In an attempt to begin articulating what effective writing looks like at the present moment, Teilo and I have formulated three basic guidelines. They're meant to start a conversation more than anything, and are not meant to be overly prescriptive. However, we feel that following them as closely as possible will eliminate many of the weaknesses we have observed in the writing submitted to our respective literary magazines. In no particular order, they are:
- Subjectivity, as far as it illuminates common experience, can be more effective than objectivity.
- Intertextuality can be an addition, but never the crux.
- The form of a work of art should never become its content.
Please feel free to comment. Both affirmation and disagreement are necessary cogs in the engine of any progression.
- Subjectivity, as far as it illuminates common experience, can be more effective than objectivity.
- Intertextuality can be an addition, but never the crux.
- The form of a work of art should never become its content.
Please feel free to comment. Both affirmation and disagreement are necessary cogs in the engine of any progression.
Well since you didn't respond to my last question, I thought I would ask another. It's a two-part, but it's short. The first part is, these guidelines do not make logical sense as written. By which I mean, I think I know what you're trying to say in each guideline, but like, at what point does an artwork's form become its content? What would that shift look like? Because depending on how you want to see it, an artwork's form always _has_ content, and the content of its form can tell you ____ about the historic period it's coming out of. Or if you want to see it a different way, the fictional form allows for certain kinds of content to be registered in a different way--which is a way of approaching something like plot. What do you mean by subjectivity and objectivity? What do you mean by intertextuality? Who cares about 'common experience' other than readers of The Kite Runner? If you want people to take these guidelines seriously (I see you have them posted on your lit mag), you need to give accounts of them that are not aphorisms. On second thought, that exhausts both my questions, and I do not want to further criticize your project, which I'm not criticizing really, I'm just requesting that it be made more clear what your guidelines actually push toward, and why.
ReplyDeleteThese guidelines are purposely vague, so it's good that you're pushing them a bit. Their vagueness is meant to provoke questioning, whether in comment form or ensconced in art. That’s why they’re not “rules.” To clarify somewhat, here is how I would respond in a preliminary way to your questions/criticisms:
ReplyDeleteOf course an artwork's form always has content. The kind of poetry we're attempting to move away from here is poetry that does nothing but meditate on its form or poetic process. This guideline theoretically eliminates poems about having writer's block, being inspired, etc., as well as poems that make claims about what constitutes “good” poetry, a poetic genre, or poetry in general. In poems like these, what they are expressing (their content) is about how they are expressing it (their form): their form has become their content. My perspective is that these sorts of claims are better suited to forms like the essay or the blog, where there is space to flesh things out and articulate your intentions.
The subjectivity/objectivity guideline is in there to distance ourselves from poetic movements and strategies like modernism’s objective correlative and the digital poetic idea of “codeworks,” where the idea of a human author is contested through the use of computer programming. Although the former has obviously yielded excellent, canonized poetry, I would argue that it has at the same time excluded other excellent poetry such as Confessional poetry, etc. And as for the latter, while I can appreciate the innovation of certain types of digital poetry, I can’t help but feel that the aesthetic quality, however that is defined, is often quite lacking in many of these experiments.
Finally, by “common experience” we meant something like a Jungian archetype. I’m curious what the logic of your reasoning is behind saying that no one cares about common experience. Obviously this guideline is bound to attract at least some angst-filled, emo poetry, but that’s unavoidable with any poetic or literary venture. This guideline is meant to invite poetry that articulates in new and insightful ways ideas or feelings that a wider number of people can relate to. Done well (however merit is subjectively determined), people will “care” about such poetry.
Does that help clarify some of your concerns? I appreciate your level of engagement with these ideas!
Again, I have just a couple of things to add. First, I want to go farther than Ben did in responding to your offhand comment about "common experience." Let's switch it around a little and say that the only people who care about common experience are those who read or watch Shakespeare. Beyond that, first person narratives are based around the idea of common experience. They don't work if the common experiences they invoke aren't powerful enough. Objectivity is great in poems and in fiction. The problem is that it can't draw the reader in as effectively as a shared/common experience can. When the right about of thought and technique is put into your work, a subjective experience is going to be more powerful and still contain the same meaning as an objective work.
ReplyDeleteMy second thing is that I have no idea what you're getting at when you say: "If you want people to take these guidelines seriously, you need to give accounts of them that are not aphorisms." I don't like jargon-y phrases in the first place (why not say: "You should tell us why you think these things are true rather than just saying that you think them"?), and beyond that, I'm not sure that drowning these guidelines underneath a flood of explanations and arguments is a good idea, since they're meant to increase a type of urgency or immediacy in people's writing.
