George Anderson

by Peter Dimock

  My research was part of an effort to recover an American sense of history before the dominance exercised by the triumphant narrative of a redeeming national American greatness became popularly established with the success of George Bancroft’s multi-volume History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent that began to be published in 1834. I have been convinced for a long time now that Americans lack a language adequate to the history we are living. This lack, I believe, is catastrophic and due in some large measure to the subjective internalization of that historical narrative of national triumph.

  I have tried to write a novel that explores this condition of what I believe is a national narrative failure. The success of my ambition, it seems to me, will rest upon the reader’s response to my invention of a form that purports to create the internal imaginative condition for the refusal of American national triumph—and a determination to live, love, and speak without compromise from the ground of that refusal, no matter how estranged or estranging the results may seem at first.

  Having lived now for some time with the sounds and speech such an invented form made possible within me, I am reminded of those early nineteenth-century documents. Once, I despaired at my inability to interpret those earlier attempts at historical form, but when I think back on them now, I feel strangely comforted.

  The seven “truth statements,” so crucial to the practice of Theo Fales’s historical method, are taken from the following authors and works:

  I. John Berger, G.

  II. Aristotle, Poetics

  III. John Coltrane (from an interview conducted in 1965)

  IV. George Eliot, Middlemarch

  V. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World

  VI. Marshall McLuhan (from a letter to a friend written in 1959)

  VII. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

  In addition to the passages used verbatim from the historical documents that are printed at the end of Theo’s method, the passage describing a child’s witness of the torture whipping of an African American woman is taken verbatim from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

  About the Author

  PETER DIMOCK has long worked in publishing—at Random House, and as senior executive editor for history and political science at Columbia University Press, where he worked with authors including Angela Davis, Eric Hobsbawm, Toni Morrison, and Amartya Sen. His first novel, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1998.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 by Peter Dimock

  First edition, 2013

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dimock, Peter, 1950-

  George Anderson : notes for a love song in Imperial time / Peter

  Dimock. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56478-801-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Book editors--Fiction. 2. Synesthesia--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.I4394G46 2012

  813’.54--dc23

  2012033347

  Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Cover design and composition by Mikhail Iliatov

  Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound

  in the United States of America

  OTHER WORKS BY PETER DIMOCK

  A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family