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May 19, 2006
Marjorie Perloff: Memory and Collage
On May 3 we had a “How I Write” conversation with Marjorie Perloff. Although in her seventies and retired from teaching in the Stanford English department, she remains incredibly dynamic, vibrant, loquacious, and smart, and she’s producing articles and books and appearing at conferences and talks at a fantastic pace. Plus she’s the current president of the Modern Language Association. Phew.
She writes on contemporary and avant-garde poetry and poetics, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her many books include The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, and Wittgenstein’s Ladder. One of her most recent books is her cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox, and she spoke about how she wrote it during out talk.
We spoke about a lot of different aspects of writing – and if you were at the talk and want to add something, please send it. But I was intrigued with The Vienna Paradox in particular.
Marjorie was born in Vienna in 1931, and she recounts her life before fleeing the Nazis and coming to America, as well as her early life in the Bronx. But the book is not only the story of her life, it’s a cultural history of pre-War Vienna, of the society of High Culture, especially the assimilated Jews, who made the city a Mecca for intellectuals and artists — and many of whom were related to Marjorie or had some connection to her family. Freud, Wittgenstein, her grandfather Richard Schuller, a high government official throughout successive Austrian governments until forced to flee. And she speaks of the exile community revolving around The Ethical Culture Society and other sites in New York. This is a story of people who lived a life intoxicated with High Culture.
It’s a fascinating memoir. But when she was first asked to write a memoir she was reluctant. She wrote literary criticism and not narrative. But then it dawned on her that she could write a memoir as a collage. “I always write about collage in poetry, ” she said. “So why don’t I do one mysel? ” And what an interesting technique she devises.
The basic chronological line remains — her birth, early schooling, coming to America, adjustments in the Bronx — but she weaves in observations and stories about the intellectual life swirling on around her or before she was born. The fate of Arnold Schoenberg and his papers and scores — in exile in Los Angeles and then returned to Austria — appears, for example, alongside items of her own life.
The style is not disjointed, the way one might expect a collage. But it is somewhat dreamlike, alternating between the personal and the historical. Any reader can see this when reading the book, how it moves back and forth between different realms. But hearing Marjorie describe this process as collage was enlightening. How many other accounts can be done piecing together the small and the large, the personal and the public, the sensual and the intellectual, all circling around each other?
Hilton Obenzinger
Posted by hilton at May 19, 2006 02:13 PM