The closing sentence of your last post, Teilo, suggests that art doesn’t have to be as careful nowadays as it has been in times past. Is sloppy art the answer to sloppy communication? Is a plurality of art forms the answer to a plurality of communication modes? This type of art exists – in the form of fictional msn conversations, blog novels, etc. – and I think there is value to it, but I don’t understand why the thoughts of the modernists (or whoever) are “worse than meaningless.” I don’t think we’re really “reacting to” the modernists anymore either—although it’s impossible to quantify what “reacting to” even means—but we’re definitely influenced by them.
What I had in mind by pointing back to Imagism was to glean some of that movement’s aesthetic principles, in addition to adding principles of our own. In this way perhaps the strongest aspects of that movement can be adapted to fit our needs of expression in the 21st Century. And the general thrust of my argument is not fixated on or restricted to works produced between 1890 and 1945, by any means. Imagism is just one example. The dictate to “make it new” is another, although I don’t think this lack of urgency that I perceive in today’s writing is a problem of newness, but rather of focus. Of course we shouldn’t expect our art to stay the same. It never does and never will. Even conscious imitation produces something different than the object it mimics.
So, diatribe or not, my basic question remains: what would a contemporary aesthetic philosophy look like that has more precision than simply gravitating towards works of immediacy?
So many questions, but I suppose I can start with one that goes back to your (Ben's) Facebook Generation post. I guess my question would be: what is the difference between the "immediate impact" you think art needs to have today (i.e. Pound) and "works of immediacy?" Why is urgency important? Yes, this is the generation of facebook, twitter, and formerly myspace, but it's also (now) the generation of a massive economic recession which has seen both the loss/cutbacks of employment on a huge scale and the rise of things like Kindle and Kobo. What I'm getting at, here, is that I don't think long-windedness has gone anywhere, and people certainly do have the time to sit through the 20-30 minutes it takes to get through a 6000 word short story. And I think those people still exist on a large scale and that they haven't been "permeated" into habitual ADHD by the Internet.
ReplyDeleteWhich sort of bleeds into my second question, or rather second set of questions: who makes up this generation? who are its writers? This is, as far as I can tell, still a generation that prefers its Jonathan Franzens to those MSN blog novels, as long as by "generation" you mean the people in positions of economic / cultural influence. It is (this generation of post-baby boomers) most definitely a generation which loves its 12-hour Lord of the Rings trilogies and its 1000-page sci fi and fantasy operas...and The Wire. and War and Peace, still. And which packs in its generic bookstores a lot more David Copperfield than it does Ezra. Novels sure haven't gone anywhere, and the Kindle just put a shelf full of classics into the lap of every hipster and housewife in North America.
I agree with you that immediacy = bad. But I also think contemporary art (or at least fiction) isn't lacking an aesthetic direction, unless you're picking from a pretty tiny pool the kinds of things you're calling art. Oral poetry, it seems, is immediate in every sense. I'm not sure that written poetry or fiction are today, and it seems pretty clear that a lot of recent work has been written with both modernism and postmodernism in mind.
You make a lot of solid points here. Again you're right to push me on a lot of these things because when I am writing these posts I am aware of the limits of my cultural and literary knowledge, and am nevertheless attempting to stumble past those limits in order to expand them through starting conversations (like this one). Sorry I took so long to respond, but this is the first "real" comment I’ve had on the blog that’s not Teilo, and I was initially intimidated by the intensity of your response.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that any speculation about cultural trends in general is always going to be on a bit of a slippery slope. As in, I think you’re definitely correct in saying that a lot of people certainly do have (make) the time to read Tolstoy novels and 6000 word short stories. On the other hand, I would still insist on the accuracy of my assertion that a lot of people certainly don’t make the time to do so. I’m not in the position to say which group of readers is more prominent or growing faster, but I don’t think that’s the point.
What your comment helps me to do is narrow and focus my claims to account more fully for the subjectivity of my observations. A lot of my comments are inspired by the submissions I have received at The Writers Block over the past two and a half years. I realize that the magazine is not culturally prestigious by any stretch of the imagination, and that that definitely impacts the quality and type of the submissions, but I still think that these submissions say something about the aesthetic direction about the “average” writer in the present moment. If contemporary art (or at least fiction) isn’t lacking an aesthetic direction, then please do enlighten me: what is it?
