In 1947, Raymond Queneau—mathematician, poet, fiction writer, and member of the Oulipo group dedicated to using formal constraints imposed on one's own work as a method of generating creativity—published Exercises in Style. He took a simple story and told it in 99 different styles: as a letter, a sonnet, a moral lesson about The Youth of Today, etc. The narrative itself is wholly unremarkable: a young man gets on a crowded bus, complains about being jostled, and then sits down when a seat becomes available; later, the narrator sees the man who jostled him in another part of town talking to a friend.
In 99 Ways to Tell a Story (Chamberlain Brothers, 2005), Matt Madden performs a kind of homage to Queneau by doing much the same thing, only in comix. The narrative itself is, if possible, even more unremarkable than the original nonstory story: a man who has been working at a computer stands, closes his laptop, and walks to the refrigerator; his partner asks him what time it is from upstairs; he responds 1:15; then he bends in front of the fridge, looking puzzled, wondering "What the hell was I looking for, anyway?" Madden retells that narrative in a variety of comic-book styles, from a variety of points of view, in a variety of different settings, from a variety of different angles, with a variety of different characters, without one of the two leads, without the refrigerator, as a paranoid religious tract, as an existentialist parable, and so on.
The outcome is fascinating, stimulating, and a micro-education in both narrativity and the history of comix. Its mechanism of production is the simultaneous use and abuse the past, and its aesthetic impulse harmonizes well with what some of us back in the mid-nineties referred to as the Avant-Pop, a mode of telling that amibivalently accomodates pop culture while using many of its assumptions of comfort, predictability, and spectacularization against itself.
One of my litmus tests for a "successful" text is that it makes me want to go out and write. Madden's accomplishes that like few I've come across recently. And, to tie back into our earlier discussion of pedagogy and the difficult imagination, I'm guessing it might have a vibrant life in the classroom as well.
13 comments:
I love this perspective, Lance -- thanks! We can of course go back to the classic Wallace Stevens and think of "13 ways of looking at a blackbird," and probably a whole slaw of writings that speak to different ways of viewing and writing/interpreting a particular scene/concept. But what really rings the bell for me is your statement that one of your litmus tests for a "successful" text is that "it makes me want to go out and write." Many years ago, I studied under Norman O. Brown, and I've never forgotten his statement (perhaps derived from someone else -- or perhaps he never said this) that "the only response to poetry is poetry." For me, that's THE mark of great writing. Great writing compells me to write.
I remember when I first read Gertrude Stein. I couldn't read for long. I had to stop and write. Why? Her concepts, rhythm and word plays tickled me shocking pink. I could do nothing but pick up the pen!
Joe,
I could never get down with those connect the dot things -- could you? I always ended up with a mess of misconnections, weird outcomes, etc. Part of the trouble was I couldn't get past the absolute imperative of 1 leading to 2 rather than say to 14 or 48. The other part had to do with not wanting to do it the dumb way my smarty-pants much more capable older sister did it.
That's part 1 of my two cents, here's part 27: Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Liz Willis (have/have had books with Penguin); Gary Lutz, Brian Evenson, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams (had books with Knopf); W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano, Lydia Davis (have books with FSG); Chip Delany (his masterworks have been reissued by Vintage)...
I have no idea what "we" are about here, which I rather like, but I will say that fierce loyalty to indie presses + active mistrust of multinational corps. running the New York publishing show is sure as fuck not going to keep me from reading/discussing The Descent of Alette or Austerlitz or Almost No Memory or, for that matter, 99 Ways to Tell a Story.
Cheers!
Laird
I'm on board with Laird here, Joe, I think, both in terms of dot-connecting and in terms of having an inordinately intelligent older sister who always scored higher on the math SATs than I did . . . but even more so with respect to the odd and complex corporate/indie press divide.
