> *between* such an esoteric discursive space and the Street, writ large. What
> are the "power structures and flows" (Ian Davidson's phrase) that bring into
> being the fragile geodesic dome of avant-garde/academic theory inside which
> poets huddle with great earnestness to talk about the relationship of the
> Inside to Out? There's nothing wrong at all with huddling so. But the guy
> from the block on the outside proposes that certain interpolations might be
> more self-reflexively probed by the poet-theorists, particularly by the kind
> who then climb out of the hut-dome to climb into 747 Business Class and jet
> back to their Charles Gray Professor of Poetry Chairs.
>
Kent's email reminded me of E. M. Forster's vision of novelists writing.
I'm not sure if the comparison is fruitful, but it's an interesting
passage, nonetheless:
. . . we cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the
stream of time. Another image better suits our powers: that of all the
novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages and
ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold pens
in their hands, and are in the process of creation. Let us look over
their shoulders for a moment and see what they are writing. It may
exorcise that demon of chronology which is at present our enemy and which
. . . is sometimes their enemy too. "Oh, what quenchless feud is this,
that Time hath with the sons of men," cries Herman Melville, and the feud
goes on not only in life and death but in the byways of literary creation
and criticism. Let us avoid it by imagining that all the novelists are at
work together in a circular room. I shall not mention their names until
we have heard their words, because a name brings associations with it,
dates, gossip, all the furniture of the method we are discarding" (Aspects
of the Novel,1927, p.14)
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