Tag Archives: Fiction

Lying, memoir and literary detail: a recording of my talk at St Anne’s, Oxford

January 27, 2013 7:39 pm / Leave a Comment /

I was invited to give a talk on the 17th January at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and I’m glad I went. Very friendly people, good questions, and a lot of free sandwiches. Seriously, so many free sandwiches. I had about 7 and took 2 with me. No remorse.

My talk was about how I wrote Praise of Motherhood, my unconventional memoir about my mother’s death. In particular, I talked about how I chose what details to include and what details to leave out entirely, at the cost of factual truth.

I discussed (in far greater depth during the Q&A than during the talk) the distinction between truth and truthfulness.

There’s a recording of my talk you can check out on YouTube. I didn’t include any of the Q&A or the introduction, for various reasons: sound quality, privacy, etc.

Thanks to the friendly folks at Oxford for inviting me.

Posted in: Writing / Tagged: , , , , , ,

Why writing and being naive go together so well

April 8, 2012 12:53 pm / 1 Comment /

I insist on maintaining a position of basic naivety toward art. The emphasis should be on “maintaining” — it’s a maintenance job. Only the very naive can remain naive without trying.

RIght now I’m on an extremely luxurious farm, full of flowers, dogs, horses, lakes, fields, beautiful paintings. This farm is a work of art: but it constantly needs maintaining. And thinking about this helps me get to the core of my assumptions about art. When I see the amount of work that goes directly into keeping this farm not only functional but beautiful, the money that gets spent every month to ensure it’s perfect for as long as possible, to keep the dogs happy, the horses and cows fed, the rabbits breeding, the rifles clean, the water free from all sorts of weeds — it’s insane.

Without proper management, without a whole crew of people dedicating their lives to this, the farm would not survive. It’s not a static object of endless beauty. This place’s beauty is a product. It sounds unappealing to put it that way, but then anything loses its “naive” appeal when you look at it from the perspective of its daily maintenance. Just as a beautiful human being has “ugly” maintenance needs, just as a sophisticated and beautiful piano composition needs to be rehearsed if it is to be played correctly, this farm is like a machine, a dynamic set of relationships that would vanish if nobody saw to its functioning.

Like it or not, until enough heads have rolled and the capitalist system crumbles (I will leave this eventuality to those who would wish to see such a crumbling), the objects of art we call “timeless” are only timeless because of the social links and routines and systems in place that allow for a fragile sense of timelessness.

No, of course I’m not saying anything particularly new, but with my involvement in publishing, and my stay at this farm — it all adds up to some considerations on the nature of art’s relation to time. Paintings need restoring. Memory changes. Conceptions of what is good and bad in art change.

I get a bit down about this sometimes. A sense of duration, of real longevity, would suit me nicely. And most of the time I can get away with fooling myself: I am uncompromisingly elitist when it comes to what I read: I want great classics, difficult books of little access to Woolf’s “common reader” — and of course, because I am semi-deluded, I write my books assuming that someday they will be appreciated by the finest minds.

But the world keeps trying, only somewhat altruistically, to instill in me a sense of “realism” about these things. And the world is probably right, and in the end the world will kill me to prove that it’s right. When I work on a book, I continually insist on this naive illusion of the timelessness of art, the belief that great art always ends up being adored by those who “get it” and so on. It is naive. It is an illusion. Yet I need it, and it informs my work all the time.

When I’m writing, I don’t want to think of the human work that will go into printing the book. I don’t want to think of my distributor, sitting in a warehouse, breaking wind and chatting about things that aren’t timeless while waiting for a van to arrive so the books can be loaded onto it. But that’s the human, the “maintenance” element, that allows the timeless delusion to stay propped up in our imagination.

So I force myself, when I’m writing this new book, this short little novel that will be printed on paper produced in a factory and marketed by marketers and distributed by distributors, to think in terms of infinity. That way the fucking book gets written…

Posted in: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Writing / Tagged: , , , , , ,

Further thoughts on monsters and terror.

February 10, 2012 1:21 pm / Leave a Comment /

The following serves as a brief and tangential addendum to the article I wrote that’s now – right this moment! – posted over at the wonderful Litreactor.

