Copyright 1995
In the Attic period our artists--and when I say artist I intend a category
that can include writers, musicians, dancers, etc.--wore poverty like a badge
of honor, and there were those who almost took an oath of poverty like
priests. In fact the priest as model, with the requisite unworldliness
implying a commensurate spirituality, hovered somewhere in the cultural
background. It was a worldly unworldliness that was in question of course,
worldly in just about every respect except business. The artist was
virtually helpless in the practical world, requiring attendant editors,
agents, galleries and other kinds of down-to-earth baby sitters to get himher
through life, at least in theory, and often in practice.
The Attic period, it should be said, followed the Cave Man period and was an
improvement, even a great leap forward. The Cave Man period was one in which
the artist pretended to ignorance, if not stupidity, to avoid any hint of
elitism in a democratic milieu, a pose heavily supported by left wing and
populist movements. The prime Cave Man was of course Ernest Hemingway. It
is our cave men who are most admired in Europe, especially in France, because
they promote an image of the States as powerful but ignorant, if not dumb,
and correspondingly of Europe as knowing and smart. You supply the brawn
we'll supply the brains. Charles Bukowski is a more recent example. To an
American the image of the Stupid American is considerably more terrifying
than that of the Intelligent American, but we can appreciate the European
point of view. In fact a whole generation of Americans benefited from a
resurgence of the Cave Man Period in the Sixties, in the form of the Beat
movement. These Cave Men were a healthy antidote to the Attic Period,
because though they were starving geniuses, these artists did not believe in
being starving geniuses. They were basically populists and believed in the
possibility of a popular art. After many detours this belief did in fact
issue in the movement called Pop Art, which swept away many unexamined
attitudes cherished in the Attic Period.
However, the movement from the Beats to Pop Art was very different from the
first Cave Man Period, because these Cave Men were not Establishment Cave Men
like the first Cave Men but were Counter-culture Cave Men. They could not be
pigeon holed as bourgeois sell-outs. They were Cro-magnon rather than
Neanderthal, which is to say they were a lot more like us. More like us
because the Sixties, as the period in question is called--though it bridged
the sixties and seventies--crossed a line in American culture over which we
can never go back again, and those of us who are beyond that line, whatever
our cultural differences, are more like one another than we could ever be
like any of those culture troops who flourished before the Sixties. Thanks
to Abstract Expressionism, to the Beats and especially Allen Ginsberg, to Bob
Dylan, to Andy Warhol, to writers like Norman Mailer and Seymour Krim, and to
intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Howe, but thanks above all to
the whole Woodstock Generation, the US lost its art cherry. The reigning
idea was that artists could, and should, not only be successful in their art,
but could gain fame and fortune as well. To hell with the attic. The thin
membrane that separated art and commerce was broken, and no matter whether we
like that loss of innocence or not, it is never going to be regained. We
have, in short, a new situation.
The main factor in this new situation is that we have lost our sense of
opposition. There was a time in the US when the mere notion of art was
oppositional in an overwhelmingly business culture. Now art is supported by
a system of grants and artists have found their place in the academy and the
commercial world, along with the intellectuals. It may be, as I will argue
later, that art is still structurally oppositional, but in a way that depends
very little on the volition of given artists.
For reasons probably having less to do with self interested delusion than
with naivete, academics and intellectuals often underestimate two components
of art that are crucial to the process of composition. I am speaking of
money--including especially the economics of publishing--and technology. I
don't deny the importance of politics and ideology but would merely argue
that they are also largely based on money and technology. These
extra-literary factors are elements that theory can and sometimes does take
into account in the sphere of interpretation, but not as variables of
composition. Besides, in the US there is an iron curtain between
theoreticians and creative artists that is not entirely unjustified. The
problem with theory from an artist's point of view is that it tends to
establish rules rather than read texts, while the problem with artists from
the theoretician's point of view is they are unruly. I am not one of those
theory bashing US Cavemen, believing as I do that the theory wars make life
and art more interesting. It is simply that there is a difference between
philosophy and rhetoric, and I am on the side of rhetoric. A story is to the
point: two men come to a rabbi with a dispute. One claims he was cheated of
money by the second. The rabbi listens to his argument and then tells him,
"You're right." Then the second man gives his argument and the rabbi tells
him, "You're right." A third man complains saying the rabbi's judgment that
they are both right is completely impossible. The rabbi thinks a minute,
then says, "You're right too."
Money, not theory, is the gravity of the culture world. It hasn't always
been so. Money is a kind of poetry, as Wallace Stevens said, presumably
because it is a symbol that makes tangible intangible value. But maybe, to
reverse the equation, art is a kind of money that tracks and codifies the
values of the culture much as the stock market does for the economic sphere.
Electronic technology was not developed for its possibilities for play nor
even for its utilitarian value. It was developed by wealth as a way of
creating wealth. The cultural sphere cannot ignore its great gravitational
pull, but in dealing with gravity there are options. You can walk or you can
fly, you can climb or you can fall.
