October 12th, 2012 / 12:49 am
Craft Notes & I Like __ A Lot & Massive People & Random

I Am Prepared to Read Many More Novels About People Fucking

I haven’t read Sheila Heti or Ben Lerner’s recent novels, the impetuses for Blake Butler’s recent, anti-realism-themed Vice article, but I’d like to respond to Blake’s finely-written itemized essay, because I, personally, continue to desire novels written by humans, which relate, slipperily or not, to human realitysubjective, strange and ephemeral as it is–novels which deal with such humdrums as sex, boredom, relationships, Gchat, longing, and, beneath all, death. I want a morbid realism.

I agree with Blake that a reality show like The Hills and social media such as Facebook create stories by virtue of humans doing simply anything. The documenting, sharing, and promoting of mundane everyday human life is more prevalent and relentless than ever before. In this environment, literature (and movies) about humans (most controversially, about privileged, white, hetero humans) that presents everyday drank-beers-at-my-friend’s-apartment life, wallows in self-pitying romantic angst, and doggy paddles po-faced through mighty rivers of deeply profound ennui can potentially seem annoying, or boring, or shittastical.

Amongst my peers in online lit, I’ve noticed a common trait of treating autobiographical realism as the default mode. I’m guilty of it, too. I can’t seem to stop writing about my ex-girlfriends. But I disagree with Blake that ego–and with it a self-obsessed mind and horny human body–are most profitably extricated from writing. If anything I call for more ego, though self-gratification is not the only goal. My favorite writing is by people who challenge acceptable taste, who are condemned and argued over, who aim for their own indulgently particular type of perfection. Salinger calls it “[writing] with most of your stars out…writing your heart out.”

I first found HTMLGIANT and first read a Blake essay because of the involvement of the name James Joyce. Joyce is one of my favorite authors–I took a wonderful Joyce seminar in college with Richard Begam–and I share Blake’s desire for Joyce-level ambition in contemporary literature. But a great many contemporary experimentalists, and anti-realist commentators generally, like to think of Joyce as an antidote to banal, domestic, realist literature and, by extension, banal, domestic real life, as a genius conjuror of mythology and words, a towering figure of progressive innovation. I’d like to remind people that Joyce set Ulysses on the day of his first date with his real-life wife, and we first see Leopold Bloom making breakfast, playing with his cat, going to the butcher, ogling a girl’s ass, browsing a smutty novel, reading a letter from his daughter, and, finally, waddling to the outhouse to take a shit. Not to mention the novel closes with Joyce using the voice of Molly to speak, in a common vernacular, of marriage, lust, affairs, and a marriage proposal that resembles Joyce’s real-life own.

Steve Roggenbuck, dear friend and booster of fricked-up heckers everywhere, wrote in an essay about what he calls Lit 2.0. Roggenbuck calls for authors to interact with readers directly, to no longer write in isolation but to engage, to be public and even undignified figures, not prim, bunkered geniuses. This is an extension of realism. The more one’s personal life is public knowledge and the more one lives publicly, and today this can mean lives online, the more the autobiographical content of one’s work, such as it exists, takes on another dimension.

Matthew Donahoo, in his piece on Tao Lin’s forthcoming third novel, of which he read an advance draft, writes that “[Tao’s] work extends beyond the pages of his books and one can learn more about the characters by closely examining the work and then comparing the information to the internet presences of the people on which the characters are based.” Thus, in a sense, “[Tao]’s life and the things he produces [are] one giant work of art.” This is a quality I also notice and like, and, as Donahoo mentions, this relates to Tao having once devoured biographical information on the writers he loved, wanting to know as much about their real lives as possible. I have this same hunger to know about the lives of artists I love. I am interested in who fucked who, and where they lived, and what they said, and who their friends were, and where and how they died.

Tao proves that writing autobiographically and living, relatively speaking, publicly–documenting one’s activities honestly and copiously on Twitter and elsewhere–need not make an author or her writing any less fascinating. This is subjective, of course. To some Tao is a solipsistic, talentless, egregiously self-indulgent scourge, relentlessly sucking in undeserved attention, somehow convincing publishers to publish his various torpid, navel-gazing abominations instead of more deserving and “serious” works. But I love Tao and his work, and many do, and I think part of the reason is that he is one in a long tradition of authors, both autobiographical realist and not, who are free in their writing, who are distinct, who think about what they love in past writers and distort it, play with it, using not only their intellect but also their emotional intuition and idiosyncrasies. He’s also funny, smart, and not boring.

