Re: [-empyre-] aesthetics of failure, microsound literature

["Trace Reddell" <treddell@du.edu>]

Glenn, thanks for the prompts with these great questions.

Definitely cool to hear of Feldman's allusions to Beckett. It's been a while
since I read Beckett, and I'm interested to know if Feldman is thinking of
the classic plays ("Godot", "Endgame") and the trilogy. This has drawn me
over to my bookshelf to look at one of Beckett's last works, _Worstward Ho_
(1983). Here's a microsonic sampling:

"All seen and nohow on. What words for what then? None for what then. No
words for what when words gone. For what when nohow on. Somehow nohow on."

Certainly minimalist, but also depicting a total breakdown of consciousness
attempting to express itself via language ... and yet still expressing
nonetheless. And here, failure unites technique and content: the body that
is writing, the consciousness that is expressing, the words that are holding
(or not) consciousness.

As far as a literary aesthetics of failure, I think first and foremost of
Franz Kafka, who not only viewed all of his writing as a failure, but who
builds up an entire theology of failure. Benjamin: "To do justice to the
figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose
sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The
circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he
was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as
in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka
emphasized his failure."

I appreciate Walter Benjamin's depiction of Kafka's "doctrine-less
parables", a code of gestures meant to derive meaning, not express it. I
think that microsound works share this kind of anti-interpretative tendency,
which is partly why they're so often labelled "experimental." That is,
they're not symbolically representing a prior idea but are enacting a field
of possibilities from which meaning may be evoked.

Benjamin also stresses the fragmented, unfinished quality of Kafka's works;
I feel that there's something there about the work's imperfection that
actually guarantees its openness, its continuing on out into the world,
because the fragment doesn't end.

-=trace