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: 2004-11-25 02:24 am (UTC)Re: cinema, when it does triumph, it overwhelmingly resembles literature. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or a French new wave film, for example. But when literature triumphs, it doesn’t resemble film. If you close your eyes watching a film, you miss so much, but those visually-oriented eyes are always closed when you’re reading. Reading is like only having one sense, but then all your other senses are stronger or something. It takes great discipline to read. And you can get so much out of words on a page.
How is music not national? In my opinion, songs are usually our greatest national texts. When people want a portrait of Canada, they more often go to Cohen or Mitchell than Atwood.
I don’t want to make you yawn, but language is what unites everyone. You know more about language contructing our realities. Music doesn’t contruct realities. Do people live in songs? By songs? Are they a religion in the sense that dialogue is? You live literature whether you want to acknowledge or not. You live language through speaking and thinking. Singing as a form of dialogue is even closer to poetry than song in that sense because it’s about following a feeling to where it goes. It's a kind of devotion that poetry contains and is hardly ever paralleled through song. Lyrics and music are an old married couple that just don’t get along that well. They can’t let go of one another to let the other one fly.
But I guess you're married to song now. You and literature had a fling once, but it left you feeling wounded.
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 02:47 am (UTC)I was also thinking of Leonard Cohen in reference to this entry as an example of someone who could have had (did have, rather) moderate success as a poet or novelist but chose popular music. He also played with experimental film, and it looks like he had fun though the results are not worth mentioning. What holds lasting interest for me? A few songs and a book of poetry ('The Spice Box of Earth'). Perhaps a novel (not two) but perhaps not. I don't think of any of it as particularly Canadian - it's quite international.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:20 am (UTC)Cohen novels are scary. ;) Getting head and Montreal dance halls and schlepping about his mother's kitchen and seeing his father's ghost.
But I didn't know he played with experimental film. A la Don't Look Back? He's much more up there in idol status for me than Dylan because of where I come from and because his poetry and lyrics deal with sexuality and sin. I like the Pardoner better than the Knight.
I really should check out 'The Spice Box of Earth.' Thanks for the recommendation.
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:40 am (UTC)Cohen was mentored by Louis Dudek (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/dudek/) - who was trying to kick start a modernist scene in Canada. Somehow the links south of the border seem much more important than links with other parts of Canada in this story. I'd probably be crucified for saying this by CanLit people, but it doesn't matter because I'm 100% dilettante when it comes to literary studies. I have some inside info in that one of my literature profs (another poetry writing, folk singing, zen meditating Montreal Jew) was also mentored by Dudek.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 09:09 am (UTC)I think of Cohen as international. He's spent far more of his life outside Canada than inside. Clinton Street and the Chelsea Hotel, New York. The Greek island of Hydra. California.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 10:06 am (UTC)There is a tribute to Louis Dudek (http://www.vehiculepress.com/montreal/tribute_dudek.html), who died in 2001, at the website of Vehicule Press, in Montreal. It reads like a brief history of Canadian Poetry.
Perhaps Dudek, in his support of the small press, was to Canadian poetry, what Cid Corman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cid_Corman) was to was to American poetry. Corman died earlier this year in Kyoto, aged 80.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 03:22 pm (UTC)And the West gets a bit of scorn from the East it seems for enthroning the Black Mountain poets, though I personally like Olson.
But the West adores Cohen. :)
I think I saw Cohen as tres Canadian (he is very Montrealais and international, you're right) with "Un Canadian Errant." He's a humble guy!
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:17 pm (UTC)But alas, I think French-Canadians have a better chance of becoming "neutral," I suppose it is.
Well, I'm an English-French Canadian, so perhaps it's half and half? ;)
Nouveau mot!
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:01 pm (UTC)x)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:12 pm (UTC)Sorry if my namedropping is making you nauseated.
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:12 pm (UTC)The film confirms your observation about LC's humility - for example the last scene has him fingerpainting the words 'caveat emptor' on a foggy window.