To Ben: thank you for your response. I figured that they were meant to provoke responses and so obviously my comments were intended toward the progression of this project you're working out. I disagree that poems/fiction about process (or about the form) make their form into their content, and at the risk of making this unintelligible, i will just say that, since it's (generally) a metafictional and (recently) a postmodernist tendency you're pointing toward, it might be good to take into account that postmodernism's great (blech) claims toward form were, yes, that it did what you're describing. But the self-consciousness of that move, making form the subject of narration/poetry, doesn't stop with that one move--metafiction carried to its limit is always in the business of thinking about thinking about itself, ad infinitum. The way this works formally is that even as we make form into content, we still have a form--our form is just making the apparent form (poetry) into content (a poem about writing poetry). Now, I'm not defending this because it's ugly as hell. But there are ways of understanding the number of permutations of hipster-dom that would be able to say things about form or history or whatever (think the frame stories of old Gothic fiction, for example).
ReplyDeleteBut that's kind of a quibble, and I understand you perfectly. The part about common experience I'll articulate below.
To Teilo: a couple of things. One: "you should tell us why you think these things are true rather than just saying that you think them" is by no means a clear way of putting anything. It's the sort of sentence that works when you can speak it but just looks like a birds' nest made of garbage when written out. In other words, it's the kind of question one might field at an oral poetry reading.
Two: 'aphorisms' is not jargon. If Mr. Gehrels can say "Jungian archetype" above, then 'aphorisms,' which is a word in English, is not jargon. It's really not even close to jargon--it's not like English speakers are a small professional group--so I don't even know about calling it jargon-y. So if you have no idea what I'm getting at...look it up.
Three: Failing that, what you haven't explained in your response is why 'immediacy' is important--and I have the feeling that you two have different views on this. Because it's not enough for you to 'say that you think' the guidelines; what would thinking the guidelines look like? I wanted them explained precisely because it's so easy to draft a manifesto about what literature should be by making claims so short that no serious thought went behind them--that is what immediacy means. So yes, I'm glad that they're there, because I happened to read some of the earlier posts and have a sufficient idea of what kind of thought has led to them. But point-form guidelines for literature today are always going to look like theory'd up versions of 'takes one to know em'. I mean, could you write good guidelines about the Renaissance? the Industrial novel? These things are long gone and they're still impossible to pare down. I just wanted to see that something was going into them, because you can't call out for urgency if you don't have a reason why people should be urgent.
Finally, I'm not sure what you're trying to say about Shakespeare, but what's actually at stake in being drawn in by the author? people take English in college so that they can be separated from the group of general readers who want to 'feel like they were there'. what would objectivity look like on your model? I haven't been to the South but I sure love Huck Finn, and I daresay no one can convince me that a novel closer to my own experiences could draw me more in. What if i like the language of a book, or poem? what if I like a book that actually has nothing to do with my own life? Does that count as caring for the common experience?
I agree with the comment on intertextuality - indeed that is the reason I dislike Eliot. He references so much, to the point that to read him without footnotes, without a good grounding in literature and the classics, is to not notice half his work. My first reading of Prufrock at age 12 was quite different from my reading now, some years later.
ReplyDeleteIf intertextuality becomes the crux, it seems likely that the work will be dated in the worse way. Beyond the time that it was written, it will never be able to transcend outside of that moment. This isn't the case with Eliot, of course, which is the whole reason my 12 year old self could have spent so much time reading him aloud. If intertextuality had been his crux I wouldn't have been as interested/enthralled by those words.
I've been puzzling over the 3rd statement for a couple of days. I thought first that 'content' was 'context', but happily that was just my dyslexia getting the best of me. (Had it been Context and not Content I would have had reams to say). Anyway, I puzzled some more and thought about the above four comments which are what lead me to articulate my thoughts here…
Anonymous, if you're still around, could you explain "but there are ways of understanding the number of permutations of hipster-dom that would be able to say things about form or history or whatever" because I think I'd be interested in what this hints at but I can't quite put my finger on what you're saying.
As for form becoming content, part of me things that poetry might be the best way to explain the process or explain poetry. Here, however, might be that subjective area between best, effective, and articulate.
