Halfway Through Jono Schneider’s “…But I Could Not Speak…”

He is amorphous.

She is amorphous.

We is various, multifarious.

So many pronouns had become part of the tale I was writing that it seemed futile to ignore the whims of fiction to which I had long ago submitted, and the silence of the clock, with scrupulous abandon, adds up these empty names. (p.54)

The narrator, the narration, is character, is commentator, is editor, the one – the many – who selects the sound to nudge the silence aside, the tentative, tenuous – no, confident, I would argue, conscious, conscientious – body asserting its space. Silence is a character. Writing is a character.

The plot is the blot is the ink is the accretion, accumulation, of thought, of construction, a set of positions about process, about language. The plot is the acceptance of no plot, spatial, holistic. The linear contrivance – the fiction -- of rising action, climax, denouement is limiting, so much more “happens” here to character, who grows as it snows, in the way that it snows, unrepeatable snowflakes, wrapped up in the current, wafted, dropped next to another whose face is familiar, the structure of faces known, yet pleasurably strange, unconnected, unrecognizable, until cognition ignites.

Then the snow melts. Go figure. Go read some more.

Comments

[Pam Lu]

Right. This is exciting writing. Or I should say Writing, for I'm a mere 13 pages into it and already the Writing is showing itself as a character, a beast of a character that comes to life through its own moment of creation, and dies, and comes to life again in the next moment (sentence). Already the book is revealing itself as a nexus of pacts and trans-boundary relationships -- between Writer and Writing, Writing and Reader, Character and Writing, Character and Writer. The book is a collaboration and a conspiracy. It's impossible not to speak allegorically about this Book. This Book makes me think about the nature of books, and the nature of self-creating spaces. People should read this Book.