Here's the blurb from amazon:
This 1965 Canadian documentary captures Leonard Cohen just as he was poised to translate his notoriety as a novelist and poet into a parallel identity as a singer-songwriter. If the latter role would bring him his broadest and most enduring audience, these glimpses of a still youthful Cohen underscore the Montreal native's prevailing literary sensibilities--even when his poetry readings verge on standup routines, both for his impish wit and the adulation it inspires among his listeners, Cohen's serious craft shines through.
Indeed, the film--shot in black and white and laced with a jazzy instrumental score that suggests a Québecois spin on European cinema--argues that Cohen began as both a peer and an inversion of Bob Dylan. Whereas Dylan's deceptively rough-hewn songs were transcended by their poetry, Cohen transformed his poems into songs. Cohen's self-conscious intellectualism now seems conservative alongside Dylan's cagier, more ambivalent slant on culture, which he lampooned even as he revealed its influence.
Given the film's evident preoccupation with Cohen's poetry and novels, we're given only brief snippets of his music, which confirm his primitive skills as a performer. More interesting is the eerie resemblance the young poet bears to Dustin Hoffman. This home video release augments the original documentary with four animated shorts based on Cohen's songs and poems.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 11:05 pm (UTC)Also, like I was saying, it was like Dylan didn't thank anyone when he was young. I mean, I admire people like that, but in the end, I suppose I just wind up feeling like they're assholes.
Not the Dustin Hoffman comparisons! Anything but that! ;) Cohen may be a performer and had some Graduate moments, but god have mercy!
This is lovely. As is the NFB, ideologies aside. '60's was a good decade for them, I think.
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 02:49 am (UTC)Remarkably, I finished watching the newly restored "Seventh Seal" right before I sat down at my computer once last time today; while I was watching the film, echoes of the conversation from this journal kept coming back to me. I was thinking of how literary and yet "beyond literary" Bergman is and yet how holy mere words are--here is the religion the prophet Momus promised us.
Certain songwriters I won't name are no doubt failed writers, as are so many of us, myself included. "Failed" even when we succeed, doomed before we even begin by the gods who came before us... Reading aloud is indeed a wonderful thing, despite it all, a way to cast spells and vanquish gloom and appease the gods, and we all must do it more loudly and more often.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:23 am (UTC)Interesting how you see reading aloud a way to bring everything together, amateur and god alike. And I'm completely full after reading this. I couldn't even have thought such a thing, but what a wonderful thing to think.
Would one of your gods be Joyce?
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 02:40 pm (UTC)Speaking of gods: Joyce Kilmer? Well, "Trees" is nice, but...
Seriously, James Joyce most definitely sits upon my personal Olympus, though lately he's been demoted for moonlighting as a muse to too many hacks such as myself.
"Finnegans Wake" is more music, perhaps, than novel--possibly the first (and last?) post-literary novel. I'll never read it all. Elsewhere here Momus speaks knowledgeably of John Cage and his love of Jimmy Joyce.
I'm a sentimentalist at heart and would prefer "Dubliners," if only for the story "The Dead."
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 03:17 pm (UTC)I'm pretty much a Woolfist. Joyce is good and fun and all, but I find it hard to love him for several reasons, perhaps having more to do with his enthronement and history and acquirement of style rather than the absolut content of his work. :)
Waugh is a scary beast, but god bless anyone who can equally shit on and adore the English in such a satirical way.
Must read the Dead though!
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 03:26 pm (UTC)I gave up on Evelyn for a long time after all the "catholicity" of "Brideshead," but I do relish how he shreds American whateveritis, being an American whatchamaycallit myself.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 03:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-25 04:28 am (UTC)x
Leonard Cohen's Territory
Date: 2004-11-25 08:30 am (UTC)"But I don't fool myself, I know the game I'm in. When I wrote about Hank Williams 'A hundred floors above me in the tower of song', it's not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer. I've taken a certain territory, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is."
from Who held a gun to Leonard Cohen's head? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1305765,00.html) or 70 things you may not know about Leonard Cohen.
Re: Leonard Cohen's Territory
Date: 2004-11-25 02:45 pm (UTC)In the commentary to that same version of "Seventh Seal" I watched, the film critic relates a story about Chopin--who when asked by some ladies why he didn't write anything grander than his lovely nocturnes, said something like, "It's a small kingdom I rule, but it's all mine."