June 22nd, 2013 / 4:26 pm
Power Quote
Impossible Mike
Power Quote
literary manifesto of the abyss
What caused this great decline? We can point to the disappearances of older class and power structures. The decline of the church, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie—those great foils of Modernist energies—have dissolved. Like Kant’s dove in free flight cutting through the air, the writer needs to feel a kind of resistance on the part of Literature, needs to work against something even as it struggles for something. And what is there to work against when there’s no one left to antagonise? We could speak of globalisation, of the incorporation of the whole planet into the world market, which has the effect of weakening of past cultural forms and national literatures. We notice the ascension of the individual to a place where idiosyncrasy itself becomes commonplace, where the self, the soul, the heart, and the mind are demographic jargon. There is little sense of a tradition to wrestle with—no agon of authorship that we associate with the writers of the past. We could point to the populism of contemporary culture, to the dissolution of older boundaries between high and low art, and to a weakening of our suspicions about the market. Writers now work in concert with capitalism, rather than setting themselves against it. You’re nothing unless you sell, unless your name is known, unless scores of admirers turn up at your book signings. We could also point to the banality of liberal democracies: by tolerating everything, by incorporating everything, our political system licenses nothing. Art was once oppositional, but now it is consumed by the cultural apparatus, and seriousness itself reduces itself into a kind of kitsch for generations X, Y and Z. We have not run out of things to be serious about—our atmosphere boils, our reservoirs of water go dry, our political dynamic dares our ingenuity to permit catastrophe—but the literary means to register tragedy have exhausted themselves. Globalisation has flattened Literature into a million niche markets, and prose has become another product: pleasurable, notable, exquisite, laborious, respected, but always small. No poem will ferment revolution, no novel challenges reality, not anymore.
—Lars Iyer, NUDE IN YOUR HOT TUB, FACING THE ABYSS (A LITERARY MANIFESTO AFTER THE END OF LITERATURE AND MANIFESTOS)
“Our” literary exhaustion: the non-tragic nature of writers’ complaints remains for them to complain about. Exhaustion: always as farce.
Haven’t read the whole piece yet but I like the excerpt.
I feel the decline of literature is in part a result of the technological age we have entered (and yes, kiddies, we have, in the larger scheme of things, JUST entered it), AND the fact that writers these days are now being “taught” by teachers who earned their MFAs under the tutelage of MFA grads of the generation before.
It’s now a third-generation removal from reality.
Every child gets a trophy. Every writer gets a book.
I also think the MFA-generation/industry itself is getting a little paranoid. For surely, after however many untold meeeeeelions of dollars have been spent for this piece of paper, surely ONE OF US will make a difference, will become… popular/successful beyond the flat-affect halls of academia, right?!
RIGHT?!
Hence the incestuous promotion/teaching of such non-entities as Oat Nil.
If the way literature is taught convinces so many of its students that the jig is up, perhaps it shouldn’t be taught that way. (?) Unless the jig truly is up, in which case it shouldn’t be taught at all for, say, five generations.
I feel the present (past 20 years) MFA industry has brought about its own demise/ridicule through its apparent inability to “produce” anything of value beyond the entertaining (and money-grubbing) of its students for 3 years.
It’s like a failed government program.
“it shouldn’t be taught at all for, say, five generations.”
I think that would be a healthy social/artistic purgative.
MFAs have created a literary ghetto populated by obsessives of form and rapacious novelty hunters. Theory children who have reached the end of Academic babysitting too afraid to wander into the world and find what every other actual writer has, a new edge to human experience.
Don’t forget that MFAs are also responsible for world hunger and numerous wars.
(The top post was somewhat less confrontational when I first replied.) I enjoy some stuff on HTMLG, some I don’t — like the rest of the internet.
HEY GUYS IF YOU DON’T LIKE MFAs OR CONSUMERISM YOU SHOULD JUST WRITE FOR THE DRAWER AND MAYBE MAKE SOME FRIENDS AND SHARE YOUR WRITING WITH THEM OR DISTRIBUTE YOUR WRITING FOR FREE OR READ BOOKS YOU LIKE ALL THE TIME MAYBE EVEN STEAL SOME BOOKS
WHY THINK ABOUT MFAs AT ALL UNLESS YOU ARE TRYING TO GET INTO ONE?? WHOLE WORLD OUT THERE
IS THAT THE LITERATURE OF THE ABYSS
WHO ARE THE FOUNDATIONAL ABYSS POETS? PESSOA? THOSE ANCIENT GREEKS WHO HAVE NOTHING REMAINING ON EARTH? WRITERS WHO DISAPPEARED DURING THE HOLOCAUST ALONG WITH EVERYTHING THEY’D EVER WRITTEN?
“MAYBE EVEN STEAL SOME BOOKS”
I used to steal books (and Playboys) down the back of my pants. Instinctively knew that art is the theft of fire.
“WHY THINK ABOUT MFAs AT ALL UNLESS YOU ARE TRYING TO GET INTO ONE??
That’s an inane question staining/failing to reach the heights of insult.
“WHOLE WORLD OUT THERE”
On that we agree.
I agree, ZIP: the exhaustion of “literary means to register tragedy” or of littérateurs to effect political-economic or social change don’t have much to do with tertiary creative-writing programs and degrees.