Culture gravity inevitably affects fiction, the way it's produced, the way
it's distributed, the way it's sold--and most interestingly the way it's
written and read. It does and it should. Fiction is the literary genre most
sensitive to the changes of the culture, and that's the real justification
for maintaining the term "novel" for its most important form. The novel at
best is always novel. Not most importantly in its manifest content, though
that too. The novelist, like the stand-up comedian, needs to have hisher
finger on the pulse, as they say, of the culture. But fiction also comprises
a form of narrative thinking that is part of a kind of lingua franca of
thought that we all hold in common. Changes in the techohistorical matrix of
the culture must register in the way, formally speaking, we tell stories if
they are to bring us the news about our lives. I'm talking about
information, and the major amount of information that is communicated to us
by that appropriately ambiguous genre we call fiction is by its form, which
immediately indicates a mode of thought that is the determining factor of all
other aspects of the story. A nineteenth century novel should not and cannot
read like a twenty-first century novel.
To take stock of the technological situation briefly, we now live in what I
call the electrosphere. Book production has been overtaken by a new
electronic technology that eliminates the job of composition, or rather,
makes it part of the writer's art rather than the technician's craft. Books
now increasingly go from disk to printing press directly. That means that
the writer is also the compositor, and can compose a page on the electronic
screen as s/he wishes, making the graphic quality of the page an expressive,
rather than an inert, element of fiction. No reason to go left - right, left
- right, left - right, all the way to the bottom of the page like a type
writer.
Book distribution is now computerized, the initially dystopian result--in the
context of the book chains--being that supply is now the slave of demand. On
the other hand, computerization can begin to identify microreaderships
interested in non-standard "product," as they call it in the trade. Such
readerships have always been essential to certain phases of literary
evolution, and for some time have been getting lost in the
hypercommercialization of the book business.
Microreaderships are further crystallized by the Internet, on which
like-minded netsters can trade information in a fluid, disinterested way,
free of the massive hype of the commercial culture which affects us all.
High frequency interchanges on the net are beginning to evolve to serve
interested litnetsters, like Alt-X from Boulder, CO, but internetypically,
really from nowhere and everywhere.
In the electrosphere, fiction as an adjunct to history and journalism has
been displaced by the dead eye of film and video--there is no reason to
imagine what you can actually see. In addition, fiction's narrative function
has been infringed upon by narratives with greater truth claims: faction,
reality films, infotainment, autobiography and biography, data oriented
prose. On the other hand, narrative language was never in essence a medium
to simply make one see or to make one merely better informed, but to make one
think and feel about what is seen and known.
In the electrosphere the pursuit of narrative integrity through language,
accommodating the facts of our actual experience as well as amplifying it,
remains fiction's essential task. In this, electronic technology can be
helpful by gathering data, refining text, rendering the medium more fluid,
manipulating spectacle, making available new integrations of written language
and other signifying mediums, especially through CD-ROM, recording experience
raw, making available realms of experience previously inaccessible,
especially through the visual media and Internet, aligning virtual reality
with data, and narrative with the way experience flashes on the mind-screen.
Further, current technology lays open the degree to which a rapidly
exteriorizing sense of identity (a.k.a. characterization) is becoming more
and more dependent on the electrosphere.
This bundle of technological consequences demands an essentialization of the
capabilities of fiction, discounting extraneous attributes that are the
result of historical accident.
Narrative is the discourse of time, and narrative thinking is arguably more
powerful and more pervasive than logical thought. Or maybe more powerful
because more pervasive. We all tell our own stories, or have them told to
us, or for us. So when new means to tell a story come to the fore, they are
likely to augur a significant shift in consciousness. Beginning with the
story teller's. Once upon a time, I used to write by hand in notebooks, and
still do when I want to obtain certain effects, notably a sensuous relation
to the forms of words and the rhythms of written language. I had already
discovered the graphic component of the page through using the typewriter,
not a very original discovery since the typewriter had been so used by quite
a few writers, especially poets, before me. But one day I started
experimenting with the effects of a new invention, the portable tape
recorder, and found in it a productive relation with the oral aspects of
language. I still use the tape recorder extensively.
The day I started using a computer, however, I knew that I was dealing with
something radically different. A computer screen is not writing, it is a
medium. It looks like writing, it can issue in writing but it is not yet
writing. Writing is not a medium, it is a destination. A medium is a way of
getting to a destination. Writing is an end, a terminal, static, out of time
(unlike reading.) It is print on page, spray on wall, scratch on rock,
something on something. Writing is in surprising ways related to painting.
You can have writing, for example, without language, as in the work of Cy
Twombly. But a computer screen produces nothing but electronic impulses.
Press a key and it's all gone, press a few others and it's radically changed.
The material on the screen is held in suspension. It is easily interactive.
Its fundamental character is transitional and provisional. The result of
this quality is an expanded arena for meditation. The mental rhythm it
encourages is not write - revise but improvise - elaborate. The screen mode
is antithetical, like rhetorical or sophistic thought, and this is a mode
much like narrative thinking, which like rhetorical thinking is continuously
self-modifying rather than definitive. Not being static, it reintroduces
time as a factor, favoring not definitive thought, but thinking as it evolves
through time.
