“if a revolution lies
in desperate protestations that you’re exactly the same as what went before
then I will personally puree my not insubstantial beard and serve it up a
Christmas trimmings”
“whereas in the past
poets have reused parts of common language, in the internet age the very act of
reusing and remixing has become the common parlance”
So we are always being told at any rate. This is Indie Time.
The evangelists proclaim either that those who did things the old way are dead
or, somewhat more consideredly – as is increasingly the case with more and more
indie successes snapping up mainstream deals – that the old way of doing things
is dead.
But what exactly does this mean? Whose moment is it? And if
this really is their/our moment, what comes next?
Now, I’m a writer so I use metaphors and similes all the
time. So I’m allowed a tangent. Because it’s not a tangent at all, it’s a
metaphor/simile/foreshadowing/analogy/insert random trope here.
The art world has had moments. Take the refusenik exhibition
of 1874 which launched Impressionism on the world. Or the painting of Picasso’s
Desmoiselles D’Avignon in 1907. Most famously, of course, there was the moment in
1917 when Marcel Duchamp vandalised the local gents and stuck the graffitied
results on the floor of an art gallery.
More recently, the conceptual art of the Young British
Artists was launched with the Freeze exhibition of 1988 and then, in 1997, was
propelled into water cooler land with Sensation. Of course historians will
argue till their bluer in the face than a Picasso period over whether these
moments were actual points of pivotal change, but what we can say is that each
of them changed forever the way the public thought about art, about what it
could be, about – in many cases – what it absolutely wasn’t. And they lifted,
however briefly, art to the same conversational level as the weather, sport, or
celebrity fashion.
Where is the literary equivalent? Well, there’s no doubt
literature had its Modernist moment with Finnegans Wake. Yet for all we are
bombarded with news of a literary revolution, I have seen absolutely nothing
since the birth of ebooks to justify that talk. What we have is a revolutionary
business moment but as long as it remains that, more important as long as that
is what we celebrate, there will be no lasting literary legacy.
If we are to see a genuine revolution, what we need to see
is twofold. We need to see a groundswell of writers straining at the creative
leash. And we need to see the cultural media latching onto that movement. Quite
possibly what we need most is a go-between impresario figure of the likes of
YBA’s Jay Jopling and Nick Serota, even larger than life writers of the Dali or
Picasso ilk.
And yet, if you trawl through the endless blog inches, and
increasing column inches, about self-publishing, at all ends of the spectrum
from millennial zeal to serious self-publishers, you would be forgiven for
thinking that the actual art of writing was a cultural appendix that had long
since undergone its appendectomy. Sure, you will find a glut of disclaimers
along the “of course the work needs to be good” lines. And you will find
endless pleas from self-publishers to be given media and reader space because
their editing and professionalism are the equal of the mainstream press.
But, um, forgive me for saying, if a revolution lies in
desperate protestations that you’re exactly the same as what went before then I
will personally puree my not insubstantial beard and serve it up a Christmas
trimmings.
Reading what self-published authors have to say can be
deeply depressing. Those who have made sales are delighted they have made
sales. Those who haven’t want to know how to make sales. Even the most serious
of authors who are turning to self-publishing to get out there the midlist
books publishers no longer chance their arms on can be found flooding forums
with questions about presentation and marketing, and commenting on the
mainstream media about their rigorous quality.
Indeed, we are at such a sad impasse that if a new writer in
an online group says they have a book and want to make a living/sell 1000
copies/become a millionaire they are applauded for their vision and welcomed
into the bosom, but when I dared to say, a few months ago, that my ambition for
writing was to win the Nobel Prize or at the very least leave a lasting mark on
literary history, the response was what kind of arrogant so and so do I think I
am.
I know a lot of self-publishers won’t like it but I think I
can be forgiven for saying that when the ambition to make money is applauded
and the ambition to change culture is ridiculed or ignored we have reached some
kind of absolute cultural nadir.
And yet.
That, of course, isn’t the complete picture. There are
people out there doing amazing things. Whisper it, there are even movements not
just springing up on the internet but using the internet as part of the
literary medium and engaging with and reflecting upon the way the internet has
affected our lives. The granddaddy of them all, Brutalism, has even passed from
Myspace and the pages of the seminal 3:am magazine moderately into the
mainstream, with this year seeing Ben Myers’ second regularly published (and
really rather brilliant) novel, Pig Iron.
If Brutalism offered literature a northern punkishness, and
3:am has been at the centre of a return to the intellectual and formal rigour
of Modernism, the alt lit movement has moved literature right into the digital
age. Brutalism’s provocative moment came courtesy of Ben Myers’ in your face
titled Book of Fuck yet it wasn’t really a what-the-fuck moment. Alt lit, on
the other hand, offers us the likes of Steve Roggenbuck’s DOWNLOAD HELVETICAFOR FREE.COM, a collection of 100 MSN Messenger excerpts converted to Helvetica
font. It offers a proliferation of flarf, in which text is lifted from the web
and reconfigure into something new. And whilst this has similarities to the cut
and paste that has been part of poetry for decades, whereas in the past poets
have reused parts of common language, in the internet age the very act of
reusing and remixing has become the common parlance, which flarf both brings to
a reduction ad absurdum and transcends.
Like many movements, alt lit is the product of a particular
social and cultural milieu (for those of us long enough in the tooth that is a milieu that feels like it spans back through Kevin Smith's Clerks and Mallrats, through, um, Christian Slater movies - of course the almost manifesto-ish Heathers but also the even more to-the-bone Pump Up the Volume - back to Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction). With its scrutiny of technology and communication,
and its use of the jittery, staccato language of the web to reflect the
jittery, staccato inner life of anxiety, it is no surprise that it is dominated
by the young and affluent, those for whom the hardware of the new discourse is
a part of everyday life. But for all its limitation, and its introspection –
alt lit has perched itself like a cuckoo almost entirely on the platform of
tumblr – and lack of desire to transcend its own discourse, there is a genuine
ambition here. This is literature that has created its own rules and whilst
there is an awareness, to the point, needless to say, of anxiety, of its
influences and context (namecheck Tao Lin, Bukowski, Sam Pink, and Brautigan)
it doesn’t seek their approbation or measure itself by them. And some people
working in the field, like Penny Goring, have pushed the connections between
internet statuses and ecstatic expressionism to its glorious limit.
Other movements will, I am sure, emerge, as access to
technology increases. And as and when they do, we have to be ready to
encourage, embrace, and champion them. And rather than a constant reactionary
harping about the paradigmatic status of the old, if we really do want to see a
literary revolution then we need to welcome the new, and all the new rules that
come with it, with open arms. We need to ensure that when literature is part of
the wider discourse in the cultural and other media, the focus is on the
potential of what words can do and not on sales and marketing. And those
self-publishers who, for perfectly legitimate reasons, are self-publishing in
an effort to make a living need first to use the coverage they receive to
champion those artists whose sales may be at zero or even not sought at all,
second to welcome the legitimacy of those writers whose ambition has nothing to
do with sales, and third, ultimately, to use their influence to campaign the
media to cede their place on the cultural pages. The conditions are in place
for a genuine literary revolution, but we owe it to culture and to readers to
do everything we can to bring it to the public.
