Post-literary
Nov. 24th, 2004 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIn a comment on yesterday's entry, someone asked why I recommend things like music, design, architecture and sociology in my blog, but little literature and no contemporary fiction. It seemed at the time like a non sequitur, a tangent, but in fact I don't think it was. I think my recommendations are all part of a position I'd call 'post-literary', which might be another way of saying 'self-consciously anti-literary'. And that might be another way of saying that my taste now contains a self-critique -- a critique of myself as a literary person.
For I studied literature, and I would say that literature has been, at certain formative points in my life, almost a kind of religion. My early career as Momus is seen by most as the work of a 'singing author', a cantautore. If I look at the scene I gravitated towards in London when I arrived there in the 80s, it was very much a literary scene -- a poetry scene, to be specific, centred on a coffee house in Earl's Court called the Troubadour.
But if literature was my religion, it's a religion I've lost. I'm now campaigning actively for the other side. Somewhere down the line I decided that I was more interested in non-literary artforms. I was more interested in texture than text. I inverted a personal hierarchy of the arts which had placed literature at the top and 'the lively and applied arts' at the bottom. Now my personal arts hierarchy looks more like this:
1. Music.
2. Visual art.
3. Sound art.
4. Design.
5. Dance and theatre (with dance ahead).
6. Architecture.
7. Cinema (with animation ahead of 'photographed melodrama').
8. Applied arts -- decoration, pottery, cookery, advertising, journalism etc.
9. Poetry.
10. Fiction.
Of course, the roots of my 'betrayal' go a long way back. Sure, I studied literature at university, but books were what I read to meet course requirements. The culture I was passionately excited about was what I heard on the John Peel show. My friends were not literature students but art students. (In fact, when I tried to befriend fellow students in the literature department, like future Booker Prize nominee Ali Smith, we really didn't seem to see eye to eye at all. Ironically, it turned out that Ali's best friends were also art students!)
My main loyalty was and always has been to 'creativity'. I celebrate whatever artform I think is the most creative. I'm quite opportunistic about that. If you give me a thrill, I'll squeal with pleasure. I'll put you on a pedestal. But you're not automatically on a pedestal just because you're working in one artform rather than another.
I adore Shakespeare, and if literature today were full of creative talents of that magnitude, I'd be rooting for literature, no doubt about it. But I think I'm more likely to find people of Shakespeare's freshness of vision in other artforms than literature.
Here are some of the 'objections to literature' I noted yesterday:
1. I dislike the sensory deprivation element of reading -- the lack of colour, sound, texture, form.
2. I dislike the sense that literature is something for an elite bourgeois class, usually university educated (like myself).
3. I think that having studied literature has made me massively self-conscious about any act of reading, and I don't like that.
4. I'm usually living in some country where the bookshops stock products I can't read.
5. I think of literature as a moribund artform, somehow.
6. I have issues with language as an art medium. We have the illusion that we know what we're talking about when we use the same words, but I'm not so sure. Language appears to be close to 'reality', but in fact it's closer to conventions and assumptions about reality. It rarely startles us, and when it does it's usually in the form of poetry, not prose.
7. Nevertheless, the literature which is about the limits of language and explores the very autism I'm describing is tremendously depressing.
When I picture a 'published writer' I don't necessarily think of someone intensely creative. Thoughtful, perhaps. Intelligent, certainly. Maladjusted, probably. My stereotype of 'the fiction writer' is of a somewhat dowdy, unattractive, impoverished and embittered figure tied into national rather than international culture. That person doesn't dress or live well and isn't a lifestyle model for me. That person has few social ties and few really interesting things to say in interviews. That person survives by getting grants rather than selling a lot. And if they sell well, it's because their work has tapped into some dismal national conservatism, or some seam of social snobbery. That person's work is hard to persevere with, and offers a rather bleak and adult view of life, one which depresses me. If I rave about this work to friends, it will be in the knowledge that they are unlikely to read the writer.
What's more, if I had the kind of relationships where literary recommendations counted for a lot, I'd have to limit myself to relationships with the kind of people I went to university with. My friends would probably be a lot more like my brother's friends (my brother is a literary academic, and has friends like Toby Litt, who's one contemporary writer I do rate). My friends tend to be visual people, or musical people. Call me superficial, but I have trouble imagining a piece of fiction being as exciting to me as the new Fashion Flesh tracks that I'm listening to right now. The writers I like -- people like Alasdair Gray, Gunther Grass, and Fernando Arrabal --- seem to be exceptions, drawing as much on visual art movements like surrealism as on literary traditions.
