The Inner Needs of Writers

There is much in Ron Silliman's recent post on the process of historical change in poetry with which I agree, and in fact I would extend most of what he says to include the history of all literary forms. Among his most salient points are that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation and are thus mostly engaging in "tantrums" over their own unavoidable fate, and that the "new" and the fashionable are not synonymous terms in our appreciation of the innovative in poetry (or fiction.).

Literature certainly is more the history of its own evolving forms than it is an assemblage of "great works," although I would substitue for "change" John Dewey's notion of "growth" as the inevitable outcome of artistic traditions that manage to extend themselves over time--"growth" not as simplistic "progress" but as the expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities. Indeed, even if we were to consider literary history as the accumulation of great works, in most cases these works are great precisely because they represent some new direction taken by the form employed. Surely English drama was not the same after Shakespeare finished stretching its boundaries, nor was English narrative poetry (narrative poetry in general) after Paradise Lost. Although we now think of the realistic novel as the epitome of convention in fiction, there was of course a time when it was on the cutting edge of change and writers like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James were writing what was for the time experimental fiction.

Thus I am less willing than Ron to dismiss the "well-wrought urn" as a metaphor for aesthetic accomplishment in works of literature. A poem or novel may indeed be "well-wrought" without conforming to pre-established models. Perhaps the passage of time does allow us to see more clearly the craftedness of some works of art that at first seemed simply model-breaking, but ultimately I see no conflict between innovation in poetry or fiction and the skillful construction of individual poems, plays, short stories, or novels.

On the other hand, Ron is certainly correct in characterizing most of the critical resistance to change in literary forms as a kind of lashing-out against writing implicitly recognized as destined to be remembered precisely because it exposes most of the otherwise critically favored writers of the moment as aesthetically tame and unadventurous, tied to the critical nostrums of the day (which, especially with fiction, are typically not only aesthetically conservative, but often not really focused on aesthetic achievement at all but on what the writer allegedly has to "say" about prominent "issues"). American experimental fiction of the post-World War II era has been especially subjected to these "tantrums"--if anything they have only increased in intensity--concerted efforts to marginalize this fiction by accusing it of lacking seriousness of purpose, of indulging in games and jokes rather than sticking to straightforward storytelling, of striving after effects that turn out to be "merely literary." In my opinion, however, it will be the work of writers like John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino that will be recognized as the indispensable fiction of this period, not that of the more celebrated but less formally audacious writers such as Bellow or Styron or Vidal.

Eventually almost all postwar writers whose work departs significantly from convention have come to be labeled "postmodernist," a term that has definable meaning but that also has been used as an aid in this lashing-out, a way to further disparage such writers both by lumping them together indiscriminately and by identifying their work as just another participant in literary fashion. Ron Silliman points out that a distinction can be made between fashion in the arts and the truly new:

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.

Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. . . .

The New York art world has become so dependent on "the latest thing" that aesthetic change becomes "unmotivated" except by the need for individual artists to enter the system that confers purpose on their work. And although fiction is probably more tied to the cash nexus than poetry, most serious literary fiction is much less so, and the degree of change and resistance to change, while perhaps somewhat less pure than in discussions of poetry, is largely determined by honest beliefs about the direction fiction ought to take.

In this context, to regard experimental fiction as "fashion" is essentially to believe there can be no "shift[s] in the paradigm" in the development of fiction, that the experimental must always represent an irritating deviation from the accepted unitary model of how fiction should be written. It forecloses the possibiltiy that the established paradigm might "shift" if something genuinely new were to appear and transform our assumptions about the nature of the novel and/or the short story. Even if it is allowed that the occasional genius comes along to produce work that stands out from the mainstream, such work is considered a singular achievement, a momentary departure from the otherwise settled paradigm granted only to the genius. The exceptional, extraordinary talent thus helps to preserve the status quo since no one else can be expected to rise to his/her level.

In reality, the "postmodern" period in American fiction came close to establishing a new paradigm insofar as it seemed to validate the experimental impulse behing modernism, its own even more radical experiments extending the reach of literary experiment beyond modernism and implicitly suggesting it can always be extended farther still. But ultimately experimental fiction can provide a paradigm only if it is one that rejects the creation of paradigms except in the loosest possible sense of the term--the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model. However desirable such a model might be in the cause of aesthetic freedom, it isn't likely to offer much stability to literary culture, and thus it was almost inevitable that some sort of reaction against the postmodern would set in to restore good critical order. The past thirty years or so has not seen a shift in paradigm but a reinforcement of conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual.

