SUB-CALLA
PIECES OF SAN FRANCISCO
Detour to the Bureau of Public Secrets ...
DEPTH CHARGES - “At the start of the century certain geniuses were abstruse; now abstruseness stands in for genius. The substitution is indeed ingenious: if your emperor has no clothes, trick him out as a puzzle of a million pieces; who then would dare deny the presence of laces and jewels?” / “Transparency alone enables one to measure depth. Personally, I suffer from a severe and incurable ailment: respect for the reader. If one publishes, it is in order to be read, to be understood -- so transparency is the minimal courtesy. Deliberately to be opaque? Except in the case of a true genius, to whom no rules apply, it is at best paradoxical, and it is always an impertinence. And yet, to edit from a story the zigzags, hesitations, repetitions, inaccuracies of normal speech, to put back in apparent order hastily scribbled notes full of abbreviations, symbols -- not to mention illegible words -- to cut, patch, stitch it all together, isn’t this to run the risk of stifling elusive perceptions with a rigid formalism?” Vercors, Le Radeau de la Méduse [The Raft of Medusa], trans. Audrey Foote (New York: McCall, 1971), p. 5
