Post-literary

[imomus]

In 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.

Comments

The organ-grinder's manque

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the post on lit. I have already said what I think in the comments section of the previous post, so I won't repeat it here. Interestingly, I am a writer who is a failed singer (at least I have been the lyricist for a band), but I still see writing as a very pure, playful form in which there are endless possibilities.

I think you remarked somewhere that you hate the notion that eveything has been done in music. I very much agree with the remark. People who say everything has been done in music only reveal their own lack of imagination. But I would extend this to literature. There is still so much that hasn't been done, and I, for one, would like to try and do it. Perhaps it is a matter of being informed by other mediums, but I see that as par for the course. Of course literature should be informed by the visual arts and by music.

I really agree with what you say about the oral tradition, by the way. I think that some kind of recognition of the oral tradition is the way forward for literature.

Anyway, such are my disparate thoughts at the moment.

[silenceinspades.livejournal.com]

as a former literature major i agree with you on most of this. i found it amusing that in my later years of school lit classes showed films as "text" that we studied. i think the professors had realized society had moved on. i still read everything, but writers of fiction haven't been of "rock star" status since oscar wilde. i think most people realize this. in school outside class people were more likely to discuss bjork lyrics than djuana barnes.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I quite 'like' Djuna Barnes, but that means (and this is all-too-typical of my experience with literature) that I bought 'Nightwood' and read a few pages and thought 'I like this and will recommend it to other people'... then cast the book aside forever.

[xyzedd.livejournal.com]

There's no way to shame anyone into wanting to read literary fiction--believe me, I've tried it. All I could ever mincingly say is, "How books will enrichen your life, darling!" Right--and steal or outright waste your time.

Momus obviously has a lot of prejudices about who published writers are and how they act and dress--and I suppose I share a few of them myself, though we both know better. But art isn't some kind of competition--what's more exciting this epoch--novels or dance? Who looks better at a party--the designers or the architects? (The architects, definitely.) Why can't authors be more like pouty pop stars? Certainly art forms compete for your time, but a novel could never be forced on you the way a popular song might. A novel can never be "catchy," try as it might. (Or can it?)

(Another thing--I don't quite understand why text isn't just as "time-based" as music or film or dance. In fact, "real time" might seem more important to text than to any other art, but I suppose this needs to be clarified for me.)

I don't mean to do battle for fiction writers--their works speak for themselves. But I firmly believe that works of fiction actually tell us more about "real life" than all the well-intentioned endeavors of philopophers, historians, and critics. You can learn more about how ancient Greeks really lived and felt by reading Homer than studying Aristotle, as much as I love and respect him, too. But Aristotle is one man, one philosopher--and Homer is all men (ask Borges).

Momus has impeccable taste in all kinds of art and artists--and I agree that I'd rather read any number of long-dead authors than living ones. In fact, I admit I rarely read any contemporary artists--but it's more a matter of wanting to catch up than for any other churlish, jealous reason--I swear! It's also largely a matter of sifting the wheat from the chaff--novels are dense things that don't go through a sieve as easily as a rock album or movie, and it might take decades if not centuries before the world can both discover and then be fully able to come to terms with a brilliant author's mind and works.

But curse those damned fiction writers! How dare they try to distract us with their black-and-white worlds when everything around us is Technicolor Cinemascope. Look at me--I've been spending more time on Click Opera than I have been with Evelyn Waugh. (He's sitting over there now, sipping his tea, rattling his spoon.) What I see in Momus is what I fear about myself. True, and we all need breaks from certain forms at certain times and sometimes I just can't stand to read another damn novel or short story. And yet somehow now that fiction has been denounced, defied, and defiled, I feel its secret powers are the only real "punk rebellion" left today. I might adore a world in which to read a book, as in Bradbury's future long past, I'm committing a transgressive and death-defying act.

Thank you, Momus, for your generous and time-consuming devotion to good argument.

Postscript on comments made while I fumed and fussed: "Qcrisp" is so smart and so accurate; I actually almost majored in film studies at college because I'd come to hate how books were taught, and I only took two literature courses in my entire ill-starred academic career. (I think of myself as an ill-educated autodidact.) But Djuna Barnes? Please--she'll stop any literary interest at fifty paces.

[discoforhire.livejournal.com]

Was that pic of W. Gaddis (it WAS him, right?) an example of yr depressing lit that explores autism of lit? I don't find him at all depressing, I'm usually a bit gloomy anyway tho. "Agree strongly" w/point 3, at least. Point 6, I'm sure there's SOME way past it (I agree entirely about language being v far from any kind of shared reality), but I haven't come across it (for myself/in others). Stops me writing properly. Oh well.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

I'm addicted to various text-based media including the occasional novel, but admit that most contemporary english novels don't satisfy. The last one I read was David Mitchell's Booker near miss "Cloud Atlas". The first two sections were good reading, but although it is not a bad book, it was more or less downhill after that. It's lauded by the blurb writers as a breakthrough of postmodern fiction, but Don Quixote is easily more postmodern. Parts of the book read like they had been written with the prize jury in mind, which bothered me. In interviews, Mitchell describes his life as a writer as a more-or-less ordinary job, and perhaps that what it is, now that he's backed by the fiction establishment.

