A different kind of tension

One of the few things the novel can be said to have on its side at this particular juncture is its stubborn and pretty much irreducible materiality. It’s just not that great, reading novel-length text online, nor are sheaves of printouts especially gratifying to the hand, eye or bookshelf. The novel’s compact transportability, its tactility and manipulability, its shape and smell, the feel and look of the cover, the font, the width of the margins, the quality of the paper, all of those factors are immediately sensually/sensorily present in reading, no matter how subliminally. They are primary elements in the act of reading. Their loss isn’t equivalent to what’s lost in listening to an mp3 as opposed to vinyl in which the physical/ tactile elements (sleeve, inserts etc) aren’t a continuous feature of the experience. No other art form demand such immediate and permanent contact during its consumption as the novel does, nor is any other form so resistant to dematerialization into digital media.

This restores to the miserable old novel ( if you’re unhappy with the use of the term novel and all its numerous connotations just substitute “book-form” or something), at this juncture, a pronounced character that was otherwise just subsumed into the fabric of daily consumption. As everything that is solid melts into air the novel remains mysteriously, jaggedly and jarringly heavy and present. It’s this aspect of the novel (among others) that I think is under-exploited and insufficiently engaged with (though of course it’s not that it has never been engaged with, it’s just that given contemporary debates around digitization it takes on an especial urgency/ prominence).

Its status as an object, something that can be handled, needs, I think, to be emphasised, (along with it’s mysteriously reticulated depths). To this end most of the things I’ve written have required the reader to engage with the book’s three dimensional present-ness, with White Diaspora for example, it was necessary to read alternate pages, turn the novel around at the book’s end/story’s halfway point and then read back to the start. With Jason Phereus the organizing principle, which expanded on Cortazar’s Rayuela, meant the reader could follow several different paths through the text, requiring them to move backwards and forward in the book, and with the latest, The Begging Letter, the two halves of the story should meet in the middle, running into each other in the centre pages.

What is of course fundamental is that formal “ tricks” like these aren’t gratuitous but objectivise (rather than “ dramatize”) the fundamental theme of the work. In White Diaspora for example the Mobius-strip created inside the book’s front and back cover relate precisely to the central character’s (and the culture’s, no less!) inability to break out a particular set of co-ordinates, with The Begging Letter, each of the two halves of the story ends on a deliberately proffered blank page, the novel itself has nothing at the centre and is constructed around this central emptiness, Jason Phereus was intended to slow the reader down, divert them, restrict their view, force them to make choices, pay attention to the text and order it themselves instead of passively gliding from page to page: an attempt to represent something of the opacity and sense of temporal disorientation that afflicts the characters.

This is one more of the tensions that I imagine the novel as existing within. The series of tensions is roughly, the internal tensions between reader and author, the tension between the characters within the story, the tension of the plot’s drive toward closure, along with the tension between the diegetic realm of the novels and the corporeality of the novel as a physical structure/object : the attempt by the fiction’s diegesis to sublimate it’s materiality.** It’s also situated in an extended tension with other forms of media such as hypertext, digital fiction (about which more later) conceptual art and theory.

Largely I think that even those who are friendly toward experiment in other art-forms feel that there’s something slightly distasteful in approaching the novel this way. It’s a nicely moribund cultural form, an area of largely curatorial specialist interest, exhuming it and trying to get all innovatory is a bit like digging up grandpa sticking a pair of Van’s and some deely-boppers on him and taking him down a Wonky*** all-nighter. Unseemly. Unwanted.

I have a few more equally unseemly and unwanted ideas about what the novel should be doing, as it goes….


*South and for that matter North Americans**** have so much less trouble with the idea that the novel is still there to be fucked-about with and pushed forward, don’t they? There is a certain stolid, meat-and-two-veg Brit literalism that likes a well-fashioned, unflashy book***** and regards any exuberance and unconventionality as all a bit embarrassing and gauche. It’s supposed to be all grown up, the novel. An adult affair with a decent, reasonable, adult perspective on life that views this kind of formal folderol as an attempt to hoodwink you, a bit of smoke and mirrors. And if there’s one thing the puritan prides himself on, it’s his ability to harumphingly dampen enthusiasm in both himself and others. All a bit silly, really! What’s wrong with just moderately putting one reasonable page after another!?

** I kind of imagine that the fictional realm is an attempt to dissolve the books materiality and that here is a conflict, the book continually struggling to assert itself as an object against the fiction’s attempt to repress and mask it, the book as a kind of surplus of reality that keeps puncturing the fiction’s symbolic shell when the reader’s attention lapses or the conjuring act loses momentum (I find a potentially interesting political/ideological analogy here). It’s not just about the story, it’s about the book as a dialogue between all its parts, its about the novel as series of planes and interactions, a whole piece.