The computer keyboard acquires musical qualities. The experience must be
something like that of a musician in a recording studio: play it then play it
back. If you don't like it do another take. Or alter it electronically by
fiddling with parts. Even concrete poetry was written in cement, as it
were--the computer screen is written on the wind. That is, it's not written
yet. This is a technology that if used to the hilt actually expands our
meditative capacity, our capacity for thinking and feeling--as does writing
to begin with--by encouraging thought to play off feeling, thought to play
off thought, in a space outside the mind but which is like an extension of
the mind.
In a publishing atmosphere that is dominated by the big buck/fast buck
mentality of the multinational conglomerates, also know as "the blockbuster
complex," it is hard to tell what effect this new writing technology has
already had on fiction. The conglomerate aura is certainly not favorable to
the meditative. What can get published affects what gets written, and what
can get published now is mostly the consequence of tastes formed by the
fiction of fifty years ago in a different world. But some preliminary
generalizations can be made about the development of fiction that is
determined by a medium dominated technology rather than one that emphasizes
outcomes--or, for that matter, incomes.
Contingency. Electromeditative prose reinforces the sense that narrative no
longer demands "the sense of an ending." Anything other than contingent
resolutions are felt as falsification. Since the novel can no longer come to
conclusions the novel in the traditional sense is no longer possible. We are
all in the middle of something more like an endless short story.
Conductivity. Fiction has become a channel for data on the states of the
psyche. This is part of the information explosion created by the
electrosphere, placing the author in a more modest role than that of creator.
The capacities of hypertext are humbling, the information available at the
stroke of a key overwhelming. The contemporary writer is more like the
traditional scribe. To a greater extent than ever before, fiction writers
simply choose among data options and pass it on. This includes a lot of
unpleasant material in the nature of violence, sexual brutality, stupidity.
It is a trend (known as transgressive fiction) that should not be mistaken as
mass market genre exploitation.
Disoriginality. Obviously there are many writers today who simply feel they
are the site in which already present elements of the literary culture get
recombined and re-issued in new and interesting ways. One thinks of Raymond
Federman's "playgiarism" with a y, or Burrough's cut-ups, or Kathy Acker.
Also, the prime Modernist technique of collage has been replaced by what you
might call Postmodernism's mosaic, the former juxtaposing disparate bits of
data to create a new synapse of meaning, the latter using items from the
museum of culture to create a new, if indeterminate, configuration. The
ghosts of tradition are summoned in surprising ways. Press SEARCH followed
by MOVE.
Detextualization. The location of fiction is less on the page than formerly.
Obviously, we have the huge influence of the reading circuit and the move
toward the sonic. Furthermore, many factors (TV, internetthink, the massive
onslaught of available information) has given rise to a new way of reading
which you might call page surfing: never read a whole book unless absolutely
necessary; skim, search, scatter-read; look for the good parts (a practice
once confined to erotic search); use abstracts. Finally the text is now
established as an object that is not necessarily read but has influence as a
presence--a benchmark, something to gossip about, a valorizing credential, a
resource if you need it. It's important to have Finnegans Wake on your
shelf, even if you haven't read it.
Degenerativation. We live in an era of recombinant genres--they are
breaking down, as they often do in times of radical change, and combining in
new forms. Avant-Pop is using mass market genres for literary purposes,
fiction is essentializing as narrative, the novel goes on killing itself as
other forms replace it. Most radically, we are moving into a situation in
which the various mediums--video, acoustic, graphics, print--are all digital
based, and CD-ROM does in fact combine them. Hard and fast genre limitations
seem absurd given the fluidity of the electrosphere.
The overall result of these changes is that the place of the fiction writer
in the culture is changing from smithy of the soul to messenger of the
zeitgeist, phantasmal representative of the tradition, i.e., the dead, healer
of cultural shatter and its psychic consequences. There is a word that comes
close to describing all this: Shaman.
The traditional shaman is a kind of medium/mediator--between the real and the
imaginary, the living and the dead, the conscious and the non-conscious, the
individual and the group--whose main function is to focus attention and open
channels for the foregoing connections. The shaman in this sense does not
impose knowledge but releases the impulse to play with data and connect it in
new ways. As medium, the shaman represents an organization or, you might
even say, a teaching that evolves from the bottom up rather than the top
down. In the arts, this way of proceeding functions to liberate rather than
dominate the reader or spectator.
In what we call fiction, this tradition is exemplified by Laurence Sterne's
novel of liberation which exposes the artifices used to manipulate the
reader. Nevertheless the shamanistic mode is to intervene in experience and
change it, not merely to mirror or represent "reality." The novel of
liberation does not limit itself to a self-contained fictive entertainment,
but is a narrative that reaches into the social life from which it emerges,
which is continuous with it, and in which it intervenes. This kind of
interventive narrative is therefore intrinsically oppositional to the status
quo. Many genres of writing contribute to this ongoing narrative
intervention, among which this is one.