Now that I think of it the last time I enjoyed contemporary fiction was when I was reading Haruki Murakami's works.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

Amusingly enough, even though I liked Life of the Fields enough for it to rise to the top of my AudioScrobbler most frequently played list for a while, and though I liked Corkscrew King enough to send you 10 euros for it alone, your writings have made more impact on me than your music. Your Thought for the Day has been extremely useful when I've tried to explain to people the general style of artists like Nobukazu Takemura, at least on cds like Sign and 10th.

[azzy23.livejournal.com]

I dislike the sense that literature is something for an elite bourgeois class

I've actually been thinking about this exact thing lately. The statement was made to me that literature that is purely for entertainment purposes (or serves no greater educational purpose, I should say) is pornography. I think perhaps there has come a bit of a greater division among the "bourgeois literati". Instead of just being elitist snots, they must then assert themselves as being more literate than the next.

An aside, it's interesting to me that you dislike the sensory void of literature. We're all wired differently, but I adore that void. I'm more visually creative the hour after I finish reading something than at any other time. As music is #1 on your list of importance, do you find yourself more creative after experiencing a new piece of music?

[dickon-edwards.livejournal.com]

We were discussing Ali Smith at my creative writing course the other day.

At the class, I am often heckled for saying unkind things about people who wear beards or trainers.

I still have your signed book of lyrics. Signing CDs just isn't the same, is it?

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I'd sit with most of this in respectful disagreement except for your statement about "classic" literature, which sounds a little strange given your other criticism. I wonder if you'd been kicking around in the 17th century if you would have been dissing Shakespeare then. Certainly a bit too 'national.' A bit frumpy. Not much to say in interviews except complaining about that Hathaway woman and insisting that the sonnets weren't written for a man. Isn't it the urge to make Shakespeare's life more interesting that leads to all of that pseudo-academic hoop-jumping to find alternate writers for the plays?

You bring to mind Martial's epigram (VIII.69):

Miraris ueteres, Vacerra, solos
nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas.
Ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti
non est, ut placeam tibi, perire.

A very free translation would have it:

"This modern stuff," you say, "All Junk!"
Your favorite poets are defunct.
If only you could be forgiving
Enough to pardon us for living.

Perhaps it's that the current cultural role of the writer -- which seems to hold in many nations -- is one that is too metaphysical for you, since it prioritizes mental engagement and the creation of (supposedly) long-living texts over the things of the body (clothes, lifestyle). Certainly somebody, one would think, should be working on "bleak, adult" art, although it is of course not your obligation to like it.

Glossa super Momum

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

Literature is the enclosure act of writing. It drives the verbal arts into their scenic sheepfolds, and kicks out the peasants. The practice of silent, interior reading only became universal in the twentieth century. As late as the eighteenth century, it was more usual for readers, especially those with less formal education, to read out loud to themselves and others. But Literature stills the lips; the writing is no less embodied, but now it is embodied in an 'autistic' solitude, appropriate for a subway train, or a living room where everybody else is watching television. Many modern writers (especially in the 'advanced' nations) of "literary" fiction express an exhaustion, a sepulchral despair in their well-drawn but unlikeable characters, in their sophisticated but disconsolate ideas, and in their well-chiselled but unlovely sentences. J.G. Ballard and A.S. Byatt, and Angela Carter all come to mind. Good writers, all of them, but it's a weak pleasure I take in them.

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!

[xyzedd.livejournal.com]

Beautiful response. I love Martial as much as Momus does and you apparently do, too. (Even though I'm too stupid to translate.)

Oh--and another thing--this use of the word "elite" really riles me. "Elitist" is one of the first words Republicans will throw at any Democrat who dares to think, so I shudder when Momus uses it. I can easily imagine Early Man sniggering at Not-So-Early Man: "Thinks he can invent writing. Elitist!"

Why is it admirable to speak of "elite military troops" but not admit that elitism is something to strive for--if it means merely wanting to be smarter, wiser, and better-read? ("Elite" comes from the Latin for "to choose, to elect" and it's the freedom to do that which is fundamental to all our high-flown concepts about art and politics.) If writers are only writing for an "elite few," they don't have only themselves to blame--we can also blame society, popular culture, and politicians.

There are more literate people, percentage-wise, on earth than ever before, and I hazard that more novels (mostly bad ones) are read than ever before, even if such readers are in an "elite" minority. If you have any kind of access to even a rudimentary library--unfortunately, many people don't--you can count yourself among the richest of the elite. Fans of Momus--"Click Opera" or his music--are an elite few. That doesn't make "elitist" sound very awful to me.