The most exciting literature (to me) is personal. The personality, the emotions, thoughts, obsessions, and neuroses of the author can make a book funnier, more exciting, more distinct, and to use a word, more human. I agree with Blake that “death, color, and the intangible” are wonderful things for an author to be preoccupied with, but I don’t think reality and human things like fucking and crying and staring perplexed at another human (in a mirror, on a screen, dead in the face) are things best left out of books. And I don’t think readers are tired of questions like “how should a person be?” The more honest a person is about her intangible emotions and mixed-up thoughts–her dreams, detachment, her yearning, uncanniness–and the more one writes in good-feeling prose, whether clean or purple–the more I will love her one particular book.

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43 Comments

  1. Beach Sloth

      I enjoyed reading this piece. I too write about my life as a sloth and about being a father of three wonderful sloth children and a lovely, slothy wife.

  2. Ross Sélavy Brighton

      I think there’s a difference between “realism” as a mode and writing about reality. “Realism” isn’t an accurate documentation of the “real”, it’s a set of generic tropes and norms that are prevalent in fiction (and confessional-lyric mode poetry). Aside from Ulysses (which, as well as dealing with the banal and autobiographical is very non-normative formally, and operates on a conceptual level, in its reflection of Homer’s Odyssey, as well as operating within the temporal constraint of one day), another example is Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden (Dennis Cooper has posted about it here: http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.co.nz/2009/07/to-celebrate-new-edition-of-pierre.html ), which has no plot, and no real characters, but also no adjectives or adverbs, and is totally in the present tense, coldly documenting sexual and violent depravity across a war-torn Algeria. I’ve got an essay on the book in the forthcoming issue of Meat Confetti. But in a way it is more “real” than a traditional narrative, as it is pure documentation of bodies and actions, without the conceits of speculating as to the interiority of characters or an artificially constructed 5-act narrative, with a cathartic denouement.
      In the retrospective introductory essay to Tracey Emin’s Works: 1967-2007, the critic (whose name escapes me at the moment) argues for Emin as a realist artist, in that her work is largely an autobiagraphical exploration of her psyche, even when much of it is conceptual or mis-spelling-filled texts emblazoned across quilts. I think this is fitting.
      In my own work I tend to eschew the lyric confessional mode, and often the use of the “I”, but my work is most often (in my mind at least) an attempt to, if not document, respond to the realities of living with serious psychiatric illness. In this specific instance, not being “realist” is, I believe, the most honest way to do what I’m trying to do.
      In essence, I think what I want to say is that “realism” as a default isn’t the only way, or, necessarily, the best/most appropriate/even most interesting way to deal with the “real”, or, as you say, the “human”.

  3. Muumuu House

      sweet

      enjoyed this & blake’s article

      that guy walking in the pic of me kinda looks like donahoo

  4. Joshua Nilles

      lit 2.0 sounds like some hold over from the peace and love era. the ‘if we all sing at once, the cosmos will hear us’. it runs alongside the ‘like’ if you want the world to be a better place mindset. the thing to ask yourself is not if this will work, ’cause it won’t. the question becomes about the genesis of the idea. which is the internet itself. if you read any of the texts the “inventor” of the internet posted during the last summer olympics, you’ll become quickly aware he feels little of his uptopian vision has been diminished by the actual practice. on the subject of roggenbuck… does he feel the need to tell everyone that reads his work, that yes, they are apart of something happening right now and it is profound. i don’t know. pepsi cans being opened during the commercials of super bowl sunday come to mind. mind control. it is one thing to tell someone you a writer, and something else entirely to tell them that they are superstars in the book of yours and their lives. ’cause if your work is disinteresting, even after you stole the riffs from future applicants. who is to blame? you or them? oh, the haters… and then the lovers, when you turn heel, tired of being the good guy. if this is just some literary-entertainment pyramid scheme we all do in the fog of consumerist fantasy.

      in response to tao lin, being a writer is easier when you train your audience how to react to the boring parts. thanks twitter.

      the summery i get from this article is that the dirty parts of reality shouldn’t be hidden since everyone knows everything already. which is naive and cynical. i think it’s cool though. something of an over-arching theme you could write a novel trying to articulate. or at least a new poetic style you haven’t tried yet. careful though, the mirrors of your house shouldn’t spend half the day looking up your ass like homeland security or social networks. unless your asshole is your muse. realism yo.

