(Why) Have we stopped reading fiction ? - Page 13

Justin Isis · 09-20-2017

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

And thus we arrive at Justin's third point: much as it is indeed amazing that both the weight and the simplicity of the allusions now possible to us are so immense, there is, on my part, the lingering suspicion that we are beginning to allow ourselves to be swayed by the depth implied by these allusions. Justin's proposed sentence is a great example: if one actually has read all of Borges and all of Lovecraft then mention of these two alone generates a wonderful intertextual web in which the circular ruins of the infinite library house shelf upon shelf of half-burnt necronomicons, revered by eldritch heresiarchs of the sect of the phoenix. But if one is a happy skater upon the surface seas of pop culture, the vague idea of a tentacle-faced plush toy teaming up with an author who supported the wrong régime might not be as rich?

Mission Hill aside, I think the "pop culture skating" approach is valid, provided we recognize that it's still possible to delve deeply into writers and engage with them in depth. In a way, this is the ultimate tribute: the fact that random TV spectators or video gamers have some idea of what "Lovecraftian" means despite not actually knowing anything about the old man from Providence is a testament to how deeply said old man has influenced the culture. And for everyone who simply leaves it at that, there's bound to be someone else who decides to take it all the way and ends up reading "The Mound" or whatever.

Remember, despite the rapid technological shifts, culture is still slow and conservative. And this has always been the case, otherwise Machen's book would have been The Hill of Immediate Personal and Public Validation for Writers instead of The Hill of Dreams.

As for the perceived decline in originality/literary achievement, we currently have Thomas Ligotti, Quentin S. Crisp, Brendan Connell and Michael Cisco (among others) alive and mostly still putting things out. I'm not really sure who you'd stack up against them from the past? Lovecraft, Machen, sure, but I'm not seeing how the living writers haven't utterly schooled the past not only in terms of inventiveness, style, literary quality and also OUTPUT - seems odd that people are still discussing random Edwardians with a handful of short stories to their name when the aforementioned writers have much more sizable bibliographies that are still growing in both scope and range. Connell has dropped three next level books this year alone, is anyone paying attention? Anyway it's normal...this always happens, but the general trend is up and better.

Ibrahim · 09-20-2017

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

I'm not really sure who you'd stack up against them from the past?

I reread Eliot's Four Quartets a few days ago, and it stacks up against pretty much anything, poetry or prose. It's profoundly dark, profoundly weird, and decidedly cosmic in scope, a monumental piece whichever way you look at it.

I do not mean this as a slight to the writers you mention. Quite to the contrary; sometimes i think i am merely ( like culture ) very slow. My mind is still reeling from some books i read twenty years ago, so i'm not at all inclined to seek out what is "new" or "contemporary." My guess is that, exactly because of their tenuous relation to the mainstream, the authors mentioned can maintain the necessary distance from their epoch to represent it both with more clarity and more incisively cut to the heart of what's universal about it than ( insert fluff of preference/taste of the week ), thus ensuring their legibility a few decades hence, during which time i'll hopefully be alive so i can finally get around to reading them.

I am quite aware of the calm, depth, and imagination that can open up when one has only one book in the house ( having had at one point a mattress and a Qur'an as nearly my sole possessions, with even the house being an object of relative presence ) and am sympathetic to the effects it can have. I often find that nowadays i do not fully inhabit or explore a work before laying it aside to experience the next one, which on the other hand may guard me from being too deeply affected by contact with a work of fiction?

Perhaps i am wilfully keeping myself safe from this embarrassment of riches that is literature in this day & age ?

It is not merely entertainment, after all; and a daily entanglement with the preoccupations, fears, and visions of complete strangers, however aestheticized, can by as tiring and trying as it can be rich and rewarding.

09-20-2017

Writerly types from a specific milieu and academic critics having access to more literature related nomenclature than ever isn't much good when the majority of the population hold writing and reading in contempt, so most artists won't be drawn to it or realise their potential for it, and in culture it will become an increasingly bourgeois and hobbyist activity accessible to an increasingly less diverse group of thinkers all writing for each other because nobody else reads and nobody else writes.

I find it depressing.

Speaking Mute · 09-20-2017

I'd wager there are now more jazz musicians than ever; I also wouldn't be surprised if there were actually more jazz listeners than ever. But with that said, jazz is dead as a popular art form, and its cultural impact is relegated to influencing musicians who don't play jazz. Now, among the devotees left playing jazz, are they up to par with what came before? I doubt it - there are brilliant musicians in their formative stages right now, and whereas I'm sure many will dabble in jazz and maybe even come to love it during the course of their education, these up and comers are going to go towards the praise and pay - which jazz no longer provides. With literature, I suspect many of the people who could have been the great novelists and short story writers are being pulled towards screenwriting and directing for film, video games, and television/streaming for similar reasons. Prose fiction and jazz aren't just competing with other mediums for consumers, but producers as well.

Literary forms aren't immune to dying out - we still read epic poetry, but there's neither a readership demanding new epic poems nor many writers trying to produce them (since qcrisp mentioned werewolves, I have to give a nod to Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth as an anomalous success - the revival has yet to be seen). Prose fiction has only been a major cultural force in the West for a couple centuries, and it's only been the dominant literary form since the 19th century. I personally think the peak was around 1900.

qcrisp · 09-20-2017

To be fair, I know a few people significantly younger than myself who are also better read (and not just comparatively), including Justin, Evans of these boards, and the mysterious S., who features in a recent publication, and perhaps for that reason I am not as despairing as many here seem to be. But I feel I also managed to somehow miss the whole indoctrination into the "don't read - it's boring and you'll end up an egghead" mindset that is fashionable even among intellectuals these days. I was reading as a child not because I thought it was intellectual, but because it was pretty much the most fun it was possible to have, alone or otherwise. I only attained to any snobbishness about it later, after encountering vast swathes of inverted snobbery, from which I took my cue.

