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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: The organ-grinder's manque
Date: 2004-11-24 03:55 pm (UTC)It doesn't have anything to do with imagination.
"Everything has been done" is another way to say that
everything is possible. When everything is possible,
everything has been done. It doesn't matter if some
*particular* idea has not been implemented, or has not
been imagined by anyone yet.
The important thing is that all possibilities are
equal. Thus, the particular idea happening is just
a case of combinatronics. The elements are all out,
and everything is a matter of mixing this with that
or that with the other.
Excitement, i.e new-ness comes only when the realm
of possible expands. But nowadays the realm of possible
cannot expand, since everything in sound, from total
silence to white noise is acceptable and permitted
as music.
Expansion of the realm of possible is not the same
as mere adding another music work or idea to the
world.
This should be read in a Braudilliard-ian sense.
Re: The organ-grinder's manque
Date: 2004-11-24 05:23 pm (UTC)You mean all mixed up? I totally agree.
Jean Baudrillard
Re: The organ-grinder's manque
Date: 2004-11-24 05:53 pm (UTC)It's possible we're talking to cross-purposes, but anyway...
Re: The organ-grinder's manque
Date: 2004-11-24 06:23 pm (UTC)Of course. But will it be new?
There are three levels of "New"-ness:
New: expands what we know and what we expect.
New: a new technique, experience or mix of those (as what you say)
New: recent (as in "U2's new album").
New in the lower two senses will continue. But the "real" new?
In 1700, free jazz was unthinkable. When it appeared it was first class new.
Is there something like this that *we* don't expect? We now have access to the whole spectrum: silence (4'33"), full blast white noise (Pan Sonic or whatever).
Re: The organ-grinder's manque
Date: 2004-11-24 06:35 pm (UTC)In any case, I think, for an artist, it's not particularly helpful to have the attitude that everything has been done.