Of the World that Freely Offers Itself: An Exploration of Writerly/Artistic Rituals

The author, a fiction writer, explores the relationship between the writer/artist and the so-called Muse, especially with respect to working rituals that precede the artist’s creative expression and make it more accessible. She takes an informal approach to a collaborative inquiry and experiments with her own musings as she navigates through her colleagues’ responses to a questionnaire in which she asks them to qualify and self-analyze their pre-writing/painting rituals and ensuing working habits. Her attempt to deepen her own experience by understanding the experience of others unfolds in this lyric essay in which linguistic strategies serve to differentiate inner process and discovery in the world. She takes liberties, invoking Franz Kafka, and even addressing him as one of her colleagues. The result is a hybrid form of creative-scholarly writing, informative and lyrical rather than analytical, that is inclusive of the researcher’s voice as a fictionist, who, in collaboration with her colleagues, is reckoning with the Muse

Fiction Fix 09

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Grace Before the Fall

Grace Before the Fall is an annotated novel that follows a flaneuse on her journey toward love and social activism. It is set in a pre-9/11 New York City, during a week in the summer of 1980. Geri Lipschultz, in her critical introduction, confronts both the instability and the virtual death of a text (drawing on Robert Scholes and Gayatri Spivak), as well as its revival in the hands of a contemporary reader. Lipschultz positions herself as a new reader in her revision/revival/revitalization of an old text—whose title, contents, and structure have been altered from their original construction thirty years past. She documents her course of revision, which begins with a rupture, itself a consequence of her impulse to investigate the etymology of selected words. Part of her work is an interrogation of the nature of revision itself, which might boil down to the adage offered by Heraclitus: You cannot step into the same river twice. Lipschultz observes that her novel's initial modernist influences, namely Joyce and Nabokov, have been decentered by the ethos of the postcolonial/postmodern novel, given her changing reading preferences. Her introduction invokes both a personal and a civic history. It introduces the reader not only to the text but also to a paratext that resembles storytelling at times, offering knowledge gleaned only after the fact—for example the way AIDS was ravaging New York without its having a name—and investigates how that retrospective knowledge positions itself for any reader. The revisions within the text, she writes, have provided portal-like openings for character and setting, much as do architectural renovations. The paratext offers historiographic, geographic, and etymological asides—and memoir—whose purpose is to document the passage of time and the metamorphosis of a city. Lipschultz paints these changes with nostalgia and a sense of loss. She argues that the annotations are not essential. They are there at the reader's discretion—placed as endnotes—as the novel, now situated within a magical realist context, articulates its theme of love and nature in conflict with the powers that be