What if fiction had simply failed to make a successful leap into postmodernity? What if, while postmodernity in artforms like TV and pop music is as natural as breathing, in literature it's been represented by a kind of tail-chasing despair which has made contemporary fiction either painfully autistic or the repository of residual anti-postmodern feelings, a kind of museum of fuddy duddy head-in-sand humanism? What if the liveliness of mind I was trained to celebrate in the 18th century novel were now better discovered in cinema (I just saw Jodorowsky's 'El Topo' for the first time and was blown away by it -- what novel since Bataille's 'Story of the Eye' has had that kind of power for me, personally?) or some other artform?
Ironically, I still love a lot of classic literature. I love Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Moliere. I love the dramatic and the essayistic. I love novels of ideas like Candide's 'Voltaire'. I love literary fragments, like the Satyricon or the Epic of Gilgamesh. I like a lot of poetry, right up to contemporary poetry, and was very sad to hear recently of the death of Michael Donaghy, a very gifted American poet who lived in London. (It's deplorable that his publisher, Oxford, has recently closed its entire poetry list, saying contemporary poetry is just not profitable.)
I've been working for the last two months with a piece of performed literature, 'Attempts on her Life' by Martin Crimp. It's a piece I like very much, and it could, in another context, pass as a 'novel' -- there are no characters per se, just some disembodied voices constructing an unreliable series of portraits of an absent woman named Anne.
I love performed literature, and I really like to hear authors read their work aloud, even writers of contemporary fiction. Somehow then text is magically transformed into texture. The disembodied becomes embodied. Charisma (or lack of it) comes into play. The 'timeless' is pulled down into time. 'God' assumes human form. 'Langue' becomes 'parole'. We abandon the universal, ideal tendencies of language and embrace something specific, something here and now. We jump from the relatively young tradition of the printed word (and its culture of bourgeois professionalism) to the much older one of oral literature -- the Homeric tradition in which stories are 'songs'. That's a tradition I'm personally still very much enthralled with, and it confirms my suspicion that perhaps writers are just failed singers, recording artists manquées.
For I studied literature, and I would say that literature has been, at certain formative points in my life, almost a kind of religion. My early career as Momus is seen by most as the work of a 'singing author', a cantautore. If I look at the scene I gravitated towards in London when I arrived there in the 80s, it was very much a literary scene -- a poetry scene, to be specific, centred on a coffee house in Earl's Court called the Troubadour.
But if literature was my religion, it's a religion I've lost. I'm now campaigning actively for the other side. Somewhere down the line I decided that I was more interested in non-literary artforms. I was more interested in texture than text. I inverted a personal hierarchy of the arts which had placed literature at the top and 'the lively and applied arts' at the bottom. Now my personal arts hierarchy looks more like this:
1. Music.
2. Visual art.
3. Sound art.
4. Design.
5. Dance and theatre (with dance ahead).
6. Architecture.
7. Cinema (with animation ahead of 'photographed melodrama').
8. Applied arts -- decoration, pottery, cookery, advertising, journalism etc.
9. Poetry.
10. Fiction.
Of course, the roots of my 'betrayal' go a long way back. Sure, I studied literature at university, but books were what I read to meet course requirements. The culture I was passionately excited about was what I heard on the John Peel show. My friends were not literature students but art students. (In fact, when I tried to befriend fellow students in the literature department, like future Booker Prize nominee Ali Smith, we really didn't seem to see eye to eye at all. Ironically, it turned out that Ali's best friends were also art students!)
My main loyalty was and always has been to 'creativity'. I celebrate whatever artform I think is the most creative. I'm quite opportunistic about that. If you give me a thrill, I'll squeal with pleasure. I'll put you on a pedestal. But you're not automatically on a pedestal just because you're working in one artform rather than another.
I adore Shakespeare, and if literature today were full of creative talents of that magnitude, I'd be rooting for literature, no doubt about it. But I think I'm more likely to find people of Shakespeare's freshness of vision in other artforms than literature.
Here are some of the 'objections to literature' I noted yesterday:
1. I dislike the sensory deprivation element of reading -- the lack of colour, sound, texture, form.
2. I dislike the sense that literature is something for an elite bourgeois class, usually university educated (like myself).
3. I think that having studied literature has made me massively self-conscious about any act of reading, and I don't like that.