Such an embrace of convention--of the assumption that the art of fiction = storytelling, that the writer's job is to create characters who can be regarded as if they were persons, persons with "minds," etc.--can't really be said to be a part of the kind of dialectical process Ron Silliman describes. Postmodernism in fiction didn't "settle in" and then become the impetus for a new a refreshed practice but was considered a temporary aberration until writers could be brought back to producing "normal" fiction. Experimental writers have not disappeared altogether, but those sometimes still called "experiemental"--Lethem, Saunders, Wallace--are surely much less resolutely so, much more restrained, than Hawkes and Coover, et. al. Normal fiction is precisely what is taught to aspiring writers in most creative writing programs.

Literary change will continue to occur, of course, but in fiction it won't come in paradigm shifts but through the persistence of individual writers impatient with normal fiction. These fiction writers will be motivated by the need to preserve the integrity of their own work and by the desire to ensure that fiction has a purpose beyond providing the "book business" with a commerical product designed to be another entertainment option. Their work will continue to demonstrate that the aesthetics of fiction are manifested more in the continued reinvention of the form than in the successful reinscription of the existing form.

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

There is something anal, airless, turgid (yet oh so oppressively fey) about the greater discussion. Poetry and its masturbatory little cloisters. The endless, quasi-Mendelian taxonomies; expertise as the aging ersatz for illumination. Silliman's jargons and genealogies are a dayglo burlesque of the Stalinist bureacracy... a maze of specializations in which the work is not the point, the point is keeping busy. Poetry: its own parodic epitaph.

Wherever the practise is still vital is wherever they haven't read learned disquisitions on the practise. Some fourth-world yokel scratching away on a legal pad, perhaps. Yes, somewhere, I imagine, some young person is reading a poem or a short story and getting goosebumps and not, thank god, knowing why.

[The Wandering Jew]

I'm with you, Augustine - and I'm surprised to hear this kind of thing from Silliman, whose own poems have an experimentalism that feels instinctual rather than academic. I guess selfconsciousness can strike anyone, like rust.

[Dan Green]

What kind of thing is "this kind of thing"?

[Leon]

Wonderful article. I love your blog by the way.

[Nigel Beale]

"expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities"

This has been the constant call of your blog. Perhaps time could be spent providing some insight into the 'possibilities'..?

Fine to condemn the status quo, and to express hope for expansion of approaches to the form, but this is the same tune I've been hearing ever since I started visiting here a year or more ago.

[Dan Green]

Each time I review an experimental novel or collection of stories I'm attempting to provide insight into those possibilities. Certainly I don't always know what they are in advance.

Why would I change the tune if it's what I believe?

[Chris]

Insight into possibilities:

Abish
Acker
Barth
Barthelme
Beckett
Bernhard
Borges
Calvino
Carter
Coover
Cortazar
DeLillo
Dixon
Doctorow
Dos Passos,
Etc.

This isn't intended as an arch reply -- with few exceptions, the work of such indisputably influential authors (and, obviously, hundreds of others) is only occasionally mentioned alongside more conventional measures of literary excellence. Such work itself proffers possibilities, possibilities immediately apparent to writers who read it, once they've found it, which it's relatively difficult for them to do, since the work isn't discussed as frequently as the work of (say) Updike, or is discussed (as with DeLillo) exclusively in terms of the writer's ideas about society and life, rather than his or her approaches to form and language.

I don't think Dan's "tune" has ever been to urge forth more experimentation, or to assess experimentation in a way that allows us to encyclopedically catalog its various "possibilities." I think Dan's more frequently pointed out what may charitably be described as shortcomings in the systemic approach to reviewing and teaching books, flaws in an overall discussion that assumes the existence of a norm, grants acceptable deviations from the norm, and condemns other deviations from the norm.

[the wandering jew]

By "this kind of thing" I meant "excessive taxonomy, seemingly for its own sake."

[Dan Green]

"excessive taxonomy"

I guess I don't see much taxonomy in Ron Silliman's post.

What Chris said.

[Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles]

have you ever thought of expanding on some of these posts and publishing a book of criticism? or would that betray the blogosphere? It seems like you could write an interesting bit of criticism in favor of expirimental fiction and discussing the flaws of industry and creative writing programs (dear god!)..

Have you ever been contacted by any literary agents/editors/journals etc? Id be suprised if no one has made any contact with you about getting some of these ideas published.

this is the only blog i read with any regularity, and everytime i vist it has at least a few great posts; thanks.

[Dan Green]

I am contacted from time to time to do book reviews, but suffice it to say that the "book business" isn't much interested in what I have to say.

I am, however, looking into the possibility of publishing an e-book version of some of the posts on this blog, perhaps somewhat edited and expanded, etc.