Ian > Books: exert-yourself‎ (51)

"Peter Pan is nothing but the spark I stole from you".

"The character is the era."

"I am smitten with that earliest-exhausted of English novel-forms, the epistolary novel, already worked to death by the end of the 18th Century. Like yourself an official honorary Doctor of Letters, I take it as among my functions to administer artificial resuscitation to the apparently dead.

"It will consist of letters (like this, but with a plot) between several correspondents, the capital-A Author perhaps included, and preoccupy itself with among other things, the role of epistles - real letters, forged and doctored letters - in the history of History.

"It will also be concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made.

"Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself; the third main sense of our word letters: Literature, which a certain film nut is quoted as calling 'that moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance.

"LETTERS is a seven-letter word; the letters in LETTERS are to be from seven correspondents, some recruited from my earlier stories (a sure sign, such recycling, that an author approached 40). They'll be dated over the seven months from March through September 1969, though they may also involve the upcoming U.S. Bicentennial (a certain number of years hence), the War of 1812, the American Revolution, revolutions and recyclings generally. I've even determined how many letters will be required (88, arranged and distributed in a certain way: a modest total)...but I'm not yet ready to declare what the book's about!"

"If one imagines an artist less enamoured of the world than of the language we signify it with, yet less enamoured of the language than of the signifying narration, and yet less enamoured of the narration than its formal arrangement, one need not necessarily imagine that artist therefore forsaking the world for language, language for the processes of narration, and those processes for the abstract possibilities of form."