***In a music-related footnote shock I have to say I’m well up for a bit of Wonk. See you down Lightbox for Zomby.

****It behoves me at this point to acknowledge the formative impact of Danielewski’s “House of Leaves.”

*****If the novel’s an object here then it’s a handsome and robust sideboard that you can pass on to your own kids rather than a weird objet d’art assemblage of sprockets, ice and brain matter that came crashing through the roof one day and just sits there daring you try and move it. I should also point out that innovation at the level of the sentence i.e. style, seems a bit of a secondary consideration now, especially given the increasingly wearying compendious stylistic profligacy of recent American fiction (I mean can you expand on Omenstter’s Luck or The Runaway Soul?) Innovation at the level of the object seems the most promising and urgent demand.

Who is the reader? Most discussions of the shortcomings of any text fall back on this phantom. Sometimes it’s just a substitute for “I” of course, “I think you risk loosing the reader’s interest here,” you say, in place of “Christ that seventeen page rumination on the meaning of a dormouse bored me shitless!” But still, the reader is often invoked in a purer form as a kind of generic intelligence, the everyman, the other whose tastes, sensitivities and engagement hover around every line.

It’s hard not to feel a certain antagonism toward the reader in any of his manifestations, at least it is for me. Then again it’s hard for me not to feel a certain antagonism toward life itself. He’s so picky and demanding, so unforgiving, so stupid and obdurate, so focused on everything that’s bad and so underwhelmed by your best efforts. The desire to just tell him to fuck off is ever-present. The only way you can do that though is to stop, and then you’ve given into him. Even if you never publish anything and can’t be said to be thinking of the reader in broadly demographic terms ( fun-loving lads age 18-20 will like the lesbian bit in Ibiza, but you risk loosing reader interest with the twenty three page description of the mandolin) the minute you put finger to keyboard he’s there in all his horrible, insatiable ambiguity.

Plus he’s thick. If you don’t spell it out to him, he’ll never get it. Plus he’s easily offended, get too obvious and he feels patronised. Plus he’s actually vastly smarter than you when he needs to be and can see straight through all your flimsy conceits, bits of desperate patching together and awkward narrative fumbling. Whatever you really don’t want and need him to be, he is. If you ever met him in real life you’d run a mile from this Janus-faced, hydra-headed nightmare, except now and for who-knows-how-long you’ve placed yourself under his daemonic X-ray eyes.

I assume that the reader, for everyone who writes, takes on a similar kind of shape, but like the old saw about you being a particular type of Atheist ( a Catholic atheist, or whatever) he’s kind of uniquely formless for everyone. In some basic way then, writing is an act of contention, its combative, you're fighting for something, for recognition effectively, for the readers eternally withheld approval. This isn’t to say that there aren’t pleasures in writing, in fact in those moments when you move close to the reader, when you know you’ve captured and convinced him, beguiled him, that he‘s laughing or thrilling along with you, the pleasure’s immense (the ego gratified!), as it is when you think you’ve got one over on him, you thought I’d never dig myself out of that hole did you! This is the invisible, subterranean labour of writing that is supposed to be invisible in the smooth, hermetically sealed world of the finished product.


But I have a stubborn desire to present the reader with this, I take it all too personally. I regard the reader as my enemy in lots of ways. He provokes me into starting then sits around criticising, then retires dissatisfied. He wants me to sweat and labour in order to present him with a nicely tooled, toothsome little morsel that he can kill a few dull hours with at best.

Yeah, I hate the reader. I want to lay traps for him, confuse him, drag him through the sewer then shower him in kisses, besmirch him, ruin his reputation, sneak into his house while he’s asleep and rifle through his things, fail to give him what he wants or expects and generally be a bad, a hostile employee.

Death of the author? Death to the reader more like!

I never post anything about writing fiction here, even though it’s what I spend most of my writing-time doing. There are two reasons for this. Firstly because I would have to reference my own work a lot in order to outline my position/practice and this seems a) rather pompous and b) useless as only a handful of people have ever read/will ever read any of it anyway. Secondly because most people who look at/link to this blog aren’t primarily interested in fiction. But having just finished a novel of sorts (though of course the finishing is just the beginning: now there’s the editing) and with the prospect of it going out into the wider world one way or another, I feel it’s probably time I said something about my ideas, as my approach to fiction writing is fairly theoretical.

This will be the first of several posts.

I’ll start anecdotally.

Eleven years ago, when I was doing my creative writing MA and finding my peers really surprisingly incurious about what seemed to me the boundless and underexplored/under-discussed possibilities of the novel, displaying generally no interest whatsoever in the formal advances of the Nouveau Roman, American postmodernism, or even British experimentalists like B.S Johnson or Christine Brooke Rose (they seemed much more interested in how to write "something-that-would-get-published") someone leant me a copy of Ian McEwen’s “ First Love Last Rites”, I appeared to write “dark” fiction and would probably like it, McEwen was considered “cutting edge”, something a bit different.