4. I'm usually living in some country where the bookshops stock products I can't read.
5. I think of literature as a moribund artform, somehow.
6. I have issues with language as an art medium. We have the illusion that we know what we're talking about when we use the same words, but I'm not so sure. Language appears to be close to 'reality', but in fact it's closer to conventions and assumptions about reality. It rarely startles us, and when it does it's usually in the form of poetry, not prose.
7. Nevertheless, the literature which is about the limits of language and explores the very autism I'm describing is tremendously depressing.
When I picture a 'published writer' I don't necessarily think of someone intensely creative. Thoughtful, perhaps. Intelligent, certainly. Maladjusted, probably. My stereotype of 'the fiction writer' is of a somewhat dowdy, unattractive, impoverished and embittered figure tied into national rather than international culture. That person doesn't dress or live well and isn't a lifestyle model for me. That person has few social ties and few really interesting things to say in interviews. That person survives by getting grants rather than selling a lot. And if they sell well, it's because their work has tapped into some dismal national conservatism, or some seam of social snobbery. That person's work is hard to persevere with, and offers a rather bleak and adult view of life, one which depresses me. If I rave about this work to friends, it will be in the knowledge that they are unlikely to read the writer.
What's more, if I had the kind of relationships where literary recommendations counted for a lot, I'd have to limit myself to relationships with the kind of people I went to university with. My friends would probably be a lot more like my brother's friends (my brother is a literary academic, and has friends like Toby Litt, who's one contemporary writer I do rate). My friends tend to be visual people, or musical people. Call me superficial, but I have trouble imagining a piece of fiction being as exciting to me as the new Fashion Flesh tracks that I'm listening to right now. The writers I like -- people like Alasdair Gray, Gunther Grass, and Fernando Arrabal --- seem to be exceptions, drawing as much on visual art movements like surrealism as on literary traditions.
What if fiction had simply failed to make a successful leap into postmodernity? What if, while postmodernity in artforms like TV and pop music is as natural as breathing, in literature it's been represented by a kind of tail-chasing despair which has made contemporary fiction either painfully autistic or the repository of residual anti-postmodern feelings, a kind of museum of fuddy duddy head-in-sand humanism? What if the liveliness of mind I was trained to celebrate in the 18th century novel were now better discovered in cinema (I just saw Jodorowsky's 'El Topo' for the first time and was blown away by it -- what novel since Bataille's 'Story of the Eye' has had that kind of power for me, personally?) or some other artform?
Ironically, I still love a lot of classic literature. I love Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Moliere. I love the dramatic and the essayistic. I love novels of ideas like Candide's 'Voltaire'. I love literary fragments, like the Satyricon or the Epic of Gilgamesh. I like a lot of poetry, right up to contemporary poetry, and was very sad to hear recently of the death of Michael Donaghy, a very gifted American poet who lived in London. (It's deplorable that his publisher, Oxford, has recently closed its entire poetry list, saying contemporary poetry is just not profitable.)
I've been working for the last two months with a piece of performed literature, 'Attempts on her Life' by Martin Crimp. It's a piece I like very much, and it could, in another context, pass as a 'novel' -- there are no characters per se, just some disembodied voices constructing an unreliable series of portraits of an absent woman named Anne.
I love performed literature, and I really like to hear authors read their work aloud, even writers of contemporary fiction. Somehow then text is magically transformed into texture. The disembodied becomes embodied. Charisma (or lack of it) comes into play. The 'timeless' is pulled down into time. 'God' assumes human form. 'Langue' becomes 'parole'. We abandon the universal, ideal tendencies of language and embrace something specific, something here and now. We jump from the relatively young tradition of the printed word (and its culture of bourgeois professionalism) to the much older one of oral literature -- the Homeric tradition in which stories are 'songs'. That's a tradition I'm personally still very much enthralled with, and it confirms my suspicion that perhaps writers are just failed singers, recording artists manquées.
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Glossa super Momum
Date: 2004-11-24 03:18 pm (UTC)But as a proud fuddy-duddy head-in-sand humanist, I have a suspicion that literature will return to prominence when the sensory overload of developing media hits an unbearable threshold. Then, folks will welcome the reduction, the distillation of the written word, whose sense is embodied by the imaginative faculty.
In the mean time, I endorse the medium of the comic book, which is enjoying something of renaissance right now, despite the efforts of one party (the big publishers) to turn it into cross-promotional ad copy, and of another party (Comics Journal, Fantagraphics) to redeem it from its distasteful vulgarity by cramming it into the stuffed sheepfold of literature. Buy a comic today, kids!