  5. Andrea Coates

      Totally ignores me, of Course, even though I am the Epitome of All that aims to be achieved : can Any One say ” Misogyny “?

  6. deadgod

      Westron wynde when wylle thow blow
      The smalle rayne down can rayne
      Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
      And I yn my bed A gayne

      What details about this poem’s author or event are wanted to increase or intensify its beauty?

  7. Alex Miller

      Realism is here to stay because people crave it. They want to open a book and feel a connection to someone. I’m all for experimentation too, but a lot of experiments fail because once you step away from realism it’s harder to forge those connections.

  8. Ryan Bradford

      I was into realism when it was free and called “blogging”.

  9. The 2012 Realist Sex Novel Kerfuffle (a response to Blake and Stephen, involving also cowboys, Atlas Shrugged, and the Franzen/Marcus debate) | HTMLGIANT

      […] want to read any more books about straight white people having sex. Stephen has stated, right here, that he is prepared to read many more novels about people fucking. There are substantial […]

  10. JosephYoung

      genesis of the idea is genesis. or buddha. or krishna etc. your/the/a word made flesh.

  11. Jeff Petriello

      Stephen, I find it very unfortunate you seem to overlook an essential part of the Vice article’s headline – namely, the “straight, white people” part of it all. There’s much more to unpack there than a simple critique of “realism” and I think your overlooking of it furthers the argument.

  12. JosephYoung

      i think thumbs up/down is now one of the world’s best mysteries.

  13. Wallace Barker

      From Balzac to Hemingway to Tao, minimalist realism has been pushing onward for a long time, steamrolling all the baroque stylists who occasionally snatch a bit of recognition. Things like the emergence of “reality TV” demonstrate this trend carrying over into other media.

      Heavy stylistic innovators like Joyce are admired, but not really influential (i.e. not many popular/widely read novelists write in a style clearly identifiable as Joycean). Kind of like Coltrane is to jazz– every sax player loves Coltrane despite the fact that almost none play in his angular, over-blown style.

      Something about the future seems to demand stripped down, “just the facts, mam” communication.

  14. M. Kitchell

      how is it even possible that you are this fucking delusional

  15. Stephen Dierks

      Jeff, i didn’t overlook that part of the Vice article headline, but i didn’t and don’t think racial representation in realist fiction is essential to Blake and i’s arguments. i suspect, though i don’t know, that Blake is conflating “white people” with “boring shit,” which is amusing to me in a way. i think, though i don’t know, that he also isn’t against depictions of people fucking or discussion of people’s sex lives in books. what i think he IS against is straightforwardly realist fiction–and maybe especially straightforwardly autobiographical realist fiction–that is boring to him, “tired,” and “uninteresting.” maybe “white people fucking” seemed like a nice and amusing shorthand for that. given Blake’s statements in the past, i don’t suspect he is in favor of racial or feminist scorecarding in terms of who’s published in what quantity, and who gets what type of reviews, and who’s represented in realist fiction. i suspect, though i don’t know, that Blake wants books to be weird, striking, ambitious, and/or interesting, and that is the main thing, above and beyond Sheila Heti, realism, white people, fucking.

      my argument is in favor of, primarily, personal investment, personality, and some kind of reality in literature, regardless of form, style, or genre (though i do care about form, style, and genre in other ways). my argument is not in favor of conventional realism, of “white people fucking” in books. therefore, my title is kind of misleading, which i knew, but the best i could come up with was a response title to Blake’s, and i didn’t want to imply any kind of “white realist pride” by putting “white people fucking.”

  16. Stephen Dierks

      “boring shit” should be like “boring people” or “boring characters in a boring realist novel that i hate”

  17. Stephen Dierks

      in general, i don’t think any type of content, race, gender, sexual orientation “should”/”must” be included more/less in books of any type. my interests in literature are emotional, aesthetic, and ontological

  18. Stephen Dierks

      which, in a way, maybe, is something i have in common with Blake, who is interested in “death, color, and the intangible.” our difference maybe is that i am more excited by literature that involves with that via humans and types of realities

  19. Jeff Petriello

      really? we have the benefit of living in relatively free societies, but this is hardly the case in much of the world. a diversity of content – race, gender, sexuality – certainly “should” be included in books in the face of censorship or oppression. books have a proud history of disrupting existing prejudices through exactly this sort of self-moderated directive on behalf of the literary community.

      the degree to which this applies to our own criticisms of literature are often directly related to the affect any lack of personal representation has had on our individual experiences.

