will very possibly not count as art tomorrow, except in some historic sense. We are always at war with the insatiable process of recognition.

This also suggests that the innovation of defamiliarization has nothing—nothing!—to do with originality or invention. Or, rather, arguments over originality and invention miss the larger point. When an artist disrupts a familiar pattern, it doesn’t matter if they’re the first person to do it, or whether they’ve stolen that idea from another time and another place (or whether they thought up on their own something that someone else already did). What matters is what effect the disruption produces in their specific artwork, in its specific time and place. For more on this principle, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and especially here.)

Finally, we can see that genre is no obstacle whatsoever to innovation. All writing, all art, is formulaic. Some of those formulas we call genres. Their familiar conventionality provides a serious artist with plenty of opportunity for innovation (aka, “The Stanley Kubrick Story”). Shklovsky: “Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant” (6, emphasis in the original).

“Art as Device” is a very dense fourteen pages, and serves as the foundation for the remainder of Theory of Prose. In the chapters that follow, Shklovsky provides extensive examples of devices and patterns of devices (taken from specific works), then demonstrates how authors can and do defamiliarize by manipulating the most conventional elements of literature. In the posts that follow, I’ll summarize some of that, drawing attention to the practical lessons I learned, and provide some more contemporary examples. (I’ll even explain how this relates to my recent series of posts on generating text!)

Until then—go fuck yourself!

(See?)

The Temptation to Exist

A Short History of Decay

This Sex Which Is Not One

Part of the aversion to theory, as far as I can tell, comes from the mistaken assumption that the genre we call theory should be read differently than the genres we call fiction or poetry, because it’s “critical” rather than “creative.” On the contrary, I think it’s quite productive to read theory as if it were poetry or fiction, which is to say as if its primary function was to affect rather than educate.

I recognize that my position is contentious. I’ve taken heat in the past for advising people to suspend their desire for comprehension while reading theory. For reasons unknown, some readers still think understanding a text is important. I’m not one of those people. I read theory and fiction and poetry to experience, to consider, to become other, to shift, to mutate, to change. I most certainly do not read those things to understand them.

What follows are five works that lend themselves to a reading strategy conducive to works of fiction or poetry. Granted, between poetry and fiction a demarcation is said to exist, and granted some read the one different than the other, and granted different styles within different genres require different heuristics, I think readers would benefit from considering the following works as “creative” rather than merely “critical.”

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture

Around the 290 page mark of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between “assemblage haecceities (a body considered only as a longitude and a latitude)” such as a mountain, a marble, or a marmot, and “interassemblage haecceities, which also mark the potentialities of becoming” such as the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life, a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack, etc. In other words, different kinds of thingness. Consider syncope the ecstatic liminal experience of an interassemblage haecceity manifesting.

Clément seeks out syncope as unlikely paradigm and poetic metaphor in music, literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy – and, courageously, in life. She finds it in various physical mental, musical and more far-flung places: held breath, cold sweats, cerebral eclipse, epileptic seizure, delayed beats in a syncopated jazz rhythm, the backward dip in the Tango, orgasm and between urine and feces in Left-hand path Tantric ecstasy, and in a host of related phenomenon, she tabulates the sundry time-outs, disruptions, breaks in linearity and involuntary secessions from the space-time continua wherein syncope gains its foothold and human beings can achieve ecstasy.

The Parasite
by Michel Serres

To become this book, to become any of the books I am listing, to allow the infection of them to circulate through you, the way you greet them is paramount: let go. Do not resist, do not indulge in negative reaction, allow the words to work in you, fall into them in the same way a skateboarder falls into a halfpipe: when standing at the top of the pipe you must lean forward and commit your body to gravity despite the scary sensation of losing control, of imminent threat. Move with the force of the text, not against it, the way you turn into a skid should your car spin out in the snow.