Something I discuss a little is that the unnameable terror found in early twentieth century horror stories is applicable beyond the narrow confines of its genre. That’s not to knock genre. All fiction is firmly located in one genre or another. Literary fiction is a genre, although one in which it’s rather difficult to specify the exact parameters of what can be found there, beyond its designation that this is highbrow, you can read this on the train with ostentation.

What does matter is that monsters, horrors and all of their malevolent friends, add a great deal wherever they exist. I made this point with Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, his terrifying “otherness” instrumental in shaking the already turbulent world of that novel. Another memorable example is in a… well, sci-fi? Fantasy? It doesn’t matter. China Miéville’s Kraken is hard to define and gains nothing from doing so. Regardless, a duo haunts the pages, two people (?) that even the hardened lower denizens of London flee in terror at their mention. Goss and Subby… A man and child, both assassins in the employ of a gang leader (who is a sentient Tattoo). Out of me scared was bejeezus. The child is silent, always just watching. Goss, the elder, speaks in an unending barrage of slang and references to incidents that make no sense, likely never happened, and have no relevance to whatever he’s doing. Bizarre enough. Downright eerie when he’s mumbling about old school chums as he licks the air surrounding a terrified victim (to read their mind). Horrifying when he’s talking about meeting a girl in the park – what girl?! – as he presses the teeth out of a cornered man’s mouth.

Again, the terror is that this twosome, even though they’re under somebody’s employ, even though they do have a mission, are completely other to us. There’s something not right, relentlessly so. I would suggest this arises precisely from the synthesis of Goss and Subby’s being on a mission, understandable and familiar in their actions, and the inexplicable topology of their minds (particularly in the case of the former’s rants).

There’s a contradiction, something impossible, that can be injected into fiction as a method of enstrangement (to use Shklovsky’s term). This alien feeling, the inability to process something, be it a character or a monster or an intangible presence, displaces us. It forces us to reconsider… well, everything. Don’t shirk terror, don’t dismiss it to a niche genre. It deserves better. Terror has a place at the heart of literature.

Posted in: Literature / Tagged: , , , ,

Alasdair Gray: Three Things To Love

February 2, 2012 1:00 pm / 1 Comment /

1) Books as Beautiful Artefacts

For those who lament the possible death of printed novels, look to Alasdair Gray. There’s no one who makes owning books such a worthwhile enterprise. On occasion, I take my copy of Lanark down to just look over his drawings and illustrations.  Each work is a thing of beauty, his illustrations sewn through the pages, pictures suggestive of a nightmarish Rudyard Kipling. In his collection of poems, Old Negatives - itself riddled with images of winged foetuses curled up in skulls – he writes a poem in which lines are rendered in  varying colours.

Alasdair Gray, a working artist, makes books the beautiful artefacts that ensures a desire for their survival.

 2) Experimentation, neither difficult nor pointless

1982, Janine, his second novel (and the one the author regards as his best), takes the various sadomaschostic sexual fantasies of its alcoholic middle-aged protagonist, and turns them into a conduit by which he remembers his life, his loves, his failures. And then he tries to commit suicide. The prose disintegrates and we are in a typographic maelstrom of inchoate words, stuttered images, and shapes. You don’t find these in most books. For those who may think experimentation in literature means impenetrability, look here. It is masterful and beautiful and makes complete sense.

Poor Things feels for its vast majority to be standard narrative with echoes of Frankenstein daubed with romance. If it were just that, it would still be a wonderful book. But there are two further parts, much shorter. To speak of them would ruin the gut-punch, forcing everything we’ve read into a new light, until one is sitting in bed, not daring to switch off the light, agog and contemplative, wondering about the truth of love and how a book can undermine itself in a way that drags it into the masterpiece club. Then this supposed person would eventually sleep, and although the book’s immediacy will wane, the book haunts many years after its reading.

3) The Things Themselves

As mentioned, Poor Things had a profound effect on this here amateur scribe. But not as big as, well, the Big One.

Lanark: A Life in Four Books is exactly what it sounds like, but also nothing what it sounds like.

The four books are out of chronological order.

Two are told in a relatively straightforward bildungsroman about a young Glaswegian artist, struggling to get by in life.

The other two are set in a hellish city, Unthank, where it’s never day and skin often turns into scale.

This is probably my favourite book. I’ve bought several copies to foist on the unfortunate souls that drift into my orbit. At least they will have this masterpiece of a novel to console them, long after I’ve disappointed and contact is broken.