  20. JosephYoung

      be willing to be bet that Cougar Town, a show i’ve never seen, has stuff happen in it that is indebted to joyce. or woolf or faulkner. you’re right that lots or most people go on wanting ‘realism,’ but realism has swallowed the dose and came out different on the other side.

  21. Jeff Petriello

      you’re probably more familiar with Blake’s writing and intentions than I am, but I don’t see any premise for assuming the conflation of “white people” with “boring shit.” i think “straight white people” means “straight white people,” and I think he has a point.

      if “realism” as a named genre is pushed by media or community – online or off – it’s setting itself up as a barometer for what is “real” experience. when these “real” experiences are expressed in majority by a privileged and historically oppressive segment of humanity, they skew, intentionally or not, what experiences society considers “real” or worthy of attention.

      to dismiss the element of race and sexuality in Blake’s argument (which, being in the headline, seems to be to be at the forefront of his mind) is to dismiss perhaps the most substantive element of this otherwise crotchety listicle.

  22. Andrea Coates
  23. Wallace Barker

      I think that’s absolutely right, especially from a content perspective. But from a stylistic perspective I do think the trend is toward less florid prose and less difficult syntax.

      “Style” is becoming less about how you say something and more about what you choose to say and what you choose to leave out, i.e. curation.

      But I think I’m off track because I’m discussing minimalism and this essay is about realism. I’m conflating style with genre, maybe.

  24. M. Kitchell

      i will place five billion US dollars on this bet. i have not seen any fiction from you, nothing but polemics and manifestos. it’s possible that people would be more likely to believe your “in/Sanity” if there were actual work to support your delusions.

  25. Andrea Coates

      Yes! Five Billion US Dollars! Ladies and Gentle’Men. Check my Blog, Bro, check it Cloooooooose

  26. Andrea Coates

      Splendid in/Sanity … hmmm … S.i/S …. hmmm …

  27. Andrea Coates

      Thanks for the Idea, Man! My Book just got Better!

  28. Blake Butler

      i don’t want to get into a long addition to my previous statement, but i do think i should point out that i don’t think that the use of the human is boring or used up; i think it’s a specific kind of approach that has become the primary mode when approaching more realistic ideas, and particularly the resonant themes surrounding those ideas, that is stagnant. it is by all means possible to create interesting and innovative work based entirely on the lives and interactions of people; it’s more the way those styles are forced into necessarily ‘ending up somewhere’ that sucks the life out of them, for me.

      tao lin’s ‘richard yates’ is a great example of the author using life experience in a compelling and interesting way, while also not forcing the narrative into what i think of as ‘old traps’. one should point out too, though, that that realistic style has a lot of fringes of the unreal or fantastical to it (the haley joel osment / dakota fanning thing for one to me shifts the entire book into a different, constantly weird-in-a-good-human-way light); eeeee eee eeee, of a slightly more towards-fantastical style, goes even further in showing how realism can be stirring when deformed. amy hempel, yannick murphy, barry hannah, david foster wallace, joy williams, clarice lispector, william gaddis are also for me all great examples in different ways of people taking the terms of reality far beyond the confines of the self. none of these authors are truly ‘realists’ to me.

      i guess my point is that what i refer to as ‘realism’ isn’t just work that presents real people in real life; it’s work that seems stuck in the mode of the ego, of the person as the center of their world, and trying to build shammy characters out of what happens; it feels anchored, feels less true, is only based on finding depth in one pocket; that’s what in both heti’s and to a larger extent lerner’s book kept bothering me.

  29. alanrossi

      “i think it’s a specific kind of approach that has become the primary mode when approaching more realistic ideas, and particularly the resonant themes surrounding those ideas, that is stagnant.”

      yes, that’s a better version of what i claimed you were claiming: that human was “used up.” but i’d say you’re still pushing for the “beyond-human” idea pretty clearly, but anyway, basically what i was aiming for. didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. and yeah re the ego mode.

