TATLIN!

by Guy Davenport ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1974

Each of these six stories is a collage assembled from philosophical scraps, junk, and odds and ends, a staccato flow of characters, space, incident, time supposed to add up to a 20th century gestalt. Among the historical coordinates are Heraclitus (known as ""the obscure""), Artemis the goddess of animals, Orpheus (""The man who finds what is easiest lost is the age's poet, the Orphic Noah. . ."") Pythagoras, Fourier, Braque and Picasso (""This man Picasso is a painter from the Reindeer Age""), Spinoza, Wittgenstein (""Language, he saw, was a picture, and in 1914 pictures became language. Cubists wrote""), Bohr (""Had not Niels Bohr found his hooked atoms in Demokritos?""), Cezanne (""That is Cezanne, said the son. How in the world do you know? the father asked. Because, the son replied, he is painting a Cezanne.""), Orville and Wilbur Wright, Nell Armstrong. The title story describes the etiology of the Constructivist monument for the Third International. ""The Aeroplanes at Brescia"" follows Kafka's account of Bleriot's 1909 airshow but bears no earthly resemblance to the mind of Kafka (""Heroism, Kafka reflected, was the ability to pay attention to three things at once""). Parts of ""The Dawn in Erewhon"" are excerpts from philosopher Adriaan van Hovendaal's reflections on Butler's utopian satire -- we wish the publisher had specified which parts. Probably not the neo-Joycean prose of the sex scenes: ""The full reach of his instroke tamped hydranths papillary and marine in her myxoid deep,"" or all the talk of chthonic cocks. ""All of time is still one history,"" says the Dutchman -- the substance of Davenport's historic distortions and speculations.

Pub Date: July 1, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1974

Categories: FICTION