It took Gray almost thirty years to write. Those who read it become fierce in their love.

In a just world, Gray would be mumbling through a Nobel acceptance speech.

The very best books instill a simultaneous elation and despair, despair that oh, someone’s done this and it does it better than anyone ever could. The despair melts away eventually. Then we are left with something like gratitude.

If you haven’t read it, it is waiting.

An introduction to the man:

Posted in: Literature / Tagged: , , , , ,

Jonathan Franzen vs. the Future

February 1, 2012 12:41 pm / 2 Comments /

Jonathan Franzen and I have something in common: we like books. We do differ in some ways. I’ve never read Franzen’s novels. Actually he hasn’t either, but writing them probably grants him some say. Probably. Still, arrogant as I may seem, Franzen is far more egregious:

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now… I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

Now. That may seem like the harmless tomfoolery of an unabashed luddite (not bad in itself) but there are implicit dismissals in every smug syllable. In fact, it’ll be easier to do a fun line by line reading if we are to get to the crux of why Franzen’s attitudes betray his fear of experimentation and the potential for new literatures that could – gasp – splay open his chosen genre of “Literary Fiction” and flick the withered heart a little.

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom.” 

The “American” paperback edition is oddly specific. I’m guessing that Franzen doesn’t particularly care which country’s version falls into the hands of the willing reader. Perhaps he’s very fond of birds looking at giant slanty text. There’s just no way of knowing.

 

Bird too close to read properly. Birds can't read.

So beautiful.

 

More important is his use of the word “technology”. This is something he’s very keen on making clear. Books in their physical form are technology. What does he mean by this? It’s a bizarre way to describe literature. Are libraries thus in possession of all the latest technology, by virtue of them containing the latest releases? I’m being fatuous, sure, but there’s thought in my inanity.

He goes on:

“I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now.“

 Franzen’s concept of good technology is its ability to withstand water damage. If someone told me their new smartphone was incredibly advanced because it could work at the bottom of the sea… sure, that’s kind of impressive I suppose. But… still. That isn’t really what it’s for. The problem is that Franzen tries to pass paperbacks as technology in the same way an embarrassing teacher might try to name Shakespeare as “The World’s First Rap Musician.” There may be a point in the argument, but it hints at a lack of confidence in sticking by one’s guns. Shakespeare was a poet and dramatist and there’s a reason that’s important. Books are books. There’s a reason why that’s important. If you’re going to defend books, why not just call them what they are, and why that’s worth preserving, instead of trying to appropriate “technology” to mean, y’know, anything.

People are afraid of technology. Proof:

 

No wonder. Franzen’s been made a wealthy and respected man from the traditional model. There’s no shame in that. Great authors always have. Many still do. It is in the closing sentences of the quote, that Franzen shuns exactly what makes e-books so exciting:

“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”

Okay, that’s more or less understandable. A text may remain the same and be comforting for that, even if a reading of said text might alter along with the person reading it. But he goes on:

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

 This is so bizarre I’ve had to read it several times. Has an author thus far – admittedly still in the infancy of e-books – ever decided to largely edit and alter their work? If the practise were widespread, Franzen may be onto something. A novel is a substantial part of a writer’s life, a great deal of time and emotion, and the authors who wouldn’t put their work on display until every sentence rang true surely outnumbers those who would.

Regardless of all that, Franzen is missing the potential for something great. There will be (and have been) an onslaught of trashy crap made available by the unprecedented ease of e-book releasing. An inevitable annoyance (one it is easy to ignore, and utter garbage has always managed to seep into the traditional publishing route too).

Reader: you do not have to choose. There is no either/or about any of this. I’ve creaking bookshelves and a stocked iPad. The literary eschatologists are wrong. Nothing’s dying. It’s changing shape. May books become artefacts that are more than just the text. Then they shall live.

If an art form is given time, it will stagnate and lose its power to shock and challenge. Franzen is not the lone voice in traditionalist dissent, decrying the death of the novel form. That we are agog in front of screens all the more, forgetting books once existed as wads of pulped wood.

Good riddance to bad pulp. Make the physical novels worth saving. Blocks of texts are more convenient on an e-reader. A rise of authors who recognise technology as an aid to their work, rather than a death knell, can lead the charge and turn the book into an artefact. Something worth owning. Franzen must build something beautiful.