Maybe there’s a connection between MFAs and writers sensing or imagining the powerlessness of whatever “opposition” they might mount (that had used to be central to artists’ self-determinations); similar effects of the same cause?
But the snippet doesn’t invite making such connections; here, they seem to be the products of obsessions imposed on the excerpt.
—
As I’ve implied, I think the exhaustion the snippet refers to is real. I doubt that it’s more in effect now than at many times of cultural confusion and upheaval easily spotted in ‘Western’ history.
It seems to me that art that thematizes ‘the abyss’ is not a sign of exhaustion in the way that Iyer is worried about. The abyss is something that can’t be opposed (except in spasms of self-dramatization that you might call ‘exhausted’? or just farcical); Iyer is talking about art having been marginalized as mere aestheticism, mere formal play. I don’t think such a political neutralization is the same as the claim of abysmal insignificance or radical finitude.
I don’t get the feeling, from The Book of Disquiet, that Pessoa is looking into abyss (because there’s nowhere else). Just a guess, but might he have been embarrassed to have elevated personal frustration and disappointment to such cosmic importance?
Paul Celan is a poet of the abyss: Die Abgründe streunen: (‘The abysses are straying:’).
text block of sad. last sentence is funny and butthurt.
> http://copyfornothing.tumblr.com/post/53460646251/sense-europa-s-s-2012
If a writer must hide behind avant-garde frenchies and reach to antiquity to make an argument it is either from habit (too much academia, too little experience) or the inability to make an argument that can be intuitively correct to even the most casual enthusiast of literature. It is patronizing and pedantic. That some of us made a leap outside the text and were more interested in its relevance to more material concerns should be your invitation to heap more references and academicism’s onto what cannot be explained without creative interpretation and a well thumbed copy of the 5th Appendix of Lit Crit Buzzwords. There is a very real divide between a well thought out idea and one muddied with references to hide the fact that there is nothing more than a piece for everyone to latch onto. It is a far more noble pursuit to enlighten even the laymen than indulge the already crowded market of ideas.
All this MFA business kind of reminds one of the process of getting a Drivers in Albania under Hoxha. The candidate had to understand the functioning of all the systems and be able to replace all major components before being permitted to drive the course and earn the privilege to go for a spin in the countryside.
If a writer must hide behind fear of French people (?) or must flee from scary antiquity’s presence, there’s always the street — and not just the street, nor the real street, but the very real street, man.
The excerpt talks of a “great decline”, an exhaustion of “the literary means to register tragedy”, a “flatten[ing]” of literature.
Exclusive of your contempt for MFA programs and whatever burden of theory they labor under, what do you think of Iyer’s claims of some historically and culturally determined impotence of contemporary literature?
Did literature ever truly have the power that he ascribes to it? Was it the publication of The Jungle or was it sensational newspaper coverage following its publication that turned the great american stomach? Then you get to dig through newspaper clippings across the country and if you are lucky some sort of evidence of sales figures. There might be an answer out there in so many archives but the awareness of this is worth far more than the sheaths of photostats and reasoned analysis.
It would seem that Iyer is speaking rather too much from the perch of the Humanities where the sole dictum is to persuade and convince rather than prove. While there are a raft of valid objections to this habit, the reader being compelled by fact and evidence in one instance and melodious rhetoric in the next. The only value of this form is its ability to give the reader enough fact and enough inspiration to conflate the two in that most annoyingly human habit of BELIEF.
So essentially, the only objection is that Iyer is being defeatist and training his intellect on what everyone who ever sat down at a coffeeshop with a thick stack of A4s and a red pen has sitting in the back of their mind the whole time. It’s disappointing that someone so rich with knowledge would take the easiest route and use their words to throw the veneer of truth and reason on their self defeating neuroses.
It feels horrible simply to cast someone’s time and effort under the column of trite but it seems there is no other reasonable conclusion.
As for Contemporary Literature? The cultural elite at the levers of creative power will always be seeking inspiration and someone who clears the path first. Tv writers are lazy and more concerned with integrating themselves in that shit show of art and commerce known as hollywood. A writer should take it upon themselves to break the ground and frame the story and the narrative first.
Curious example. The current spate of television food documentaries can be traced back to a series of documentary programmes produced by a Pittsburgh Public Television Station in the late 90s. Rick Sebak filmed the Hot Dog Show and the Ice Cream Show. While they did not achieve any great national exposure they might have given inspiration to someone at Sharp Entertainment to travel around the country interviewing restauranteurs and their customers.
While that not be what many an MFA aspires towards, the people that love ideas, love words, love observation, love everything one can cram into the notion of culture, usually tend to enjoy the discovery and those moments of bringing so many overactive neurons into the world and onto the page.
I spent most of the time reading this essay thinking: I’m sorry you engage lit this way. The dead horse being beaten is that the only thing around is a dead horse.
“Globalisation has flattened Literature into a million niche markets, and prose has become another product: pleasurable, notable, exquisite, laborious, respected, but always small.”
I’m not sure how the interaction between diverse communities (as the result of increasing ease of communication) is “flattening” lit into niche markets AND this is somehow negative. I’d like to hear an elaboration on how cultures interacting and creating art is negative. Art can be a product. So can your teeth.
If there is something to “work against” it’s probably this drive to summarize / make pretty an assessment of a present state of lit.