  30. Blake Butler

      right on, alan. i like what you said

  31. Michael Fischer

      “I think there’s a difference between “realism” as a mode and writing about reality. Realism” isn’t an accurate documentation of the “real”, it’s a set of generic tropes and norms that are prevalent in fiction”

      Thank you. “Realism” has nothing to do with “writing about reality,” writing “the human,” or writing “autobiographically.” It’s tied up in the development of the novel and the standardization of fiction technique, which is relatively new compared to most other genres.

  32. reynard

      holy crap you tagged yourself

  33. Jeff Petriello

      GOGOCOATES

  34. reynard

      everyone needs to read donna haraway yesterday

  35. reynard

      i see this sort of behavior in children all the time

  36. Chris Dankland

      Stephen and Blake’s articles are both so good…I like what Kafka said about how the universe is full of meaning, but most of it isn’t human…we’re tiny and unimportant, the universe is huge…I really like the starry borders on HTML Giant…but Kafka also said that the meaning of life is that it ends…my little life is tiny and it’s all I’ve got

  37. Ross Sélavy Brighton

      Yeah – and “writing about the human” and “writing about reality” are totally subjective categories – “human” and “real” aren’t ultimate, definable concepts that can be applied to all people, all experience or all readers. In order to talk about how these things work, one has to define terms really carefully, and work out exactly what one is trying to say. I think that this is one of the things Blake was trying to get at in the provocative title of his original piece – that “the Human” and “autobiographical realism” or whatever all too often describe a very narrow (hetero and white, and/or upper middle class, and/or sane, and/or able-bodied, etc etc) – which is what seem monolithic, and makes writers like Blake, or me, want to tear a great big fucking hole in it.

  38. Michael Fischer

      Good post. Let me add one thought though: one problem with associating genre or mode too closely with race, class, or gender is that one can inadvertently imply that “difference” itself is monolithic. Such claims also come off as primitivist or orientalist–“let me go hang out with the ‘exotic tribe’ who doesn’t look like me to get away from all of these normal people.” Personally, I roll my eyes when people–usually well-meaning but self-righteous liberals–say things like, “realism=straight white male upper class hetero!” Pretty sure James Baldwin was a realist, and he was black, gay, and grew up poor. Feminism and the women’s rights movement also owe a great deal to realism. Most of these arguments that conflate identity too neatly with genre or mode don’t pass the smell test.

  39. Ross Sélavy Brighton

      Oh, I agree – I don’t want to become a “diversity-for-the-sake-of-diversity fetishist. What I mean to say is that certain privileged demographics can mistake representations of themselves for representations of a universal, i.e. “the human condition” or whatever. And at least in terms of numbers The Great American Novel and US literary fiction in general are dominated predominantly by men, most of whom are hetero (for gender figures VIDA have good breakdowns). The danger that this presents is that, if one expects novels to be representing reality, or teaching Great Truths About The Human Condition or some such, that things about Straight White Men can be mistaken for Universal Truths or reality or something. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the inverse is true though – that diversity of gender, sexuality, race or whatever is going to directly correlate to stylistic or epistemological diversity. What I meant to imply (and it doesn’t map 1:1 onto reality, obviously) was something along the line of “(a lot of X[ie realist/humanist/whatever fiction writers]) = Y[ie straight white dudes]” from which “Y = X” doesn’t follow – and neither does “if all Y are bad, then all not-Y are good”. If that makes sense.

  40. Joshua Nilles

      or you could say the genesis was in the wait for someone to finally speak and make light.

  41. Realism or Experimentation: This Isn’t Higlander, There Can Be More Than One « Salvatore Pane

      […] Realism is Dead.” This follows a back and forth between Blake Butler on Vice and Stephen Tully Dierks on HTMLGIANT, the former arguing that realism is a bloated corpse, the latter arguing  we need realism now more […]

  42. David Eberhardt

      i was surprised to learn abt flarf poetry at the gallery reading- got no sense of craft- seemed to b dada redux- already done in the 30’s- (i realize it must b done in every generation BUT- Rimbaud ended all that w “Le Bateau Ivre”- didn’t u know)

      on 2nd thot- i never met a poet i didn’t like- i liked all the poets i met that nite- just was not impressed w the poetry

      dave (old school)-
      also- no politics

  43. Daniel Goldman

      If you’re really as great as you say you are, why do you have to constantly tell everyone about your greatness?