Posted in: Literature / Tagged: , , ,

Pynchon: An Imagined & Failed Biography

January 30, 2012 11:27 am / 1 Comment /

From a chain of pilgrim milk, Pynchon was born. That is to say, Pynchon’s ancestors heaved onto Massachusetts soil in 1630, and from said landing did a combustion of genes and chance result in Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (that is his real middle name, and if I were friends with him, I’d ask if I could call him it and pretend not to be hurt when he refused).

Did he start writing V in early adulthood, or before he was even born? Certainly not the latter.

Pynchon (or Ruggles, as I call him) is now in his mid-seventies. We don’t know what he looks like, what he does in his spare time. Marijuana – or the memory of it – permeates his novels, from slight whiffs to heavier wafts, culminating in the great green plume of paranostalgia in Inherent Vice. “Doc” Sportello is a man unaware of what’s going on in the dying decade (the Sixties), the jittery instability of which remains like a wine-stain. And that’s saying something, because I wasn’t born, but I feel great Fear. Like the Sixties was a horrible preamble to an inevitable implosion, Nixon as a cackling vizier, and the failure of some avert tragedy did not allow history’s wound, coming to a long overdue spurt of pus, to breathe and scab over.

Ruggles… I would not dare call him Ruggles where I to meet him.

Dear Mr. Pynchon,

 I’m trying to think about you in a blog post that few will read, fewer will find interesting, but am finding it an enjoyable enterprise. For example, did you enjoy my portmanteau a paragraph or two up? (Paranostalgia.) I threw it in mid-sentence, so as to not draw attention and act like I just shit new words. An artist. I imagine you drink a lot of lemonade for some reason. Can’t imagine you listen to much modern music, but what am I basing that on? 

Images of Against The Day, hazed by a few years, makes me think of gunpowder and the cracked earth and dust under the feet of anarchist plotting. For a while, it was my favourite Pynchon novel. Better than Gravity’s Rainbow. Now, I’m not so sure. I need to reread it. The Chums of Chance occur, apropos of nothing, hovering in their airship, pursuing their bizarre adventures, always moving forward. Threesome between a woman and her father’s two murderers. Dog biting a penis (the owner of said penis mistakenly thinking the dog was trained in sexual service). Gunshots at nice. Franz Ferdinand being an utter bastard in a Chicago bar. Time machines and Iceland spar. Nikola Tesla in a tent. All those things could not conflate into a mediocre book. It is one of my favourite books.

Pynchon graduated and went into the U.S. Navy. No, he didn’t graduate. He left halfway through a Cornell degree in engineering physics. After the Navy (in V. a hamburger being cooked by invisible waves, not appropriate method of contraception) he returned to a degree in English. Nabokov lectured. Stories began to trickle. (He notes an embarrassment towards some of his earlier stories in the introduction to the collection Slow Learner.)

V. is my third favourite. Images include shotguns in the sewer, a priest in the sewer with vermin congregation, Kilroy was everywhere, dangling from a building as part of a daring break-in, applause for impalement, and a great spout of water. My experiences were stuttering and confused, struggling with the unusual but beautiful language. A sentence stands out, half a decade later: “His pants puddled on the floor.” I’m fairly certain I’ve remembered it wrong, but banal as it seems, it made me think yes, that’s exactly what that looks like, when trousers are down, that’s so simple and perfect.

But then! Good reviews for V. Alas, a blockage. Pynchon tries to write several novels at once. Fragments may or may not survive in what eventually hit shelves, after gaps of up to seventeen years. Or the complete things emerged only just prior to the current millennium. He dislikes his next book, The Crying of Lot 49.

Horrible confession: I’ve not read Vineland (the first one I bought, because I was vaguely aware at seventeen that the author was worth my time) or Mason & Dixon. The latter haunts me, following across countries and bookshelves. Soon I shall read it. Many call it his masterpiece. I almost daren’t complete my Pynchon reading in case he’s done writing them.

Images from Crying of Lot 49: Insane doctor locked in office, the obvious recurring symbol, a cork ricocheting between the corners of a hotel room as the inhabitants remove clothes, Lolita reference in lyrics, the auctioneer’s gavel, the parting twosome talking of W.A.S.T.E. communication.

