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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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 05:39 pm (UTC)Literature suggests certain characteristics and details, but, unlike film, for example, it cannot fill out the picture. Updike does not go into tremendous detail about the house in the _Rabbit_ books. Much is left for the reader to fill in. There is something in this deep interiority that separates fiction (and poetry) from other forms of media. I think music certainly shares this characteristic of being a form of guided dreaming. Animation and film and other more visual arts give us everything. They can be, and often are, thought provoking, and open to interpretation, but it seems to me that not as much is produced by the viewer of visual media as is produced by the reader of fiction or poetry.
Whether this is good or bad, desirable or not, I can't say.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 05:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 06:23 pm (UTC)Perhaps the level of interaction between the artist and audience shifts between various media (literature, visual art, music) and different people prefer different levels of interaction? This may be partly why literature is only for the literate, educated, and/or "bourgeois elite."
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 06:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 06:46 pm (UTC)Also: "And Aristotle's theory of catharsis against... um, pottery."
Haha.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 06:49 pm (UTC)Pottery can be quite beautiful.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 07:03 pm (UTC)I quite agree.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 06:43 pm (UTC)In the end, words and sentences--imperfect, flawed, detached, wooden, and worn as they are--remain the symbols probably closest to our consciousnesses, or so I think. Don't we think and feel and remember in an unconscious that is like a language?
Or perhaps this is too strong a reliance on thinking like the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/whorf.html
Also, I went on about the subjective nature of lit earlier, but I would like to note that language came about through the millenia as a form to share and convey experience and thought and ideas. It still seems like the best method out there for these things--as others have noted, this discussion itself is a good example of that.
Now, perhaps language need not be caged to the black and white of the page, and can be embellished in other media, etc. Perhaps language changes, as new communities develop new symbols of agreed-upon signification.
Were not the Chinese characters pictures that became words?
There's something in that, I think, which I don't have time to get to now, that seems to offer many avenues for this discussion.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-24 07:28 pm (UTC)I think you have too much of a structuralist approach in your arguments about language, consciousness, and literature. Also, when I made the comment about the "bourgeois elite" I did not mean that literature is only for the elite. However, it does necessitate education at a basic level, which about a fourth of the world does not have. Also, the reason many people lay off of literature is primarily due to the effort involved. Perhaps not conscious effort. Anyway, my comment was partly sardonic when I referred to literature being for the "literate, educated, and/or bourgeois elite." I was quoting.