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“Lecture 1” from Narration (Selections Ed. Joan Retallack)

It is something that any one interested in narrative has to very much think about, because it has never happened before. Always before the language of each nation who had a narrative t make a story to tell a life to express a thing to say did it with a language that had gradually become a language that was made gradually by them to say what they had to say. But here in America because the language was made so late in the day that is at a time when everybody began to read and to write all the time and to read what was written all the time it was impossible that the language would be made as languages used to be made to say what the nation which was coming to e was going to say. All this has never happened before. History repeats itself anything repeats itself but all this had never happened before. (293)

So there they were and the Americans were not at all that way they did not live their life at all no not at all in that way and they had it to say that they lived their own life in their own way and they had it to say it with the words that had been made to tell a nation’s story in an entirely different way as the nation who had made the language had the entirely different story to tell of living their daily life every moment of every day. (295)

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do. (300)