Re: The organ-grinder's manque

[bugpowered.livejournal.com]

I think you remarked somewhere that you hate the notion that eveything has been done in music. I very much agree with the remark. People who say everything has been done in music only reveal their own lack of imagination.

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.

[concrete-tiger.livejournal.com]

Regarding objection #6:

When language in prose startles us -- the use of language or the language itself perhaps more than the idea conveyed -- we'll often promote it to the level of poetry.

"Read this passage."

"Wow, that's poetry."

That may be built into our perceptions of language, at least enough that the English words "poetic" and "prosaic" match completely with what you describe about predictable, old novels versus delightful, surprising poems. This notion holds true fairly well in the German language also.

Regarding objection #7:

Would Samuel Beckett or William S. Burroughs be in the category of #7? Could you give some other examples?

Re: Glossa super Momum

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

Interesting points on the history of 'interior reading', I will have to look into that.

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!"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

*Curtsey*

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you'd been kicking around in the 17th century if you would have been dissing Shakespeare then. Certainly a bit too 'national.'

No no no! Shakespeare was tuned into Italy the way I'm tuned into Japan! He made mash-ups of Petrarch and Hollingshead, and in his imagination he was right there in Denmark or on the (non-existent) sea coast of Bohemia!

A bit frumpy.

Very much not! He may have been losing hair, but he has a kind of Mona Lisa sexiness. He's bisexual, he's working in theatre. He very much isn't sat alone somewhere with a word processor.

It's clever of you to quote Martial on me, because I love Martial. But what he's satirising there is people who only like dead writers, not people who locate equivalents of literary creativity in new media. We can't really expect Martial to have much of an opinion on artforms invented millenia after his death.

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

I think that contemporary literature is frightfully backwards, or alternately pretentious or insistent on missing the point entirely. The literary establishment is overly obsessed with being "literary" and scoffing literature-as-entertainment. I'm thinking of David Foster Wallace proclaiming that Mark Leyner was "the antichrist" because his stories are essentially mindless pop souflets.

The problem, or one of the problems with literature, is that it has yet to come to terms with its own obselescence, ie. the hegemony of film/television, video games even. Literature was a technology developed to describe space and time(and to a lesser extent, the emotional universe) to people in other spaces and times. What do you do when someone develops a technology that works better than yours-abandon it, refine it, or make it increasingly esoteric and useless? Contemporary literature has chosen the latter.

Although Momus, your list should probably read:

1.Blogging
2.Music
3. Visual Art
etc.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

As for 'elitist', I also don't like it when people call other people that. My usual argument is 'there cannot be an elite without power'. But certainly literacy, and the tendency to consume 'serious' literature, is tied in closely with 'cultural capital'. We can't say it's not correlated in any way with power, even if reading Calvino won't immediately give you any more votes or money than you had before. (In fact it will make you poorer by the price of the book.)

I think what I wanted to say was that there's something terribly exciting about those media in which you can shout, to invoke a phrase of James Joyce, 'Here comes everybody!' Now, I may not sell any more records than the average first novelist sells novels, but I work in a 'Here comes everybody!' sort of medium, and that in itself is exciting.

[tump.livejournal.com]

soundtrack for this post (http://www.emusic.com/m3u/song/10775150/12506638.m3u)

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.'

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's a whole category, really, 'the literature of exhaustion'. (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0258.html)

[(Anonymous)]

of course, 'literature' is pretty moribund at the mo and has been for a while...
butbutbut 'the disembodied becomes embodied'= so for it to interest you, the printed word has to be attached to some physical presence? this is a form of rockism, is it not?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, the Derrida of 'Of Grammatology' certainly tried to portray it as such.

My interest is not so much philosophical, though, as physiological. The way someone's voice affects my body is quite, quite different from the way words on a printed page do.

[transient-poet.livejournal.com]

Brilliant. I think there has been a major shift in, at least 'western' culture from a literate to a post literate or rather visual culture. Much like in the European middle ages where the majority of commuinication was either aural or visual. Stained glass or the talk of the town.

Today we are in a very similar state. However there is some pretense made that language serves much of a function beyond an immediacy of response. After debords 'Society of the Spectacle' how could a purely language based medium survive. DJ Spooky spun a hard breaks set in SF several years ago with the film of SoS in the background. Perfect soundtrack.

Film or perhaps rave culture are the truest artforms today because they embace a multiplicity of sensory experience. The latter is dieing out and while Opera served the 19th century, there is little there today that is truely reflective of our contemporary world.

[(Anonymous)]

Mo, I think you are suffering from a common problem: attention deficit disorder. You only respond to stuff that stimulates you (fair enough) it's just that the quality of that stuff - and the efforts you make to get stimulated by it - are diminishing. This is a general symptom, though. The problem with this direction is that, at its end-point, we become oblivious to everything other than porn and violence (live if possible). I know poetry is boring, but if you make the effort and begin to stimulate the higher levels of the mind, the ephemera returns to where it belongs: wrapped around a poke of chips.