Every year a Nobel disappointment.

Gravity’s Rainbow (images in parentheses to reduce mundanity of selfshit rambles, inserted as they come) was a thick paperback, that invoked great anxiety and awe at its very handling. The (pig suit, then castration) first pages were a wade through treacle, each sentence another sweet trudge, and it carried on this way for a hundred pages or so. And this (Rocketman!) all with a guide to help me! Reading the novel, in its scatological rambling glory, against the unlikely setting of sunny Portugal. Almost felt like giving up. What was going on? Why exactly was (Slothrop pursuing harmonica down a toilet) the protagonist diving into a toilet? V2 rockets falling at the sites of his sexual activity. (Eating a series of disgusting “jelly” sweets.) (They were in love, fuck the war.) (The haunting ending.)

Gravity’s Rainbow changed a weird thing in me – incidentally, the biography of Pynchon is clearly abandoned now, his later life remaining unknown and of little relevance – because beautiful language did not necessarily go with humourlessness. The more characters the merrier. References to King Kong and Mickey Rooney, even if inconsequential, were absolutely fine. Absurd offshoots, Byron the Bulb in particular (we are given the biography of a lightbulb), somehow add a great deal in their pointlessness. The main character fragments. SLOTHROP WAS HERE.

Pynchon’s books, even the ones I’ve read, are still a mystery to me. The above rambling was an attempt to deduce what he is to me, what I’ve learned. Nothing is solved. But writing lessons were learned. So a list:

Anxieties Induced: 

How can I ever learn so much information? How can someone know so many things?

Christ, my character names are so dull.

This book is long. That must take years. And then most people have trouble reading it.

I live in dull times.

Joyful learnings:

Hey, books can be funny in a slapstick way! Disgusting too!

Dialogue doesn’t have to be boring, like in real life.

Too many characters are only too many if they’re all dull.

Explain a lot of the inconsequential. Explain little of the important.

It's Pynchon!

 

Posted in: Literature, Writing / Tagged: , , , ,

The Encoded Unnameable or: A (Failed) Stagger Towards What Literature/Writing Is For.

January 24, 2012 6:08 pm / Leave a Comment /

There may be people in an alternative universe, tapping through on an unholy radio, wanting a proper explanation of what the point of reading (sitting and staring at configurations of words, provided by someone that isn’t known to you) and writing (putting said words into said configurations so that strangers will like you). What if these denizens of the parallel are tap-tap-tapping right here to this page?

Fine.

What is it to me? A transmission of something unnameable and unsayable. In the lacunae of language’s unfilled spots – the crevices, the fact that I could write a 900 page novel about what it feels like to caress my big toe at half past six on a Wednesday morning, in every detail, would require me to account for every physical and nonphysical instance in the universe, and even then would remain incomplete – lies a truth we all grope for. There is no truth there, to quote Gertrude Stein (but changing her words and meaning, stripping it of poeticism and novelty).

Language refers to itself, words refer to other words, nothing at the centre. Big pit of blank. Can’t handle that myself. There is something missing. I’ve a great yearning, and you’ve a great yearning, and she’s a great yearning, and he’s a great yearning. The yearning is for whatever is in the big blank pit. There is nothing in the big blank pit. That makes no difference. My idea of a trowel is not yours, never was or is.

Think: a writer as transmitter, using the book for this very device, like Orpheus twiddling the dials to hear fragments of poetry and decipher a meaning. What meaning is there? None, none told by Cocteau.

Then: a reader as receiver, scanning the words. They make sense but they are not what they say. Books have something else. Don Quixote is not a classic because it is an account of a mad old man who wishes to be a gallant knight (if we can agree that it is about this, we cannot). It is in the lacunae that the blank pit lives, where resides the unnameable (remember, not named because nothing there).

Robert Meeks: “I’ve a fear that to scratch my skin will reveal something else. There’s a skeleton under my skin, somewhere.”

Regardless of the ontology of it all (irrelevant at best), why do either of these things? I don’t know.

Enjoyment is not to be dismissed. Life would be a parade of hemlock-drinkers and twitching nooses without enjoyment.

Why not make do with films or music or comic strips or sculptures or paintings? There are things they do better. It is worthy of a sneer when someone says that a film adaptation “misses things” out from the book. They should be different, otherwise why bother?