I definitely feel that it is an appropriate sort of aphorism (which, I would argue is a word for a small and select group of English speakers, probably as small as who would recognize a Jungian archetype instead of clicking to another page!) to declare that you are interested in content that doesn't focus merely on form. That's a personal/editorial call on what is interesting and what isn't - which is in itself subjective and leads me to my next question.
Teilo, I wonder about what you say: "a subjective experience is going to be more powerful and still contain the same meaning as an objective work."
ReplyDeleteMy question would be how could objectivity ever be valued more than subjectivity, at least in the context of art? Moreover, how realistic is it to think objectivity is achievable, should we not embrace the subjective?
I can't imagine that a subjective work could have the same meaning as an objective - surely if the subjective is more powerful, that means although the facts might be the same as the objective the subjective's power comes from something more than the facts. This something 'extra' that the subjective has in comparison to the objective that gives it power is that extra bit of meaning which allows for a connection to the individual (be in in identification or in repulsing the Other).
Perhaps I'm venturing too far down a road littered with critical theory's potholes, but if the powerful reaction in a reader is to the subjective material/text/viewpoint, then it has a different type of value and meaning than the objective. Is this not why fiction/poetry/artistic or creative endear is so valued when speaking of experience? it is so much greater in variety than stark objectivity. I rather think this why people talk in psychoanalytic terms even when they think Freud was a crackpot.
When I read, I personally love feeling as I'm there. Yet, Anonymous, I read English at uni. While you raise some interesting points, I can't help but think your definition of common experience must be narrow.
I would agree that one does not have to go to the South to appreciate Huck Finn, but I would argue that whatever it is that draws you into the tale is the source of the common experience/shared subjectivity.
I'll use my own example:
I delight in the romance novels of Julia Quinn. Set around the British Regency period, this fantastical world is as separate from me as, perhaps, Huck Finn is for yourself (although I'll note that the 'South' part of the novel can hardly rule out other sources of identification).
If I actually time travelled to the context Julia Quinn writes, I'd lose my shit. As an educated 21st century woman, it just wouldn't be on.
However, Quinn writes some amazing banter. Words and wit (not always accurate to the period in tone) trump over all inaccuracies and actions that I otherwise would dislike or revile. Why? because of subjectivity and immediacy, I am brought to the moment and it mirrors my own love of banter and wit (and feeds my desire for that type of engagement).
To me, I think some type of shared experience inhabits most great works - they are things that delight, terrify, arouse, or repulse the majority of audiences that encounter them. Would I be correct in surmising then, Ben, that this type of shared delight, terror, etc, would be part of what you understand as reactions of the Jungian Archetype? That those of that have inherited our understanding through these paradigms will share similarities in our reaction to a piece of art because of our shared subjectivity?
Hmm. My apologies for the novel, but once I began to think, well, that was that.
i was going to actually try to compose an argument about how really stupid basing literary criticism on shared experience and personal identification is, but then i realized that your counter-argument will just be full of bullshit buzzwords like "powerful" and "shared/common experience".
ReplyDeleteanyway, i hope neither of you paid very much for your education, because you've basically paid to learn how to read a book and circle the bits that made you feel super special to be alive.
@Trollcake: you're above all that "being alive" bullshit; you don't circle things or crack the spine; you sit in the darkness and solemnly consider metaphysics, only taking breaks to seek out and read through obscure blogs on writing-related issues just so you can shit on everything that's been said without showing any trace of intellect in the process.
ReplyDelete@Snackcake: you’ve admirably clarified a number of issues surrounding these guidelines, particularly the intent behind the use of “subjectivity” and “common experience.” I think an important distinction should be made here (which Anonymous hints at) between reading and analyzing, despite the possibility of ever separating them entirely in practice. What we’re trained to do as literary scholars is treat texts as objects of interpretation; there’s no room in an academic article for phrases like, “I could really identify with Huck Finn when he was on the river because I ran away once as a kid…” Such phrases do nothing to contribute to the critical conversation in academia.
ReplyDeleteBut is the only alternative to academic analysis subjective babble? The Writers Block isn’t associated with academia, and part what I envision for it as a creative forum is a meeting place between theory/analysis/logic and response/emotion/accessibility. For me at least, what lies at the root of my academic interest in literature is an ineffable “delight,” as Snackcake put it, in relation to certain works. While this delight never impedes my judgement as an editor and critic, it lends meaning to why I do what I do.