Re: Glossa super Momum
Date: 2004-11-24 04:12 pm (UTC)I agree with you on comics-the term "graphic novel" is a frightfully apologetic term, as if comic creators are embarassed about their playful four-color world. In a perfect world people would be proclaiming that "literature are comics too!"
Re: Glossa super Momum
Date: 2004-11-24 07:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 04:40 pm (UTC)The Fantagraphics people get most of their money from publishing porn comics (the Eros line). Doesn't sound like 'redemption from vulgarity' to me, even though they admit to "slumming for dollars" -- they are still spreading more 'vulgarity' than 'art.'
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 07:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 08:55 pm (UTC)In the context of the US as it stands today, "porn" is more mainstream than "art," in that most citizens know far more about porn than they do about art.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 09:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 09:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 09:23 pm (UTC)1.) Are Eros comics distributed outside the direct market system?
If not, we can make various assumptions about those who are familiar with the line. Fantagraphics' other publications are available through book distributors at chain stores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, and are thus gaining market penetration which will never be available to Eros, even under the best of circumstances.
2.) What is the recognizeable "cultural impact" of the Eros line, and how can it be measured?
Not to be too facetious, but I have actually never stumbled across an Eros comic "in the wild." I have specifically ordered a couple, and received one as a printer's sample when I priced a job a few years ago, but aside from that, the line does not seem to have made a "brand" impact, even with porn consumers, the same way that other names like Swank, Jugs, etc. would garner instant recognition. I've never seen one in a porn shop.
I certainly see the point you're trying to make with regards to the larger discussion, and agree for the most part, but I think using the Fantagraphics/Eros construction as an example is stretching it a bit. Eros' earnings float the Fantagraphics line -- this is uncontested -- but perhaps a minimal, marginal success in the porn field (a multi-billion dollar industry) is more than sufficient to prop up a literary medium where selling 100,000 copies of your book would place you in the top rung of visibility and success as compared to your competitors. To be fair, comics weren't always this small, but the market continues to contract in terms of real numbers even as quarterly gains are posted by several of the largest publishers.
In any case, greetings. What a way to meet!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 03:47 am (UTC)re: porn comics-- in Italy they sell them everywhere books or magazines are sold. I think its a bit more mainstream there. But in Europe, comics don't seem to be the exclusive domain of youngsters and connoisseurs. There are about five comic shops on the Rue Dante in centreal Paris; they're quite busy, and they all have nice carpeting and gallery lighting, and almost no action figures. It's a treat.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 09:48 am (UTC)My statements above are grounded on two points.
One is that the Eros books I've seen have been priced roughly the same as the Fantagraphics books; since the Eros books reliably profit where many Fantagraphics books do not, it seems likely that the audience is therefore larger. (I've since checked their catalog and see that they also produce some high-ticket items that no doubt produce profits with a much smaller print run, so scotch that premise.)
More significantly, The content of the Eros line, throughout, is more in friction with the culture than the vast majority of the Fantagraphics output, however less artful it may be. I don't think the culture changes without friction (those Brit singers with the girly hair, Bob Dylan goes electric, my daughter burned her bra, etcetera). I further believe that all cultural friction does effect change, whether for good or ill (usually some of each).
If one is going to meet on the net, there are far worse places than "salon de momus."
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 03:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 07:45 pm (UTC)Re: Glossa super Momum
Date: 2004-11-24 11:17 pm (UTC)Composer John Cage had a minor obsession with Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. He set "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" to music in 1942. In the 1970s and 1980s he put together five works of "Writing Through Finnegan's Wake for the [Nth] Time", as well as "Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake".
Two or three times I read the first 100 or so pages of Finnegan's Wake and realized I did not know what was going on. John Cage felt it should be read out loud to absorb the sounds, and that it was perhaps not so important to try to gain insight into all the various possible interpretations, references, or triggers. That is a liberating idea. That is the way I had absorbed many of William S. Burroughs' novels. I did not read out loud, but a book like Naked Lunch or Nova Express does not function in terms of traditional arc of a plot, character development, and such things. So it was liberating to find out someone who had dedicated so much time to Finnegan's Wake through his life had suggested the book could or even should be taken as a stream of sounds and words.
That seems to me like a post-literary approach to reading -- given an appropriate text. Even though it involves words and indeed whole novels, it brings literature some distance towards music, but also bypasses poetry.
Re: Glossa super Momum
Date: 2004-11-24 11:34 pm (UTC)Re: Glossa super Momum
Date: 2004-11-24 11:50 pm (UTC)