A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation

by Randy Fertel

Sold out

Account Type

Format

Quantity

Author: Randy Fertel

Publisher: Spring Journal, Inc.

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1935528688
ISBN 13: 978-1935528685

Western civilization has always driven toward mastering the world through reason, will, craft, and scientific objectivity. Yet beneath this current swirls a riptide that suggests we can know more of the world through non-rational means - through spontaneity, intuition, and creativity. In A Taste For Chaos, literary scholar Randy Fertel explores this undercurrent of spontaneity in literature and identifies a new metagenre called improvisations - texts that claim to have been written without effort or craft, like an idea that hits you in the shower. Whether the authors claim to have written them in a dream, instinctively, off the top of their head, or when drunk, they have done so, so they claim, without effort, and their work is the more valuable because of it. While self-styled spontaneous texts claim to be unlike anything we have ever seen before, they actually abound across genres and time, from the epic sung poetry of classical Greece to 21st century novels. A Taste for Chaos, presents a methodology for talking about spontaneity, and then applies that methodology to landmark texts. Fertel explores the complex nature of the spontaneous gesture; identifies the stylistic conventions, themes, and rhetorical features of improvisations; and explores the archetype of spontaneity throughout history from philosophy and psychology to chaos science, jazz, conceptual art, post-modernism, and finally Hermes - the god of crossing boundaries, of improvisation, who graces the book's cover. Fertel then provides a fresh approach to major texts of the Western tradition by analyzing them through the lens of improvisation: Milton's Paradise Lost, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Jung's Red Book, Joyce's Ulysses, Mann's Dr. Faustus, and finally, McEwan's Saturday. Woven throughout these improvisations, demonstrates Fertel, is the lesson that we can ultimately know more of the world by accepting the limits of reason, and opening up rationality to more of life.

Review

"A smart blend of psychology, philosophy and literary history.... A tour de force of reading in the fields of literary theory and history befitting a George Steiner or Erich Auerbach."

--Kirkus Reviews

"Fertel has Erasmus jamming with Jung and Louis Armstrong, and you can almost tap your foot to it."

--Roy Blount, Jr., Alphabet Juice

"A stunner of a book-smart, jarring, innovative, witty, provocative, wise, and beautifully written-nothing short of dazzling, both in its meticulously structured central argument and in its intricate exploration of the artistic tensions between order and disorder, reason and intuition, design and improvisation. Not only is this a book about the artistic endeavor, but it is also a work of art in its own right."

--Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

"The magnificent chapter on Hermes and Odysseus is alone worth the price of the volume."

--Stanley Lombardo, trans., Iliad and Odyssey

"A Taste for Chaos provides a sweeping view of the complex history of the notion of artistic spontaneity. Packed with erudition and references ranging from Lucretius to James Brown, and written with reader-friendly clarity, Fertel's book is a lively examination of the centuries-old debate between the improvisers and the deliberators. This detailed labor of love deserves its place on any serious bookshelf devoted to literary study or the history of ideas."

--Billy Collins, Poet Laureate; Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems

"A Taste for Chaos is a work of love: a monument to erudition, with the kind of analytical depth and expanse of reading behind its arguments--and the kind of wit and elegance in its presentation--that come only with craft and time. This book was worth every minute of the wait."

--Fred Anderson, The Dominion of War

"I started reading New Orleanian Randy Fertel's journey through the landscape of literary improvisation with a CD of Louis Armstrong's trumpet playing softly. Gradually I realized that Louis was Fertel's exemplar rather than simple accompanist, and that all those intimidating, august, marble-busted great men of letters--Rabelais, Milton, Joyce, Jung, and so on--had also been sitting up too late, smoking, working out their riffs. Who knew? There's a new and unanticipated note on every page of Fertel's exciting book."

--Richard Rabinowitz, Revolution!: The Atlantic World Reborn

From the Author

A Taste for Chaos was inspired by one of those rare moments when I managed to think outside the box. Suddenly I was looking at spontaneity in a completely different light. You know, spontaneity: acting off the cuff, no cards your sleeve, not breaking a sweat. From the Latin sua sponte - of one's free will. You just do it. But how does it happen? Is it the Muse? Is it one drink too many or, to coin a phrase, one drink just enough? When you're not totally in control of that alchemical mix of impulse and instinct. When you're "in the zone" where the idea, the artwork, poem, play, essay, speech, or song comes without thought and effort. Such a state is what we all long to attain.

For William Faulkner "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself ... alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." This longing for spontaneity is then part of a larger conflict, maybe the ultimate conflict of the heart, that is, the conflict between the heart and the head. We long for the truth of the heart but inevitably the head will have some role in understanding it. The longing for spontaneity--for unmediated experience, for seeing not through a glass darkly but face to face, for experience unmuddled by the head and the artifice and logic the head is heir to; all of that is inevitably in conflict with our other longing: for mastery of the world through logic and intellect and craft. So spontaneity is part of a larger conflict, the conflict between the inartificial and the artificial, what is divinely or in some other extra-human inspiration and our hard work. Spontaneity and the form it has taken since the dawn of literature was my way into tackling all that.

The first thing is not to play the Goldilocks Game debating whether the improvisation is improvised too much ("That's not writing, that's typing"--Capote on Kerouac), too little or not really improvised (e.g. Adorno on jazz), or just right. Far more interesting is to trace the ways that the claim of spontaneity ushers us into a world where the value of craft and rationality are questioned and alternatives to craft and rationality are explored and promoted. If as Valéry said, Everything changes but the avant-garde," improvisation is the perennial discourse of the avant-garde. A Taste for Chaos explores that at once mutable and persistent form.

About the Author

Randy Fertel holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University, where he received a student-voted teaching award. He has taught English at Harvard, Tulane, LeMoyne College, and the New School for Social Research. He specializes in the literature of the Vietnam War and the literature of exile.

Fertel has been featured in People, Bloomberg, and Esquire and has contributed to The New York Times, NPR, Smithsonian, Kenyon Review, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Gastronomica, Creative Nonfiction, The Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, Spring Journal, Tikkun, WLA, New Orleans Review, and The Huffington Post. His first book, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir, the tale of two distinctive people -- his parents -- and his efforts to survive them, is now in its third printing and recently in paperback. amzn.to/1Gcqkhg

Fertel is president of the Fertel Foundation and co-founded, with the Nation Institute, the Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-Telling, named for My Lai whistleblower and investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour. (ridenhour.org). He lives in New Orleans and New York.

Filters

Creativity & Genius

A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation