Language is miraculous not in its power to differentiate. Differentiation, when all is said and done, is carried on nonverbally by the reasonable cross-checking of the information of the other senses. The wonder is that language can respond to any number of different things in the same way: it can call ashtrays, actors, and accidents “entities”; it can call poems, paintings, and nesselrode pies “art”; it can call what three different men at three different times of day do when going down the street “walking”; it can call three entities that walk down the street at the same time “women”; it can call sentences, ideas, and blue-prints “models”; it can call freedom, death, the color white, and the Second-World-War-and-all-its-causes “volumes in multidimensional meaning space”; it can call causing pain, inflicting suffering, and perpetrating injustice “evil.” In this way language guides the senses to concentrate on various areas and aspects of the world for further examination and further differential cross-checking.
Things “obviously” similar are coherent areas of meaning-space only because of the shadow the senses throw over them. Those areas not so obviously coherent become so under the various shadows language can cast.
59. Science fiction is a way of casting a language-shadow over coherent areas of imaginative space that would otherwise be largely inaccessible.
60. Is it the tragedy of mind? Or is it what assures the mind’s development: Today’s seminal idea is tomorrow’s critical cliché.
Index
“A” (Zukofsky), 166, 172
A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 202
A-minor Symphony (Mendelssohn), 50
ABC (Silliman), 146, 169, 172
Adam, Helen Douglas, 209
Adam Bede (Eliot), 260
Adamov, Arthur, 4
Addison, Joseph, xiv
Adorno, Theodor, 68, 70, 78
In Search of Wagner, 68
The Jargon of Authenticity, 70
Adventures of Alyx, The (Russ), 116
Agassiz, Louis, 110
“Age of Dream, An” (Johnson), 243n
Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Bloom), 196
Ailey, Alvin, 18
“Albany” (Silliman), 146, 169, 170, 172
Aldington, Richard, 147
Portrait of a Genius, But…, 174
Aldiss, Brian W., 278
Report on Probability A, 280
Alien Critic, The, 257, 298
Allen, Donald, 240
Allen, Robert, 261
Allgemeine Oesterreichische Zeitung, 52
Alphabet, The, series (Silliman), 146, 157, 163, 169, 171, 172
Alvarez, A., 185
American Shore, The (Delany), xvi
Amitie du Prince (Perse), 209
“An einen Staatsanwalt” (Wagner), 52
Anabase (Perse), 209
Anathēmata, The (Jones), 166
“And I Am Telling You” (Bennett), 154
Anderson, Laurie, xxx
Angel Fire (Oates), 259
“Angouleme” (Disch), xvii, xxiv
Anouilh, Jean, 14, 80, 315
Anthony and Cleopatra (Barber), 18–21
Antigone (Cocteau), 14
antinomies, 265–274
Grelling’s paradox, 273
Apollo of Bellac, The (Giraudoux), 317
“Apology for Raymond Sebond, An” (Montaigne), xxxv
Appalachian Spring (de Mille), 197n
“Architecture of The Bridge” (Unterecker), 187
Ardrey, Robert, 157
Arendt, Hannah, 71, 93
The Origins of Totalitarianism, 71, 93
Aristotle, 13, 25, 40, Poetics, 13
Armantraut, Rae, 170
“Engines,” 170
Arnold, Matthew, 35–37, 40–42, 64, 78, 79
Culture and Anarchy, 35
“Culture and Its Enemies,” 40, 78
“Dover Beach,” 35
Arp, Hans, 4
Art and Death (Artaud), 13
Art and Illusion (Gombrich), 273
Art and Revolution (Wagner), 3, 16, 48, 63
Artaud, Antonin, x, xxvii — xxx, 1–17, 22, 41, 42, 75, 76, 78–84, 172
Art and Death, 13
Backgammon in the Sky [Tric Trac du ciel], 13, 25
The Cenci, 4, 11, 14, 15
“Centre-Mére et Patron-Minet,” 5
Correspondence with Jacques Rivière, 14, 23, 172
“Cri,” 26, 30, 172
“La Culture Indiene,” 6
Douze Chansons, 25
Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned, 13
Letters from Rodez, 3
“No More Masterpieces,” 15, 30, 76
“Le Pèse-Nerfs,” 15
“The Return of Artaud, le Mômo,” 4, 5
The Return of Artaud, le Mômo, 13
The Theater and Its Double, 2, 14, 31, 76
To Have Done with the Judgment of God, 10, 12, 31
“Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,” 7–10
A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara [The Peyote Dance], 3
Artwork of the Future, The (Wagner), 3, 16, 48
Ashberry, John, 41, 159
Athanasiou, Genica, 14
Athenaeum, 3, 230
“Atlantis” (Crane), 185, 187, 215, 216, 224, 226, 227, 231, 237, 244, 245
Atlantis: Model 1924 (Delany), xvi, xxxv, 244, 245
Auden, W. H., 33, 79, 80, 83, 159, 278
“Caliban to the Audience,” 83
The Sea and the Mirror, 83
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, 240
Auerbach, Berthold, 67
Auntie Mame (Dennis), 317
Austen, Jane, 38, 260
Authoress of the Odyssey, The (Butler); 164
“Ave Maria” (Crane), 189, 215, 218, 219, 221, 222, 224
“Baby Is Three” (Sturgeon), 257
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 67
Backgammon in the Sky [Tric Trac du Ciel] (Artaud), 13, 25
Bacon, Francis, xiii, xiv
Essays, xiv
Baird, Peggy, 189, 243
“The Last Days of Hart Crane,” 243
Bakhtin, M. M., 82, 84, 107
Bakúnin, Mikhail, 37, 46, 47, 49, 52–55, 57, 60–63, 65, 84
Baldwin, James, 205
Giovanni’s Room, 205
Ballets Africains, Les, 153
Balzac, Honoré de, 13, 37, 74
Banquet Years, The (Shattuck), 37
Barbarossa, Frederick, 54
Barber, Samuel, 18
Anthony and Cleopatra, 18–21
Bare Hills, The (Winters), 199
Barnes, Djuna, 139
Barnett, Lincoln, 310
The Universe and Dr. Einstein, 310
Barrault, Jean-Louis, 4, 11