`Reinventing Everything'

We celebrated our five-year-old’s birthday in the park on Sunday. Among the guests was a sculptor from Los Angeles. I’ve never visited L.A. nor had I ever met the sculptor, though I feel as though I know his city through books and films. He’s an Oregon native and hopes to live there again, and said he always feels like a guest in L.A., not a fully certified resident. We agreed L.A. did not begin as a Spanish mission in the 16th century but was created in the 20th century by Raymond Chandler, with assistance from Nathanael West and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. We also agreed that only in this era could a non-native resident of Houston speak authoritatively with a non-native resident of Los Angeles about their respective cities, neither of which either of them likes. This sense of dislocation, of being abstracted from one’s surroundings, is peculiar to our time. To preserve equilibrium we improvise roots and keep our domestic arrangements lightweight and portable.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984, speaking of dislocation) was a Russian literary critic who above all writers esteemed Laurence Sterne and one of Sterne’s chief disciples, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. I’m reading Shklovsky’s final work, Energy of Delusion (1981), published in English last year for the first time by the estimable Dalkey Archive Press. The title comes from a letter Tolstoy wrote to his friend N. Strakhov in April 1878. Strakhov had complained about the difficulty of his work, and Tolstoy commiserated:

“I know this feeling very well – even now, I have been experiencing it lately, everything seems to be ready for writing – for fulfilling my earthly duty, what’s missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I’m lacking the energy of delusion; and earthly, spontaneous energy that’s impossible to invent. And it’s impossible to begin without it.”

The sculptor from L.A. works in wood. He spoke modestly of his work, saying he buys plywood at the hardware store, cuts it into desired shapes and paints it. Some is abstract, some representational, but he lit up with contempt when describing the work of “conceptual sculptors.” I said that sounded oxymoronic, and he said I was being polite. He liked Tolstoy’s notion of the “energy of delusion.” He said the only irrational element in art he recognizes is the will to make it, that his sculpture is without utility but it enables him to feel a connection with those who enjoy it and with the artists of the past he admires and from whom he has learned. Shklovsky writes:

“The writer, the great writer, is working with words created long before him, with instances and images that were created centuries ago, yet he is free – because he is reinventing everything.”

He also writes:

“I’m not writing a biography, that is, I don’t have to accompany the carriage full of treasures as an infantry man. And I’m not writing a manual for young fiction writers about how to open or close their prose works. Life will teach them that. Step accidentally on your untied shoelace, fall down and you’ll understand a thing or two about the theory of literature.”