Guy Davenport occupies an unusual position in contemporary American literature because his accomplishments cover so many diverse disciplines. Not only is he considered one of the most respected short-story writers; he is also one of the most...

EVERY FORCE EVOLVES A FORM, by Guy Davenport. North Point Press. 192 pp. $16.95. Were he a Flemish painter of old, Guy Davenport would come down to us as The Master of the Tangent. In the title essay of this delectable collection of...

It is no surprise that Guy Davenport admired the work of Henry Darger. Beginning with the landlords who discovered Darger's immense project when they went to clean out his apartment after the artist's death, every discerning viewer who has encountered it has been...

[The six stories in Tatlin!] have a maturity, a philosophic depth, and a richness of effect beyond the reach of the younger writer, even one like Thomas Pynchon, whose artistic ambitions and temperament are not so different from Davenport's. What distinguishes these two, mainly, is a difference in orientation: Davenport is an erstwhile friend and devoted student of Ezra Pound's; and in its intense, eclectic and well-nigh overbearing erudition, Tatlin! is offered to us as a fit companion to, if...

The highly developed critical sensibility of the modern era is a product of fiction. The Tatlin! stories are, in part, essays in a criticism by mimesis. The most difficult thing for an article to convey about the writing in Tatlin! is its subtle use of known voices and styles of prose…. The book is, simply, superbly written, and I know of no one in our language who can equal its accomplishment. In method the stories are comparative, analogical; they develop through parallels and oppositions, through ...

Tatlin! is historical fiction of an unusual kind. It is concerned more with the sensibility than with the events of the period it covers. That period is our own; four of the six stories are set between 1900 and 1970, and the collection is unified by a vision of modernism in art, science, philosophy, and politics. Like Hugh Kenner, Davenport believes that the intellectual life of the twentieth century is qualitatively different from that of any preceding period. Tatlin! attempts to do in the form of fiction ...