What's striking to me is how there's no easy formula to help us work through this. As I commented in my first post on this blog, "Three behemoth media corporations dominate Manhattan publishing. These Brobdignagians employ the print arms of their swollen conglomerates as tax write-offs, considering low sales figures and small audiences tantamount to failure. That is, they view their products exactly the same way executives at McDonald’s view their death patties." Yet, at the same time, "That isn't, of course, to suggest Manhattan isn't bringing out some wonderful and surprising work (think José Saramago, David Mitchell, David Markson), but it is to suggest it is bringing out less of it—much less of it—than it did, say, during the sixties, when over 100 big houses thrived in New York. Nor would I want to suggest that alternative presses don’t bring out some bland, simple, sloppy stuff in innovationists’ clothing."
I'm not quite sure what to do with that observation, except to suggest that discussing publishing economies doesn't perhaps lend as much light to the gnarly subject of the innovative or spaces of political resistance as it might first seem to. Luck, good agents, serendipity, previous sales, ardent editors, potential sales, review track records, power of a particular work at hand, and even kinds of experimentation figure in to things. At the same time, I wonder if a New York press would even know what to do with work that regularly appears from, say, Dalkey, FC2, or Chiasmus, even though all have authors who at one time or another have published with gargantuan New York houses.
dots, schmots.
What is influencing what? Each, the classroom and the so-called publishing world are mutually exclusive in that they parade a facade of "alternative" instead of actually coming up with a plan of attack.
99 ways shows how both classroom society and publishing world can get together and genre-bend. Ah, but you weren't interested in that outcome, were you now?
Rose Selavy
Pork braised in milk!
Which incidentally came out as bork praised milk on my first typing pass.
Thanks for the clarification, Joe. I do believe I misread your comment, a little like I mistyped your recipe.
Or perhaps I gave it one possible reading of more than one possible reading.
At any rate...
"It's not that the trades aren't, to a large degree, sitting ducks. But if their business model sucks, and if this has repercussions for ambitious art, to argue as much again (and again) isn't exactly breaking any new conceptual or pragmatic ground."
Yes, excellent point here, Joe.
Joe, Laird, Lance, et al...
I'm struck by Joe's question about how we may change our writing to play to or against what we perceive as the big publishers.
For years, when I first started writing, I sat down to pen every story as if it could appears in one of the mainstream anthologies that I routinely read in college courses. Of course, two sentences in would find penguins in outer space or an enormous turd a la Gogol's "The Nose"...and so I came to evenutally stop worrying so much about what I thought I should be doing.
And even now, a decade later, I find myself describing my work to a stranger at a party, with phrases like, "this new one is not as weird/weirder than the last one."
I know also, in ways I've never fully articulated, that when I am writing, this question is very much in my mind.
I'm going to give it some thought as I edit my current ms.
What say the rest of you?
Davis
PS: Reading Murakami's _Kafka on the Shore_, a so-far fantastic book from a non-small press...!
Joe, you say: "We probably ought to consider how our assumptions about the marketplace for our writing, however half-baked (or un-dotted), condition the terms of our writing."
I have a feeling I might be in the minority here, but, well, when I'm writing, I never think–either consciously or, I want to say, unconsciously—about the marketplace. I just write the narrative I want to read. Then, when I'm done writing, I see if there's a publisher who wants to publish it. If there is one, I write another narrative I want to read. If there isn't one, I write another narrative I want to read.
This isn't to say the role of the marketplace in writing isn't a potentially interesting and important one, just one that it never crosses my mind to keep in mind when I'm working. That may well be why I make virtually no money off my fiction. But who cares?
And Rose, you say: "99 ways shows how both classroom society and publishing world can get together and genre-bend. Ah, but you weren't interested in that outcome, were you now?"
I've read those lines 99 times, and from various points-of-view, in various settings, via various styles, and I still don't know what you mean. Would you pretty please clarify?
I think you're on to some important distinctions, Kass. It's not a "claim" that I don't think about the marketplace when I write; I really don't think about the marketplace when I write. As I say, I just think of writing a book or a short story or whatever that I'd love to read.
The rejection-phase is a much more complicated affair for me. Again, I really don't pay much attention to rejection; I have a 24-hour turn-around rule: if something gets rejected one day, it's out in the mail the next. That isn't to say, though, that I don't listen to editorial suggestions from people whose voices I've learned over the decades to trust, several of them editors, most of them writer-friends; I listen to them like mad, weigh them for what strikes me intuitively as right, and often incorporate them into future drafts. Unfortunately, those voices have little or nothing to do with the marketplace.
