Friday, May 02, 2003

 
Jean Genet is teaching me to read in a completely other way. Usually I weigh each word carefully, tasting its colors and heft, rolling it around. But his writing gives way to images in the running of the words. If I were to stop and hold each of them in my mouth, Genet's magic disappears.



"What if [writing] merely enabled us to conceal what was, and any account is, only eyewash? Without actually saying the opposite of what was, writing presents only its visible, acceptable and, so to speak, silent face, because it is incapable of really showing the other one."

--Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003 [1986]): 32.
posted by Open Mouth 1:15 PM