I recently had the pleasure of visiting Joe Tabbi’s graduate seminar on “World Fictions” at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Tabbi asked me to discuss my response to Ben Marcus’s scouring of Jonathan Franzen in Harper’s last fall.
My essay, “Notes from the Middleground: On Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and the Contemporary Fiction Combine” (Electronic Book Review) proffers that Franzen’s position—non-mainstream fiction (read: the stuff we talk about on this blog) is destroying American literature—and Marcus’s well-meaning response, to some extent, makes an aesthetic argument out of an economic problem. I ultimately suggest that the most interesting works express the tension between art and the market in their material substance, and cite Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and good ol’ Tristram Shandy to this point.
I’ll leave the nuances of this to those interested, and instead comment on a provocative notion Tabbi articulated during the session:
Tabbi argues, quite convincingly, that the first generation of postmodern authors (Barth, Gaddis, etc…) focused on the literary work above all else. They may have indeed been/be great show(wo)men, as demonstrated by William H. Gass at the &NOW festival at Lake Forest College last spring), or by Raymond Federman or Kathy Acker any time those two, well, do/did anything at all…yet, Tabbi says, many current writers who have moved into non-textual environments sacrific this same intense attention to literary production.
Not that there is any less value in multimedia endeavors, but that these writers, if I take Tabbi correctly, are perhaps not writers in the same sense. And, just maybe, the literary tradition suffers, because literature becomes, well, something else entirely.
My first instinct, as one of these sometime-multimedia folk, is to recoil. I see my non-print, non-text work, really, as writing in different forms. But then I start to wonder if the technological transformations overtaking the work that we now do may not be fundamentally changing what is it is, exactly, we end up doing. No great lament from me about these changes, and if we take Gilles Deleuze seriously, the death of the book has been a long time comin'.
As someone who schedules many writers on the academic circuit, I must admit often considering entertainment value, in many different forms, before extending an invitation. This doesn’t mean that great writers can’t be damn entertaining, but perhaps reinforces Tabbi's claim that writing has lost real cultural ground in the age of the Xbox.
Against my better judgment, this takes me back to Franzen’s seemingly ridiculous claim that literature needs to compete with things such as extreme sports.
Bungee jumping while reading Swann’s Way anyone? Or am I just expressing the bowhunter’s fear of the gun?
--Davis
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Davis,
I (continue to) argue that technology is NOT neutral, that is does fundamentally change the literary project. I would also argue that this change is (not necessarily) for the better, although I might be on shakier ground here. The one example I’ll give is that I believe that all text is hyper – we don’t need machines (other than the book) to demonstrate that. But I’ve beaten this horse (Nietzsche’s or Raskolnikov’s) before.
Your post brings many other nodes of discussion. For example, the whole reading/entertainment/ performance phenomena, which, at the risk of placing myself amongst the old fogies, I find more than a bit overrated. Maybe because I don’t write shorter (performable) pieces, and because I need drinks in order to get myself up there, but I’ve always found public readings and performances, well, at most supplemental (not in the Derridean sense) to the solitary work and play of reading/writing. I’ve found the reading ‘event’ to be more about presence and personality than the work being read. This doesn’t mean I can’t derive pleasure or benefit from attending such events, but this pleasure is on a different and lesser register than the pleasure I can get from reading the author’s work myself. Although it was certainly a pleasure to meet you all at NowWhat, and I’ll continue to go to readings (I suppose), I find this reading phenomena odd and slightly discomforting. I just don’t network well. I’d love to have someone explain this to me.
All the best, Jeffrey
Jeffrey;
Thanks for your thoughts on this--let me put the question to you and others...when booking readers for your school, is the performative persona an issue at all?
Even to deliberatley discount or include a certain type of writer?
I find that long-time readers and writers often have a better attention span for complex work that those just introduced to complex fictions--and so, I wonder how we make our economic choices here as to who to invite, pay our measly fees to, etc...
--Davis
Dear Davis,
We almost never make reading invitations based on performance persona. We often try to make our reading invitations coincide with our graduate CW literature courses, Studies in Poetry and Studies in Fiction: we try to invite writers on the syllabus, and performance plays no role. Then, it's really whoever's coming around, has a new book, is 'owed' an invitation etc. The one exception was the wonderful performer I saw at &NOW in Lake Forest, Nambi Kelley. She was great in Lake Forest, and great in Boulder, and I haven't yet read her work. But she's in the theater, which might make a difference. Best, J
Institutional money for the small reading series I've started at my university is entirely dependent on student reaction; I had to create a survey to get their responses to each reading, more on the subject of "learning" than "entertainment," but you see the blurriness there, I'm sure.
So far, I've invited only writers who both can make themselves comprehensible to the barely literate and less well-informed than that audience of students--I don't say this to attack them, just as fact--and who also interest me as innovative writers. A very small window, I can assure you--and one that does feature a large number of writers who "perform" as such (given that all readings are performance, etc). Hal Jaffe, for instance, appeared with a synth player and used several readers for multi-layered voices. Not his only mode, but one he can pull off. The students liked it, without always understanding it, of course.