If you'd like to conceptualize praise as another form of economy, well, that sounds find. But praise has nothing to do, at least for me, with the marketplace—i.e., with some cash nexus—and so I don't think "economy" is quite the right metaphor here (maybe I'm getting tugged back to my notion of the "tribal" instead). Please don't get me wrong. Praise means worlds to me, of course, as I suspect it does to every writer, virtually every human being—so long as it comes from a source I respect, but I don't think of it as an "exchange" in the way I think of money as an exchange. Praise is blood fuel, yes. It's food. It's sometimes vindication and motivation and celebration. But I can't make that into an "exchange" the way, say, buying a Big Mac or a bike is an exchange.
Nor would I write—would any of us write, I want to say—just to receive some of that wonderful stuff.
Yet, having said that, I know publishing itself is a kind of praise (often, interesting, virtually untied to money, at least where the writer is concerned), and, like you, like us all, I suspect, I can't imagine what would happen if someone stepped up to you, to me, to the next writer, and said: "Sorry. The rules have changed. You can do anything else you like. You'll be a millionaire and a brilliant physicist both. But you can never be published again."
My instinct is to say I'd say I'd keep on keeping on, since writing's a telling I have to do, and for many reasons that have nothing to do even with praise. But I don't know in what sense that's true, and I don't know of any way (thank goodness) to find out.
What about the rest of you?
Hmm...do we know of anyone who always published with small presses, and had never approached a mainstream agent or press in her or his career (not even in the wide-eyed period of early production)?
Davis
Kass, you say: "i think, lance, that you and i are working from different points of the processes—you seem willing to theorize reception but not willing to theorize generation."
It's not that I'm unwilling to theorize generation. In fact, I think my post above is a stab in that direction. It's just that we appear to disagree about generation's necessary dependence on the marketplace. That quasi-Marxist equation seems a little too easy to me, a little too obvious, reductionistic, unnuanced.
That's probably no more than to say that we're different writers sometimes writing for different reasons. And to that I say: thank goodness. Imagine how dreary it would be if we were all the same writer writing for the same reasons. Ick.
A few fragments around ‘For Whom Do We Write.’
One of the ideas of late 20th Century crit theory was the difference separating writer and reader was kaput (Barthes, Benjamin, de Man et al).
When we write, we need to read and have read. When we read, we are help completing the text, we are writing what we are reading. Writing and reading, no difference.
Does this collapse if difference works to bridge the gap between production and reception? Is there a difference between the “subject positions” of the writer and the reader?
In other words: what is the relationship between (separating) the writer and reader? Is saying “Writing and reading, no difference” the same as saying “writer and reader, no difference?”
Possible response: I keep the reader (large [becoming famous and/or rich] or small [cult] group) in mind when I write.
Possible response: I write for myself.
Possible response: Some combination or oscillation between the two. I write primarily for myself, but if FS&G pick it up, well, that’d be cool.
Question concerning responses: Do we know the reader? Can we ever know the reader? Is the reader absolutely other? Reading SOME reviews of my work, reader’s reports or rejections suggests this to me. I honestly don’t understand what they’re talking about most of the time. It’s like they’re speaking a foreign language. Who is the public(s)? Who are these editors? Who are (and how smart) are the people making these decisions? What do they have in common with me? What do they want?
Question concerning responses: What does it mean to write for oneself, when writing is an ‘activity’ that puts the self into question? “I write what I like to read” is a sentiment I sympathize with, but writing seems to destabilize both the “I” and the “want.” And then, when you return to yourself (a different self in that now you are a self who has written), the end product is never what you desire. Is it?
Whenever I start to think about readers I end up being wrong. This could be my problem.
Jeffrey
Joe:
Joe's right about the "wreader" reference. I used it in 1993 and 4, thinking I had come up with it.
But unbeknownst to me, Joe used it before I did. I was unaware of electronic journals in 1991.
I think its important to give credit where credit is due, since the academy is a pyramid scheme where ascendancy occurs through the "originality" of one's thinking (one hopes).
mer(osenberg)
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