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.
That the durationist movement doesn't actually exist perhaps makes this
something of a moot point.
Nonetheless, Mader-Lin's influence is evident in nearly all major
durationist works, as has been documented in recent critical studies of the
movement.
Mader-Lin's most important
statements regarding his own literary practice are to be found scattered about
in his offbeat tome The Clay Testament. Whether read as postmodernist novel or mere crackpot
scrapbook, most critics have recognized 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 round several
unlikely characters, and a division into separate books within an ironically
foregrounded Book.
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
questioning of how different kinds of discourse relate to the divine--it is
these elements that 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 American Midwest,
where the 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 turned much of his energy to the study of
Mandarin. His immersion in this
new language completely outside the Indo-European pale has clearly weakened what
had already been a questionable English 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 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 copies 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 merely ironic, as some argue, or is Mader-Lin perhaps
only now working to fulfill a commitment already made in the early 1990's? In any case, if we are to judge by what
the writer 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 researcher has been
able to find.
Adam Weiner,
Department of English,
University of Wisconsin, Slim
Point
July, 2002
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Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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