E. L. Doctorow, "Creationists"

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E. L. Doctorow, "Creationists: Selected Eessays, 193-2006" (2006)

 

 

창작(자)에 대한 열여섯 편의 에세이다. 올봄에 읽은  E. L. Doctorow의

역사 소설 "The March"를 창작의 관점에서 떠올려본다.

 

뉴욕 타임즈 서평

 

시애틀 타임즈 서평

 

 

아래는 책 본문에서

 

Introduction

 

This gathering of Essays is a modest celebration of the creative act. It acknowledges compodition as the reigning enterprize of the human mind.

 

1. Genesis

 

If not in all stories then certainly in all mystery stories, the writer works backward. The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending. (p. 4)

 

Artistry is at work also in the blessings the deying Jcob bestows on his twelve eponymous sons. Each blessing, an astute judgment of character, will explain the fate of the twelve tribes led by the sons. A beginning is invented for each of the historical tribal endings known to the writer. (p.4)

 

The ethnically diverse territory that Abraham and his descendents were called to was abuzz with Amorites and other Canaanite tribes. Under such difficult circumstances it is understanable that the Abrahamic nomad's desire to be a designated people living in a state of moral consequence would direct them to bond with one God rather than many gods, and to find their solace and their courage in His singularity, His totality. (p.8)

 

4. Composing Moby-Dick

 

Melville's irrepressible urge to make the most of everything suggests the mind of a poet. The significations, the meaningful enlargements he makes of tools, coins, colors, existent facts, are the work of a lylic poet, a maker of metaphorical meanings.... Moby-Dick can be read as a series of ideas for poems. (p. 45)

 

I'll make a crude distinction here between those writers who make their language visible ... -- Melville, Joice, Nobokov in our time -- from those magicians of the real who write to make their language invisible ... so that we see the life they are rendering as if no language is producing it. Tolstoy and chekhov are in this class. (p. 47)

 

7. Fitzgerald's Crack-Up

 

[H]e used everything he knew of society, as critic, as victim, to compose at least one work, The Great Gatsby, that in its few pages arcs the American continent and gives us a perfect structural allegory of our deadly class-ridden longings. (p. 81)

 

15. Einstein

 

[L]ooking in from the outside, he saw clearly the pretentions and lies and dogmas upon which the society fed. He would come to distrust every form of authority. He was from the beginning, as he himself said, "a free sprit." (p. 159)

 

He was a scientist, a secular humanist, a democratic socialist,... and never, so far as I know, did he succumb to a dispair of human life. (p. 163)

 

16. The Bomb

 

And if we decide the Hiroshima bomb had to be dropped, we will need to know why the Nagasaki bomb had to be dropped as well. (p. 172)