Eric
Mader-Lin: An Introduction
Eric Mader-Lin is a writer
whose works have played a decisive role in the early development of the
durationist movement in American literature and theology. Being that the durationist movement
doesn't exist, this perhaps becomes something of a moot point. Nevertheless, the influence of
Mader-Lin's early work has been evident in nearly all the movement's major
accomplishments, as is documented in many of the recent critical works on
durationism.
Mader-Lin's most important
statements regarding his literary practice are to be found scattered about in
his offbeat masterpiece The Clay Testament. Neither postmodernist novel nor mere crackpot scrapbook,
readers have found in The Clay Testament an attempt at structuration
akin to that of the Bible. There
is a slow development of themes through a variety of genres, an accumulation of
myths gathered around several unlikely central characters and one unavoidable
central concern--writing.
Generically The Clay
Testament might be placed somewhere between menippean satire and
theological jeremiad. Its
juxtaposition of wildly different types of text, its dependence on different
sources put in contrast--"parallel traditions," so to speak--its
concern with a developing discourse in relation to questions of the
divine--these elements make the work both open-ended, in the postmodern sense,
and reminiscent, oddly so, of that supposedly least open-ended book in our
literature: the Bible.
Volume II of The Clay
Testament, entitled Gospels from the Last Man, has often
been considered a separate work in its own right, and is slowly gaining
recognition as the high point of Mader-Lin's early work. Unread all across the Midwest, where
its action is set, Gospels remains untranslated in more than
fourteen languages, including Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian and Finnish.
In 1996 Mader-Lin moved to
Taipei, Taiwan, where he has since turned much of his energy to the study of
Mandarin Chinese. His sporadic
dedication to this new language completely outside the Indo-European pale has
clearly weakened what had already been a questionable English writing
style. The process is documented
in the writer's Taipei novel More Lies of Louis, where a
substandard and mechanical protagonist (shades of almost Victorian stuffiness)
is dropped into a subhuman (actually a canine) state. The novel is scheduled to be published in October 2002 under
the title A Taipei Mutt, after which two or three large stacks of its
volumes will sit upon a varnished wood floor, having been paid for in part or
in full by the author.
It has been suggested that Mader-Lin's
turn toward Chinese studies represents an abandonment of his previous literary
principles as put forth in The Clay Testament. But those who take this position
neglect one of the writer's very early statements (Clay Testament, Volume I)
to the effect that the only proper languages of the scribe are "Hebrew,
ancient Greek and Chinese."
Is this remark to be taken as merely ironic, or is Mader-Lin perhaps
only now working to fulfill a commitment already made in the early 1990's? In any event, if we are to judge by
what Mader-Lin has made public, nothing much has yet been accomplished in
Chinese. One practice
text published
on a web site of student writings is the only thing this writer has been able
to find.
Adam Weiner,
Department of English,
University of Wisconsin, Slim
Point
July, 2002
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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