Why bother? “Because we are always coding, darling.” – Robert Meeks.

Something is encoded, a specific kind of nothing, an unnameable, when we write. No author can fully account for the monstrosities they have birthed. No reader can fully account for why they love/hate a text. It is just something there, encoded, dead on the page, but then pumped through with some kind of unnameable meaning/feeling by the reader’s gaze.

But why bother?

“Why The Word? Why not The Pause, or The … ?” – Robert Meeks.

.– …. -.–   -… — – …. . .-. ..–..

A compulsion to connect or the satisfaction in at least attempting to seek meaning? The code is unbreakable, and even if it wasn’t, what’s to find.

Answer: Not sure.

Posted in: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Writing / Tagged: , , , ,

Three things that make me lose respect for a fictional work if encountered.

December 20, 2011 2:02 am / 11 Comments /

This list is biased and incomplete, because I am biased and incomplete.

1) Disaffection

There’s an idea that our generation (or to be precise, mine, those in their twenties) are numb and joyless, increasingly engaged with technology and not with each other. That brand names carry an ideological weight for us on par with a deity. That, in short, this is what people are like now: “I do this. Then I go over here. Whatever. Then I have meaningless sex, which I shall describe to you in a clinical fashion to convey just how alienated I am. List of brand names. Here are some swear words. I am nasty to someone. List of medications.”

I don’t know or care if this is what people are like. It’s dull and reductive, and suggests a snide condescension on the author’s part; that, you know, she/he sees through all that bullshit, welcome to the real world. None of the things mentioned are tedious in themselves, but Christ, say something new. Sex may be joyless. We may be numb. But that’s not even interesting enough to hold interest for a short story. If a character has no desire, no yearning, at least none that is represented in a compelling way, then why listen?

2) Epiphanies

This isn’t even something I would know how to escape. They’re there, and it’s all James Joyce’s fault. Problem is, the bastard was damn good at them (notable exception: the ending to “Araby” is abstracted and terrible). Actually, an epiphany is arguably inescapable in some form. But I still cringe when a protagonist learns something in a moment of crystalline clarity, gets a glimpse of wisdom. Raymond Carver liked to have his characters get inklings of epiphanies, rather than go the full whammo. That works to an extent. I don’t know. This is something I’m going to explore a bit more in my next post (maybe).

3) Nature Fetishism

I want there to be a movie or book… let’s say movie, movies are stuck in more of a fetishist rut. I want there to be a movie where a middle-aged man, living a gentle and wholesome life in the countryside, perhaps self-sufficient, great marriage with little perfect children, smells flowers as a pastime, has friends who express concern for his material-free life and self-reliance, until something happens. Doesn’t matter what. But I want the protagonist to become reliant on technology and filth, on the stink of a good city, on smog, on everything artificial. That this, the modern, is what gives the person ultimate fulfilment. It is not the return to an idyllic natural life that never existed, couldn’t exist. The reverse has been done to death. It’s both the gall of fiction, or rather the people behind it, that peddles this New Age wish-fulfilment to people who buy battery chicken breast, and the fact that the natural world – definitely beautiful and definitely astounding – is also full of death and horror. A bit of both would be nice; terror and beauty and ugliness can be squished together. They should be. To speak of nature with such reverence, to be such a Thomas Hardy about the whole thing, smacks of an authorly fumble of how people actually are. I just don’t buy it. After all, most people are reasonably afraid of nature in all it’s glory (there are yetis outside). To quote Robert Meeks, as I often do:

“Abhorrent though modern life is, let us all rejoice that we can, at least,  remain indoors. Dark things wait in the brambles and the hedgerows and the swamps. Children: The fairy-tales your mother read to you were correct.”

4) Lack of Alchemy

John Dee (1527-1608) said that a story without at least a brief scene in which the protagonist attempts alchemy is “of no merit by any mean,” and he should know.

                      .

Some issues here will be investigated further in next blog post that can’t be read, only inhaled, exclusively on slothrop.com (the drink of runners-up!)

