MATTER/IAL DEVICES
MA Thesis on the hybridity of literary language and the creative application
of its verbal-visual interplay. The study takes aspects of both Wittgenstein’s
and Saussure’s theories of language as a starting point and approaches
literary language as a game. Focussing on hybrid modes of writing and the
inextricability of the verbal and the visual, the primary study zeros in on
three different texts by three different authors that embrace the materiality
of language to vividly perform what words alone cannot live up to: Hubert
Selby Jr.’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test”, Arno Schmidt’s “Das Steinerne Herz”. The objective of this study?
To show that literary material matters. As authorial device, as typographic
responsibility, and as a subject of interdisciplinary discourse.
English, 16 000 words
"(...) I don't only see the rhythm, I also feel it while reading. The uneasy reading experience mirrors the hardness of the story. It reminds me of Gertrude Stein's notion countering readerly convenience: Selby's sentences forcethemselves upon me. I don't just read about the doom and gloom. Selby puts me through it. I get words that I never saw before, slang spelling, that I perceive as parts of a social world I don't know, one that suggests unfamiliarity and danger. I experience a world that is unpredictable and torrential. The punctuation adds to that: There are no periods at the end of a sentence, no stabilising, calming elements, neither visually, nor verbally: This world is abysmal.
The fight between Vinnie and Mary in the last part of the book, its "coda", is an extreme example. I can tell how things go without having read a word. I see the rise of volume, the uprush of tension, until the dispute bursts into allover capitalisation. The climax is reflected in the grey value of the page. Over the course of the scene, Selby increasingly skips punctuation. There is not a single period throughout the last two pages. Samuel Beckett comes to mind, grandmaster of punctuational omission, whose offbeat prose-structure severely tests the readers attention. The device is anchored in history: From late antiquity to the early medieval period there were no marks in written language, not even blank spaces. "Scriptura continua" was commonly practised across Europe, until Irish scribes reintroduced spaces and punctuation marks. (...)"