Let me state again that I don't blame the students for what it is they do and don't understand, although it certainly clarifies the kind of capitalist world they've grown up in; still, an institution that makes a writing series subject to student preference is a very limited and annoying beast. I'd rather have the money this way than no series at all, though I can imagine some people feeling otherwise.
Thanks all, for your comments, and I do appreciate's Dimitri's bemusement and Jeffrey's reticence.
On one hand, sure, why even consider this distinction? Perhaps Tabbi's concerns are more theoretical than practical, but then again, Mark's comment demonstrates the real economic restrictions of this problem.
In the case of Lake Forest, we are talking about a combined budget of very little in real money, which makes any great agon about it, seem, well, unreal--but there are still may writers who command considerable sums for their appearances.
The &NOW Festival was able to procure its headliners for relatively modest amounts, but these choices had to be made very carefully. Just 2-3 "big" names wipe out 20-30 potential "smaller" writers. So, who we pick--and why--becomes of great import.
I once had the chance to make an offer to Salman Rushdie to read at Lake Forest. He was participating in the Chicago Humanities Festival, and I found out about it before a public announcement had been made. His booking agent said he normally charges $30K, but he would do it for $15K since he would already be in Chicago.
15K! I could feel my throat stifling the words "no problem" before they made it out of my gut. Anyway, to my amazement, we were able to gather the money together w/i the 2-3 day timetable we had to make an offer--only to be told that Mr. Rushdie was taking a pass...!
To pass on an hour's worth of "work" that will net you 15K is a reality most innovative writers will never know, or even come close to knowing.
I would certainly never be able to obtain $15K for someone who was not a guaranteed crowd pleaser--or who had not amassed the requisite cultural and/or symbolic capital to make us think as much.
Fatwa aside, it seems that connecting with the audience will take you much farther than not. And so, each author who gets an invitation for a few hundred dollars here or there, will perhaps be forced into developing certain characteristics, that, as the above argument goes, may only have tenuous connection to literature.
I don't see this as a negative really--although some clearly do. What makes this discussion interesting is the way a relatively small subset of university money intertwines with larger issues of economic performance.
So, again, if anyone else is willing to share--what motivates your reading series?
--Davis
Readings strike me, to echo Timmi's interesting take on the subject two posts down, as a way, not to make audiences (of undergrads or others) comfortable, not necessarily to entertain them (or, rather, not to entertain them via modes they are used to), but to introduce them to myriad voices they haven't heard before, voices that challenge them, unnerve them, ask them what literature is and can be, undercut their assumptions about language and the world, wake them in the midst of their dreaming.
Why, I wonder, would one want to invent a reading series that simply perpetuates the McDonalization paradigm of student/listener as consumer?
Lance;
I take your point--but my question isn't so much about "why" would we want to avoid this (of course, we would), but rather, whether the paradigm you mention is to some extent unavoidable, given the fact that these series ofter serve larger communities already inculcated into the standards of McDonaldization.
And further, that the economics of the reading series often side with that same paradigm. And, that perhaps the nature of who we invite has changed (not necessarily for the worse) because of it. In other words, and I am certainly not articulating this as clearly as I would like, what do you think of Tabbi's lament that an attention to "literature" is fading, even within the admitted successes of introducing provocative new voices?
[I think here also of your resignation letter from the University system...]
--Davis
I agree wholly with Tabbi, Davis, and, I think, with you.
As I mentioned in one of my early posts here, fiction has become a secondary--if not a tertiary--mode of cultural exchange, increasingly competing for smaller and smaller slivers of the general population's attention with everything from movies and iPods to cell phones and their annoying boutique ring tones.
But I wouldn't want to say that we therefore either can or can't avoid McDonaldization with respect to setting up a reading series.
That is, the choice doesn't fall along an either/or axis in my mind.
Now it's my turn to sound like an old fogie, I guess, but I find the idea of students or administrators dictating the terms of reading series repellant. Neither know enough to make informed decisions. That's why we call the former students, rather than, say, professors, and that's why we call the latter administrators rather than, say, teachers.
At my old job, I had to spend most of my time as director of creative writing cajoling, compromising, noodging, begging, demanding, and balancing angels on the head of pin with my colleagues and administrators, but at the end of the day was able to bring in the likes of Kathy Acker, Carole Maso, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Coover, David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, et al., and pack 400-seat auditoriums with willing (and sometimes unwilling) audiences.
What I mean to suggest is that we can and should live both within and against McDonaldization simultaneously.
It's an always exhausting, frustrating, and perhaps finally losing battle, but, heck, what other alternative (pun intended, I'm afraid) do we have?
Three cheers for the rant, of which I hope I have more to speak on shortly.
For now, see page 115 of _Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs_ Soft Skull, 2006. (which I am about to review):
Letter from Bill Sr. to Bill Jr.
"Writing is a very depleting, exacting, dangerous and underpaid profession, and the most basic and vital advice that I can give to any young writer is: pay attention to your finances. In the words of Wilson Mizner, 'Don't turn down any money.' It seems now that in order to survive we must become performers as well, and peddle our wares like the purveyors of snake oil. At the same time, readings can be fun, when seen as performance..."
well god damn it CHIASMUS is trying a deconstruction of "the literary reading" at awp.
l.
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