 

 

Posted in: Literature, Writing / Tagged: , ,

Zizek’s fictions: why I am merely a passive consumer of Zizek’s late work

June 2, 2011 3:17 pm / 1 Comment /

I am becoming increasingly critical of Slavoj Zizek. This is not only because he has become more and more “interested in” (read: obsessed with) revolutionary terror, a position that strikes me as half-posturing and half-terrifying. It is also not just because of what I consider to be the slowly deteriorating quality of his work (his first few books, up until the late 1990s, I still find fascinating in many ways). I am critical of Zizek because he has become synonymous in my head with “philosophy fiction”.

Here’s an attempt at defining what I’m calling “philosophy fiction”. First, it’s not the same as philosophical fiction, of the kind Sartre and Murdoch wrote. Philosophy fiction is not “philosophy structured like fiction” but the opposite: “fiction structured like philosophy”. Second, philosophy fiction stands isolated from the realm of philosophy and from the realm of fiction. To put it succinctly, philosophy fiction is a hybrid mode of academic writing that relies on traditional narrative techniques to makes its point.

Zizek exemplifies this kind of writing. I don’t believe he writes works of rigorously thought-out philosophy anymore. Instead, he writes self-contained little “fictions” where the protagonist (like the “protagonist” of the Phenomenology of Spirit, an abstract protagonist whose nature is only revealed as the narrative progresses) is pitted against various bad guys (capitalism, cultural studies, soft leftism, humanitarian aid) portrayed as silly or petty or thoroughly evil with few redeeming features. A Zizekian philosophy fiction stands amid many other such philosophy fictions, and features recurring characters, situations and even descriptive passages, like a popular children’s books franchise. The two-dimensional villains always seem insurmountable at first, but the Zizekian hero, through a mixture of rhetorical ingenuity and shameless, conscious misreading, manages in the end to find a way to slay them.

Zizek has said on different occasions (including the recently published epic philosophy fiction, Living in the End Times) that he loves Ayn Rand, and in particular her most tolerable novel, The Fountainhead. This is not surprising. LIke Rand (albeit in a far more interesting and compelling way), Zizek has constructed an “impossible” hero (a combination of Lacan, Hegel, Howard Roark and Robespierre) and summoned him to defeat various ridiculous caricatures presented as accurate depictions of “philosophical positions”. And like Rand, Zizek likes drastic measures: it is not enough for his hero to be flawless — he must blow up a building or two in order to make his point. In The Fountainhead, Roark shows he would rather be condemned by the world and engage in acts of terrorism than see his world-view (and his aesthetic preferences) compromised. This is how Zizek-the-fiction-writer operates; he is not afraid of being unpopular because he has the truth (no, more than that: the Real) on his side, and he will explode any theoretical edifice he wants in the name of revolutionary terror.

The problem, of course, is that the buildings he blows up were built by his own hands. Zizek often fails to engage his opponents on a serious level, and instead he draws up caricatural portraits of certain theoretical tendencies and unleashes the Zizekian Roark to demolish them. It makes for fantastic fiction. It is consumable and entertaining. It is also intellectually dishonest.

I have read Zizek’s recent work with a great deal of enjoyment — or jouissance, even. But he’s jumping the shark, as they say in showbiz. He’s raising the stakes ever higher. Now “radical democracy” is no longer good enough; we need communism. We must fail and fail and fail better and better. Zizek, the author of philosophy fiction, is great for passive reading. But, to stretch this whole analogy to its limits, he is no longer writing literary fiction — he is writing trite sequels to sequels, and while The Sublime Object of Ideology was a mostly serious, impressive work of philosophical synthesis, his recent work, like In Defence of Lost Causes, is fun to read superficially, but scary to take seriously. He is advocating revolutionary terror (in fictional form) where once he espoused the ideal of radical democracy, of agonism.

I will, of course, continue to read Zizek. His first few books will remain on my privileged bedroom shelves for a while yet. But I am a passive Zizek consumer nowadays. I read Zizek’s fictions because I am out of Simenon novels.

Posted in: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis / Tagged: , , , , , , ,

We Are Vespertine, official site of Brandon Tietz and Michael Sonbert

April 19, 2011 10:48 pm / Leave a Comment /

It’s a quality site, and they accept submissions for their regular LitMag feature. Both Tietz and Sonbert are gaining popularity for their brand of edginess. I’m not always a fan of edgy writing, but I concede that these guys are good.

Check out their site here.

Posted in: Literature / Tagged: , , , ,