A brief explanation of the title of Serres’s book might help, a book that was originally published in French as Le Parasite. In French this terms has three meanings: 1. biological parasite; 2. social parasite; and 3. noise. Noise is a term from information and systems theory to describe the interference that occurs when a message is being transferred between a sender and a recipient along some channel. Serres argues that noise, which we can also call nonsense, disorder, chaos, is fundamental to the transfer of a message: this would seem contrary to what we would normally understand noise to be, that is, merely a nuisance. Serres draws out the positive quality of noise or interference to suggest that it is out of noise that new systems and patterns, and perhaps even new ways of thinking can emerge.

Glas by Jacques Derrida

“As a piece of writing,” wrote John Sturrock, in his review of the English translation of Glas for The New York Times, “it has no known genre.” I would disagree. I think the genre is clear and obvious: badass, irreducibly singular, anomalous, experimental literature. Unfortunately, you might have to sell a kidney to get a copy of it.

Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974) may be one of his most important and yet least read publications…variously described as “Derrida’s chef d’oeuvre”, “Derrida’s hypertext”, or “a Fleurs du Mal of philosophy”, makes the boundaries between ‘coupure’ and ‘crochet’, digest and vomit, philosophy and literature, book and electronic media tremble.

Glas (1974) by Jacques Derrida is such an antibook. Each page of Glas is divided into two columns: the left offers passages from Hegel with comments, while the right is a commentary on the French novelist Genet. Paragraphs set in and around other paragraphs and variable sizes and styles of type give the page an almost medieval appearance. There is no linear argument that spans the columns, yet the reader’s eye is drawn across, down, and around the page looking for visual and verbal connections. And the connections seem to be there, as words and sentence fragments refer the reader back and forth between Hegel and Genet.

Crack Wars: LITERATURE ADDICTION MANIA (Texts and Contexts)
by Avital Ronell

The scholar Gregory Ulmer, who happens to be a UF Gator and therefore (I guess) my sworn enemy or something, has said that “Avital Ronell is perhaps the most interesting scholar in America.” Whether you agree or not, Ronell is, I think, unquestionably in the running. I could’ve easily listed other of her books; two I’ve loved in addition to this one: Stupidity and Dictations: ON HAUNTED WRITING. Keep in mind that she studied with Derrida and Cixous, and she was friends with Kathy Acker, so intellectually speaking she rolls deep.

Literature as quintessentially narcotic.

Avital Ronell asks why “there is no culture without drug culture.” She deals with the usual drugs and alcohol (and their celebrities: Freud’s cocaine, Baudelaire’s hashish, the Victorians’ laudanum), and moves beyond them to addictions that are culturally accepted–an insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance, and romance itself.

Borderlands/La Frontera
by Gloria Anzaldúa

This book has haunted me since my first encounter with it. And perhaps more than any other, this book has had a profound effect on my thinking in terms of identity. Before Borderlands, I don’t think I’d ever seriously thought through what it means to be a middle class straight white guy. Understandably, I reacted passionately against this book when I first read it, probably seven or eight years ago. I took it as a full frontal assault on my identity. At the level of content, it seriously pissed me off; but on the level of form, I loved it. Sometimes when things piss me off, I take that as a sign of the thing’s success. To provoke such a strong reaction, Anzaldúa had to have been doing something right. So I spent time with it. I read it again and again. Over time I came to realize that the reason I disliked it so much was because it held a mirror up to my privilege and when I saw my face in the mirror I was embarrassed and ashamed of my complicity. I was mad at Anzaldúa because she had shown me the Hyde lurking behind my Jekyll. Now, I am so thankful that she did that.

In a radical genre she calls autohistoria, which offers an innovative way to write history, Gloria Anzaldua presents a non-linear history of both the geographical and psychological landscapes of Borderlands. Anzulda’s autohistoria is a genre of mixed media—personal narrative, testimonio, factual accounts, cuento, and poetry—that refutes stasis just as the Borderlands from which Anzaldua comes.

In Borderlands, Anzaldúa tenses racial, class, and sexuality differences to the limit by subjecting them to the category of being female, being poor, being Chicana, and being lesbian, living in English but thinking in Spanish.

Godspeed, good sir.

- Matthew Simmons

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WINNER: Sewage Treatment Technologies