FOREWORD:

a point to go forward from.

"Writing is organizing one's personal chaos."
- Jonathan Carroll

The purpose that a preface to any written work is supposed to serve is either for the author to introduce or justify the subject matter he has chosen to tackle, or for the readers to find out what can be expected in the pages that follow. Often such a presentation will be redundant: the self-explanatory title or the readers' previous knowledge and a degree of interest in the topic will suffice to establish the necessary link - and the readers will want to skip the preliminaries which would provide little essential information or clarification. However, as it is inference and deduction that are at work here, said "previous knowledge" is a sine qua non condition for such a fast identification to take place. To give an example (and I am going to resort to these quite often on these pages), if the title of this work read: "Objective correlative: the concept and its application in the poems of T. S. Eliot" or "The use of catalectic meter in Frank O'Hara's poems", any self-conscious introduction to it would be superfluous, and here is why: an authorial excuse for devoting whatever time and effort it takes to compose this kind of dissertation would be pure rhetoric and smelling of self-indulgence - and that regardless of the readers' potential interest in highly academic matters like these, regardless even of whether they comprehend the title or not. A heading of this sort provides enough data to conclude about the intended "target audience" of the piece in question as well as about its contents... unless it marks the author's wittily perfidious nature, that is. Moreover, to handle either of the topics, it would mostly be unnecessary to deal with anything that is not directly and thoroughly related to the implied subject matter, e.g. in order to discuss the peculiar meter of Frank O'Hara's poetry (i.e. first to describe it and then to study the role it serves in the syntactic/semiotic structure of the poems) the critic would hardly need to find himself supplying the poet's date and place of birth or discussing his position in the American literature of the 20th century. He would be right to assume that his readers will have a prior understanding of these issues or that these issues will be considered altogether irrelevant, given the scope of the work in question.

This, however, is not the case with the work the introduction to which you are in the process of reading. This work's subject matter is the study of (or indeed, the introduction to) the writings of Jonathan Carroll, an American novelist. Having published seven novels since 1981, this Vienna-based New Yorker remains largely unfamiliar to the readers of American literature. (The cult followings in Sweden and Japan, though indicative, do not seem to have made much difference.) Despite favorable reviews he has received in some widely read magazines, to this author's knowledge there has been no serious criticism of his work so far, and he is still often regarded as a writer "in the making." Therefore it must be assumed here that the readers of this commentary will not be familiar with either Jonathan Carroll himself or any critical opinions pertaining. This is exactly the source of the problem that the author of this introduction is facing: it is relatively easy to discuss (and follow the discussion of) a subject that is not entirely unfamiliar to the audience, who can draw upon what they already know to incorporate the new information into the preexisting cognitive structure in their minds. It could be argued that the difference between knowing one thing about a particular subject and knowing plenty is much smaller than that between knowing nothing and knowing one thing only. The position in which both this author and his readers find themselves might then be described as "breaking past the zero knowledge point" and involves the need to establish an agreement, an understanding, of "exactly what it is that we're talking about here." In the attempt to solve this problem a number of approaches have been considered. The simplest of them would entail starting off with a biographical note on the author Jonathan Carroll - and run the risk of sounding like a high-school second grader's composition piece (three hundred words or less). Anyway, this can be taken care of in as few as three lines, as will be shown presently. Another way was to bypass any preliminaries altogether and hope that in due time all things will fall into their proper places. It is this author's belief, however, that hope is a concept of little critical advantage. Yet another method, and a fortunate one in that it reflects the idea found in a piece of writing by Jonathan Carroll himself, is to expose the readers to an inventory of ideas in order to provide them from the very beginning with as many facts and notions as possible, later on to be sorted out and built upon, to precede mental understanding with intuitive "feel." The obvious danger which this approach poses lies in the randomness of selection and the opportunity it gives for unforeseen misconceptions to be formed in place of the previous informational vacuum (for example: one of the few things about Jonathan Carroll we have mentioned in the above paragraphs is that, after thirteen years of writing so far, he has received little critical acclaim - this might easily lead to an impression that we're going to talk about some big time failure). All is not lost though, because this very randomness, in its arbitrary process, will likely alleviate any such danger by the law of equal distribution: for any mis- there should be a conception formed, for any person discouraged, there may to be one inspired to read on.