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

 

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