Also, I should clarify that mostly what I’m talking about here is poetry. I agree that novels are still around and will still be around in the indefinite future. A lot of what you are saying revolves around fiction, so this point potentially clarifies and contextualizes my claims more effectively.
Urgency is important because its opposite is apathy. And especially in relation to poetry, apathy is rampant, even with the emergence of e-books and e-book readers.
A couple of things I'd like to add. First off, the closing of my last post wasn't meant to suggest that art doesn't have to be as careful nowadays. It was meant to propose a cause to the phenomenom. As for the modernists' thoughts being worse than meaningless, they're a group who were very focused on what it meant to write in the modern world. Saying that reading their opinions is "worse than meaningless" was probably too harsh, but I don't think that returning to a mode of thinking that was obsessed with how its era was different from any others is the the right path to follow.
ReplyDeleteI also have a couple of questions for Anonymous. The first is to do with your point: "And which packs in its generic bookstores a lot more David Copperfield than it does Ezra." I realize that this is intended to further your point that people enjoy length over brevity nowadays, but I can't help pointing out that Copperfield has always been more popular than Pound's poetry. On the other hand, what sells better: David Copperfield or Maxim magazine? Even LOTR and War and Peace lose out there.
I'm also curious about what you mean by: "as long as by "generation" you mean the people in positions of economic / cultural influence". I don't understand why you feel the need to make that distinction.
Teilo: Of course Maxim sells better. Just replace Copperfield with a contemporary example. Let's see, Twilight rounds out (are there 3 or 4?) at about probably 1800-2400 pages. Justin Cronin's _The Passage_, which I cringe at mentioning, is 800-something and has tiny, Copperfield-sized font. All of Stephen King is long. Bryce Courtenay. Robert Jordan. who else. John Irving can't shut up. Walk into a Chapter's. Secondly, and actually this should have been firstly, at what point do you count Maxim as literature? I'm sure in its heyday TV Guide sold out Copperfield, too. People can like Maxim and long books too.
ReplyDeleteMy response to the second question fits in with my response to Ben. I've been taking up a lot of space (it's my inner Copperfield) and so I'll be brief. I don't understand what it means to look at an "average" writer. You're not attempting to diagnose present culture, you're looking for a future answer to today's problems. Yet, this is what both literature and criticism try to do, to put it very rudely. But I think that basing this expedition on the assumption that today's art is lacking aesthetic direction is a really weird claim. I could try to give an account of the present direction, but I don't think it would be great--which is kind of the point. Ask a Jonathan Franzen, or a Colson Whitehead, or an Emmanuel Dongala, or I don't know Marilynne Robinson, or some other people who are widely recognized as writing good fiction. Or do the same with poetry, the current poetry scene is completely foreign to my knowledge but there have got to be some prominent people. Better yet just read these current writers, and instruct your "average" (which seems like the worst insult you could call a group of aspiring artists, by the way) readers to do the same. The now (and its generation of people who are older by decades than I am) is not lost and people are working on it, and if you want an aesthetic direction for the future it just makes sense to try to examine the present.
The urgency thing I agree with. Have you ever just thought of ignoring the apathetic people? What's at stake in involving mass culture in art? They were _never ever_ involved in art.
Unless there's been some error, my questions have gone unanswered, but they still stand. The invention of the blog has allowed people to talk about culture in a way that doesn't depend onthe work required to start a serious discussion about culture. That, to me, is apathy. That fiction is such a broad enterprise as it is today--that genres don't seem to go anywhere, that we live in a post-global post-postmodern post-what have you kind of world in which ordinary life has become metafictional--none of this necessarily amounts to a generation without aesthetic direction. Things are complex, and so you might rephrase the matter as 'fiction and poetry have too many aesthetic directions to choose from.' But I don't think that quite pins it down, either. Partly because it's a problem that has been around for a long time (complexity) and partly because there are a lot of good writers writing today whose work addresses complexity in such a way that doesn't involve Oedipa Maas or Mrs Dalloway having a panic attack on a freeway or at a party, respectively. Which obviously is not to discredit either of those authors.
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