From my perspective, immediacy, subjectivity, and common experience are useful editorial concepts because of what they oppose: obscurity and objectivity, for example. The writing of Gertrude Stein, for example, while innovative, has no place at the Block. Stein’s project involves avoiding nouns and disrupting conventional notions of linguistic referentiality. She tried to describe things through avoiding direct descriptors in favour of words that suggested that thing to her. The result, while vastly important to the modernist canon within the forums of academia, is a steady flow of difficult, distorted, subject-less writing. For me, avant-garde writing like Stein’s is too theory-heavy; I can appreciate her work as a scholar, but outside of her theoretical project I can’t find much about her writing to relate to or get excited about.
Writing that has a subject – a he, she, I, whatever – immediately offers an interpretive framework to the reader. It doesn’t mess around with abstractions (a personal pet peeve) and generalizations. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been to the South or been on a raft; that’s interpreting the intent of the guidelines a little too literally. “Common experience” can include something as broad as the experience of being human, for example. Why do we read or study literature? Presumably it is to learn, think about, and analyze that which literature represents, whatever that may be: capitalist ideologies, cultural themes and ideas, psychoanalytic behaviour, etc. From where I’m sitting these are all aspects of common experience.
As to “immediacy” and “urgency,” perhaps it helps to reword them as “clarity” and “so what?” As in, when the clarity of a work breaks down (however “clarity” is interpreted), so does its effectiveness as a mode of expression. Theoretical works that disrupt clarity to prove a point, like I said above, have been done and have no place at The Block. I’m sure there are lot’s of forums for that kind of thing. And the so what? question helps root out all the angsty, emo writing: why are we writing and what for?
Sorry, there’s my own novel.
This is all interesting. But might it be better to use a different word than 'common experience'? You're talking about literary criticism or just attentive reading in general, it doesn't have to be theory but yet it's more than simple representations. I think it looks like the criticisms you're getting are probably drawing from something close to negative critique, or call it what you want. Because 'common experience' or the illusion of commonality/identity/mimesis/whatever has been behind so much historical violence (the Enlightenment, colonialism, the Holocaust, the KKK, racism in general) it seems like a sketchy tendency to align oneself with, especially since what you really seem to be talking about isn't really about subject/object at all, but like the fact that you can like a work because of the claims it makes, or because of how difficult it is, or whatever--because 'being human' is less about seeing similarities between things than drawing out differences. That seems to be what you're attempting to describe here, and if so, that's right on. But you might draw fewer criticisms if you pick a less politically-charged term than 'common experience' and if you accept the idea (as you seem to be nearing it) that part of being human means formal experimentation, liking difficult literature, and needing to do a kind of theoretical work (whatever knowledge backs it) to understand a text. It's by no means clear to me that 'clarity' is the beacon of our historical moment.
ReplyDeleteBut I mean, on the other hand, I'm offering this because I want to hear your response to it. So please don't take this as a harsh criticism (even if it reads that way, which I don't think it does). I don't think Anonymous is trying to say that there's a binary between literary analysis and 'subjective babble,' and I don't think his/her criticisms are meant to upset.
The other response seems obvious but I'm not sure why anyone hasn't made it. Why not just 'do' art today instead of talking about how to do art today?
ReplyDeleteBecause if you're facilitating a forum in which to display art, it's useful to have some parameters around what you do and do not display in that forum.
ReplyDelete@Nart: I think you (and others here) are right in pointing out some of the problems with "common experience" as a guiding principle. It's a loaded concept for sure. By using it, however, I'm not attempting to flatten the differences and nuances in subjective experience; rather, in my understanding, that concept as a "guiding" principle would absolutely allow for new and differing perspectives on things. I think what your comment brings out in a productive way is a reminder that sameness and difference can never be considered in isolation: we couldn't talk about how we differ without knowing how we are the same. So perhaps its two sides of the same coin.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious if you could say a bit more about "being human." That's, in many ways, the basic premise behind that guideline - so you're right on to articulate it in that way - but I'm not sure I agree with locating "humanness" in terms of formal experimentation, theorizing, etc. I was following you up until that point and then lost you.
If what you're saying is that part of being human is continual experimentation and difference making, I would agree to some extent, although it's up for debate how much mileage an argument for discrete identity has. As in, how secure is individuality as a definable thing? Perhaps sameness is a more useful starting point in a largely capitalist world where we are encouraged to express our individuality through conformation to brand name products? Any thoughts?