There were at that point NO English writers I was interested in reading (a situation which has remained largely unchanged through the intervening decade, with the exception of James Lasdun) though I had respect for Scottish Kellman and a love of Irish Banville. I had in fact been surviving on weird combination of French fin de siècle and American post-war for the past few years, reading things like William Gass and Lautreamont, Barthelme and Baudelaire. This must have been more or less round the time of Brit-Lit, something parlayed up into a non-movement by some media types under the rubric of the New Puritans a little later, I believe. Certainly the big sellers around the time seemed to be Irvine Welsh, James Hawes and Alex Garland, a thoroughly dismaying triumvirate of Blairite literary titans.

Actually, someone tried to persuade me of the importance of these three, and their ilk on the grounds that “they had got young people reading again.” As though the mere act of dragging your eyes over lines of print were itself virtuous/nutritive irrespective of the content of the work, but here at least is one of the early pseudo-egalitarian inversions taking place, the writer doesn’t challenge the reader to come up to his level of linguistic, formal or thematic invention, quite the reverse, the sulky reader challenges the writer to produce some pablum that he can get down easily, with a passive-aggressive minimum of fuss. There was a doubly-conciliatory aspect to this writing, it wouldn’t stretch you as a reader, its fundamental duty being to entertain (it was and has remained, vitally, “a good read”) and it would largely perform a reconciliatory role within the culture. The bad would be punished, the good would be rewarded: what it wouldn’t be was demanding and ambivalent, certainly it wouldn’t be arguing for anything. It was friendly, good-time, cool-Brittania literature, the literary equivalent of sticking to drugs to see you through the long, possibly endless night of late Capitalism. Should you have anything to say as writer, any political perspective or critique (though that wasn’t the way things worked anymore, yeah? New historical phase, yeah?) you would smuggle a few nips of it in with the pablum and console yourself that that was how things were, you played to generic expectations and tried to sneak a little bit of “yourself” in on the way.

I believed, callow fool that I was/am that the fundamental purpose of art was that it was oppositional, but now, with a Neo-Liberal Labour party in power a weird cleaving together of art and politics was taking place, a kind of mass artistic denial/abnegation of responsibility. We can’t be against the Labour Party! Capitalism is the new rock and roll! Even those oppositional currents that had been kept alive by Thatcherism slowly disappeared through the early-to-mid-Nineties, cultural Blairism predating Blair by a few years, kicking off in grand style with “Four Weddings” in the Major years. From my perspective it all looked like a miserable capitulation/ sneakily grateful dereliction of the artists duty to be a radical of some kind, affiliated to the progressive currents of modernism and emancipatory politics. Is this IT then? I would ask myself, wandering around Waterstones in York trying to find anything even half exciting to read. This is what my generation has produced in response to the End of History and the triumph of Liberal Capitalism, is it? A White Merc with Fins. The Beach. Toby Litt. The ultimate accolade seemed to be that you were a British Tarantino.


But back to McEwen. My immediate response, picking it up and flicking through it was, “ Ahh… but these are just stories.” Stories, no matter how well crafted, were absolutely not what I wanted. What I wanted was something that was innovating in terms of the form, that appeared to be thinking about what fiction was, “metafiction” of sorts, but a kind of grim, challenging, aggressive metafiction ( just in case you think I’m glossing here’s a “story” I wrote on a return from the above-mentioned Waterstone’s in 1998.) Not that I didn’t love and respect Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s night” nor feel deep admiration for Barth’s “Lost in the funhouse”, indeed all his work, but I wanted to rescue it from it’s close association, at least in these two writers with fabulation/ magical-realism. I found the impulse to post-modern “re-enchantment” with the world in both of them sensually gratifying but politically alienating. The question was how could these writers among others be built on, not a repudiation of postmodernism but a correction of it in some ways, an enlargement of it in others.

I eventually found a kind of aggressive, Brechtian redeployment of metafictional technique a few years ago in Christopher Priests’ audaciously great “The Glamour” (unsurprisingly, recommended to me by Mark K-Punk) a novel which like B.S Johnson’s “Albert Angelo” basically commits diegetic suicide in its last three pages.**

I applaud this wholeheartedly, though I’m personally aggrieved enough to be more interested in committing diegetic murder.***

*In passing I saw an article a few years ago by Nick Hornby entitled, more or less “Why you should never, ever struggle with a book.” And I spent six months sweating over “The Recognitions” when I could have been reading “Fever Pitch”, enjoying all the great stuff nineties Britain had to offer and not taking things so seriously!

** My first thought on finishing it was: “ Fuck me, no-one would publish this now.”

***Leading us nicely on to the next part: The Reader.

It's a monster!