PEN American Center - PEN America Issue 3: Tribes (PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers)

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Published by PEN American Center,
an affiliate of International PEN,
the worldwide association of writers
working to advance literature
and defend free expression.

PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers

Issue 3 (Volume 2)

PEN American Center

568 Broadway, Suite 401

New York, NY 10012

This issue is made possible in part by the generous funding of The Sol Goldman Charitable Trust and The Kaplen Foundation.

Copyright 2002 PEN American Center.

All rights reserved. No portion of this journal may be reproduced by any process or technique without the formal written consent of PEN American Center. Authorization to photocopy items for internal, informational, or personal use is granted by PEN American Center. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating collective works, or for resale.

Opinions expressed in PEN America are those of the author of each article, and not necessarily those of the editor, the advisory board, or the officers of PEN American Center.

Printed in the United States of America by McNaughton and Gunn.

Postmaster: Send address changes to PEN America , c/o PEN American Center, 568 Broadway, Suite 401, New York, NY 10012.

ISBN: 0-934638-19-5
eBook ISBN: 0-934638-40-3

ISSN: 1536-0261

Cover photograph: PEN dinner in honor of Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize, Hotel Commodore, November 25, 1930. Photograph by Empire Photographers, N.Y.

Because of limited resources, at present we are unable to review unsolicited submissions of writing except from members of PEN American Center. We do, however, seek color photographs for the cover and black-and-white images (single photos as well as photo essays) for the inside. The theme of issue 4 will be Fact/Fiction. See www.pen.org/journal/submit.html for guidelines. No manuscripts, requests, or artwork will be returned without the inclusion of a self-addressed stamped envelope. We do not accept unsolicited submissions of any kind via e-mail; these will be deleted unopened.

Please see page 228 for text acknowledgments.

CONTENTS

EDITORS NOTE

S ince the days of clay tablets and papyrus scrolls, writers have been seeking relief from the solitude thats part of our job description. Weve left our desks, left our rooms, and joined other writers to celebrate ideas or denigrate them, claim intellectual territory in the company of kindred souls or cast aspersions on those deemed less kindred. Some writers, of course, shun the collective, but even they may find themselves assigned to a group by critics who see the past as a succession of literary movements and the present as a map of stylistic schools.

Half a century ago, Philip Rahv divided American writers into cerebral palefaces and earthy redskins. Though such labels make some of us cringe, tribal allusions persistin part, perhaps, because the word tribe is so elastic that it can encompass literary tradition, genre, style, geography, subculture, identity, ideology, ethnicity, nationality, intellectual or emotional affinity, shared taste, shared quirks, shared prejudices, shared readers, and shared marketing strategies. A literary tribe can be a group of ancestors or a group of friends, a support group, a gang, a club or a fan club, a clan.

The fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in this issue approach the juncture of writers and tribes from angles that suggest more junctures: us/them, insider/outsider, familiar/exotic, dissident/patriotic, East/West, black/white, rooted/rootless, mindful/mindless. In a symposium on tribes, essayists (including two of the stouthearted young editors of this journal) sift through their mixed feelings. Here and there in the issue, youll find strikingly unambivalent pronouncements, many of them from Manifesto: A Century of Isms , edited by Mary Ann Caws and published by the University of Nebraska Press, an illuminating anthology that helped those of us who put together PEN America as we tried to organize our own mixed feelings about literary tribes.

M. Mark

Pierre Albert-Birot

Translated by Mary Ann Caws

An ism to outlast the others.

Nunism was born with man and will only disappear with him.

All the great philosophers, the great artists, the great poets, the great scientists, all the flamebearers, the creators of all ages have been, are, will be nunists.

All of us who are seeking something, lets be nunists first.

No life outside of nunism.

To be a nunist or not be.

Jacques Roubaud

Translated by Harry Mathews

Periodically, generation after generation, literary groups appear (or are invented after the fact by literary historians) that share the following characteristics:

The groups are formed with a view to renewing and re-establishing a literature that has, according to them, deteriorated to an appallingly low level.

Their motto is: everything done prior to us is worthless; everything done after us can only exist because of us.

The group thoroughly despises its contemporaries, particularly rival groups to which the fact of its existence and the claims it makes inevitably give rise.

The very way the group works leads, through splits, divergences, deviations, and exclusions, to its fairly rapid destruction.

Raymond Queneau had been a Surrealist; and he had, as we know, taken violent leave of the Bretonian sect. It was unquestionably as a result of his reflections on this unfortunate example that he invented the following rules, original, if few in number.

The Oulipo is not a closed group; it can be enlarged through the cooptation of new members. No one can be expelled from the Oulipo.

Conversely, no one can resign. The dead continue to belong to the Oulipo.

One may relinquish membership of the Oulipo under the following circumstances: suicide may be committed in the presence of an officer of the court, who then ascertains that, according to the Oulipians explicit last wishes, his suicide was intended to release him from the Oulipo and restore him his freedom of maneuver for the rest of eternity.

Oulipian writingthat is, writing with constraintsendeavors to rediscover another way in which to practice artistic freedom, one that is at work in all (or nearly all) literatures and poetic enterprises of the past: the freedom of difficulty mastered. Definition: An Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape.

For this issue, we invited several writers to consider their tribal associations. What is your literary lineage? we asked. Who are your tribal elders, the writers from whom youve learned? Who are your contemporaries? your heirs? Does your tribe include your readers? In what ways are tribes useful? Are you ambivalent about them? Is tribal identification merely a label that has little bearing on writers and their work? Do tribes necessarily imply exclusivity? territoriality? Are you a loner? Do loners constitute a tribe? Here are the responses we received:

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