Anglo-Saxon Rhythms in ‘Screed’
A Distillation of a Review of `Screed’
by Prof. Jack Remick, Univ. of Wash., published in full length as part of a White Paper by Vagabond Press. Available for $10 at POB 1634, Ellensburg, WA 98926 (historic booklet typeset and printed by hand)
What makes Screed such a dangerous book is that it rolls back the cover of a reality to establish once and for all a new way of looking at narrative. Saunders simply and effortlessly calls into question everything you think you know about novel writing and narrative structure.
Screed is a danger to future generations of writers. It will be responsible for the death of everything that comes after it. It disembowels your urge to imitate and it throttles you; it tears writing up into small pieces and gives you in return one of the great experiences a writer can findit turns you into a reader. It does what all good writers [and citizens] dread findingcoming across something totally new, completely fresh, something outlandish and wonderful, something that is not art but is becoming art. Something in the end that tells you everything you’ve been doing is crap.
It is going to take more than one person to lift it and to find out what it really has to say. Like all important writing, it is packed and will need to be talked at infinitely before it will reveal itself. But, it exists principally in the mind and the memory, not in the art of its present. This is flat. This is why critics will not see it. It is something so new, it does not fit. It is probably the first piece of American fiction that is not a novel. Like all diamonds, it was born rough.
People who don’t like this book should feel vindicated by their provincialism; people who don’t like this book are going to be people who think they already know what there is to say and have understood all that has been said. People who will like Screed are those who aren’t afraid to stand on the abyss and look down.
It works because he gives you the good English language, the whole of it. But Saunders rarely says fuck. When he does, he means it. He doesn’t write about sex. He doesn’t tease into jerking off in the dark corners of the mind. He doesn’t have to hide it, because that’s not what he’s writing about. Anything can now be said, and because that is so, he doesn’t have to fool with guilt. This is the freedom. The provincials still want writing to be risque and sexy. They don’t realize that there is more important work.
Saunders has written what is probably the first piece of American fiction that transcends the fragmented reality of the subject and becomes a statement about the bringing into existence of an alternative reality. The subject is fragmentation. The breaking up is the cement that binds the pieces together. This is no mean feat.
When the writer writes, he is an instrument, but when he has finished writing, he becomes a being in space and time with an ego that can be bruised; he becomes a mere human. Thus, the core of the book is the crunching together of two worlds.
Saunders makes no concessions to you, the reader. On the other hand, he doesn’t try to baffle you just to see you squirm. He does assume a vast learning on your part. But you have a thousand years of writing behind you, you ought to know something. [However, this assumption works as yet another element encouraging the reader to explore.] He won’t insult your intelligence, he just assumes that you are ready for the journey.
The journey through pain assembles Screed out of its parts. As the history of the pain emerges, as the scream of rejection mounts, the pain becomes unbearable. Never in my life have I seen so much anguish and pain assembled in one spot by so much good writing. A fusion of beauty and pain. Unbearable. You say the pain becomes self-pity. Go beyond it, you say, write a real book. Well, the real hero of this book does exist. Saunders creates a meta-psyche of a saint of anguish whose presence is all pervasive. It is almost funny it is so pervasive. Unless you’re a writer. [Or anyone who pays attention and wants to live with integrity…] Then the pain isn’t funny. Then the saint shows himself.
But Saunders doesn’t will this position for himself. He is not a savior. He doesn’t let the artist off. He won’t let you cry. He skewers you. There is no mercy in this book. And he doesn’t trick you because this is for real. This book is the first piece of actual American realism that is not derivative metaphor in structure and form.
Pain comes from the war between the deities, one ever-present, the other ever-absent. They are the Writer, who puts down the reality of his vision in his own form, and the Publisher who refuses it. They are locked in titanic combat. The outcome will be a seizing of truth and the creation of a new, fictive universe.
That is why this book will not mean anything for thirty or forty years. Too many writers have been fed other things, they don’t know what writing is about, there is always a time lag between the creation of an idea and its implementation. A whole generation of writers [and good citizens] will suffer, be rejected, and they will wail and they will moan and they will complain about their fate. Not knowing that it has all already been put down; that it is all already written for them, there’s a blueprint of their future existence. Because they will not have rejected the past, but will have continued to write gothic novels and imitations of Hemingway, they will not know how far they could have gone.
Finally, Screed creates its own future by annihilating its past:
“Conventional novels were false. The truer it was as a novel, the fakier it was as life. If he could set down the truth of how it was for him, that truth would have its own integrity, its own aesthetic, its own artistic validity. It would invent its own shape.”
What this means is that the writer becomes truth, and he hurls the truth into the void, and the truth is always naked, and the void is always immense. Nothing is safe here. The teeth are hard and real.
Saunders does what all good writers have sought to do and what so few have ever pulled off. He does not experiment with the sentence, because the sentence is the thread from your mind to the paper and back into mind. Saunders has a terribly strident melody and he has joined it with a graceful rhythm. He writes with a large beat that persists through the sentence, and builds phrase with a kind of epic quality.
It has no beginning, it has no ending, it is itself, the rhythm accentuates the self-turning- in-upon kind of beautiful thinking that exists in Celtic kennings, you see. Something incredibly primitive about the rhythmic structures, almost as though he is tuned into a kind of deep Anglo-Saxon reality that he is transforming into modern idiom. That piece I quoted [deleted] has all the rhythmic essence of Beowolf.
I don’t know if Saunders would like to think that he’s writing Anglo-Saxon rhythms, but I’d be proud. It surges with the truest kind of linguistic reality. What he is doing is stripping away the crud of civilization by grinding it up with his words; he is piercing deeper into the real mind, and that is where this book exists. Screed is important, not because of what it does, but because of what it eventually will generate.
