Jason Schwartz - Two Pieces
Jason Schwartz has an interesting
style about his work - these short (one and one and a half pages long)
stories concentrate more on something akin to definitions than they do
to plot, or action. They're almost character studies, but not about a
specific character, if that makes sense.
David
Yes,
Dan, your observations make a great deal of sense. Let's talk about
this some more. Objects seem to take the place of characters in
Schwartz's work. Characters appear as little more than a way to link
these objects in much the same way that an object might link two
characters.
But
there's a lot more to Schwartz's pages than this. Stylistically, he is
set apart perhaps more than any writer I've come across. The objects
from his lexicon seem to be from another time, perhaps the 19th century, but his techniques are more akin to those of the Modernists. Regardless, the final artifact is one that appears nearly without antecedent.
He
employs a variety of archaic terms from several fields of study, and
finds ways to match them with language. Whether it's an obscure
children's game or a page torn from an ornithologist's notebook,
Schwartz is a able to braid two or more categories into a single
arrangement that bears his strangely beautiful mark. Here is a great
example of such braiding:
"Pigeon's neck refers to a pinewood gunstock. Pigeon's wing refers to a
shade of blue--but also to a knitting stitch and to a bloody wig."
He
uses various definitions of a single word or phrase to open out his
fiction and create additional objects. It is the unfolding of language
from its very root that Schwartz uses as one of his tools. He's a kind
of meta-etymologist, using the origin of a word (and the layered guises
it attains over time) to create a new kind of fiction. In this way,
Schwartz's object is the lexicon itself.
His work has appeared in each issue of Unsaid. I'm a great admirer of his collection, A German Picturesque,
but his newer work is even stronger. There's a density to his work that
makes a page or two from Schwartz carry more heft of concentration than
most works exceeding thirty or more pages. Quite simply, Schwartz is
writing literature in its truest sense. His is very serious work, and
it's the kind of work that will last. I'm very excited to see the
origins of his new book take form.
A German Picturesque is one of those rare books that announces its word right from its very first sentence. With each new issue of Unsaid I look forward to whatever new offerings Schwartz has brought forth from the page.
Posted by: Peter Markus | June 23, 2009 at 07:45 AM