Having said that, what does give me cause for... anxiety, or despondency, is simply a combination of the flimsiness of contemporary writing as I generally encounter it, most of it based on making the right kind of bantering social and political noises, and the fact that, in my experience, people graduating from university now (judging by their e-mails, blogs, and so on) are more often than not unable actually to write a sentence, are uninterested in doing so, and take any concern anyone shows for this state of affairs as incipient fascism.

But there are very interesting writers about, as Justin indicates - I would not be involved in publishing (as I am) if I did not think so. We don't know how such writers will be viewed in a hundred years' time, but then again, considering the current state of affairs, we don't know if there'll be a human race in a hundred years' time. And there is a kind of exhilaration to reading something completely contemporary (and not (necessarily) the newspaper pundits' pick-of-the-month), because one has to experience and evaluate it in a relatively virgin manner.

Well, I had more in mind to write, but I'll save that for later, if I manage to get back to this, as work and other such things call.

Druidic · 09-20-2017

One example only. Today only poets read poetry. It's an incestuous audience and it can't be supported.

I'm pretty much in agreement with James' somewhat dour viewpoint on the decline of literature.

Oh, on second thought, make that in complete agreement.

Ibrahim · 09-20-2017

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

And there is a kind of exhilaration to reading something completely contemporary (and not (necessarily) the newspaper pundits' pick-of-the-month), because one has to experience and evaluate it in a relatively virgin manner.

Quite true, & fine salesmanship there, qcrisp & isis: i was immediately tempted to go over to the Snuggly site and hit that paypal button, until i realized i am first awaiting the arrival ( from Cuddly books ) of the daughters of apostasy, and from Comma press, M. John Harrison's latest collection, which then must take their place in the reading pile, which in turn comes after various kinds of work ( i haven't even produced enough pages of drawings so far this year to approach my hoped-for average of a page a day - Own Proper Output First! )

Who stopped reading fiction?

Speaking Mute · 09-21-2017

I actually intended to dedicate this year to reading contemporary horror authors because I was starting to feel like a crumudgeon. I also let myself fall pray to the suggestion that I might just be drawn to obscurity for obscurity's sake. I've consistently kept up with the contemporary authors in the Ex Occidente/Egaeus/Tartarus Press orbit (which now includes Snuggly Books), but I've been quick to pass up the more popular and more American Weird revival. So I set my reservations aside and ordered half a dozen author anthologies that were all critically acclaimed and widely read within the horror community. I read most of them cover to cover and have even gone back to reread some stories to see if I might catch on. They all sucked. I'm ambivalent in regards to Pleasant, but I now understand some of the disparagement of "New Weird". In particular:

1. Prose. I've mentioned in this past, but I'm definitely not a fan of what the English literary establishment has considered the most artful approach to prose in the last sixty years or so: every man writing in the vein of Strunk and (supposedly) Hemingway - sparing adjectives, simple words, short sentences - that compensates for its austerity with unusual and (supposedly) poetic metaphors. The American Weird authors I've read recently take this to its most ridiculous extreme - e.g. "Her prose read like it burned in her blood and spattered out of her. But she also wrote as if she had time to pick up every seashell on some prehistoric beach, examine the sound inside each one until she found that inimitable tone."

2. Formulaic stories; I found most the stories extremely repetitive, with one plot in particular sticking out - a two man setup that leads to a confrontation with what that cinematic masterpiece of Weird Horror "The Never Ending Story" referred to as "THE NOTHING!". This example is why I don't see Justin Isis's suggestion that greater literary analysis has lead authors to better innovate and respond to previous tropes. Since Joshi and other intellectuals like Eugene Thacker have argued that the best Cosmic Horror involves THE NOTHING! - because even Lovecraftian extraterrestrials affront materialist sensibilities - I've noticed this exact same story line being used ad nausuem:

Person X and Person Y are in a remote/exotic location (remote/exotic by suburban white American standards at least), Person Y starts behaving erratically, makes nonsensical statements that imply THE NOTHING! is nigh at hand, alarming Person X. As Person Y acts more extreme, Person X becomes more and more unsure of their surroundings (if in the first person, the narrative hits all the convenient checks for being unreliable). The narrative then abruptly ends - sometimes with an epilogue where Person X recovers and further emphasizes how unreliable the previous narrative, which in turn is just more padding to demonstrate how elusive albeit definitely not supernatural THE NOTHING! is.

This plot arc strikes me as far more rigid and specific than even Victorian ghost stories or Zombie films - however repetitive their situations and conclusions, these formulas at least left space for developing characters, setting, and atmosphere and creative takes on ghosts and zombies. Even the remote exotic/locations used in the above plot arc are just a staging to confront us with the monotonous, ineffable horror that is THE NOTHING!

3. The portrayal of women - this is the funniest one for me; given all the recent political controversies, I know that many of these authors are far to the left to me in terms of identity politics and political correctness - but pussy control and mommy issues are so frequent in these authors' fiction that I have to wonder how many of them are closet Red Pillers. Even stories that attempt to switch up the family drama with daddy issues can't help but include a domineering girlfriend/sister some where in the mix. What's more ironic is that I've read many openly misogynistic authors from the Kinder Kuche Kirche era that were better at varying and developing their female characters. On what some might take as a bright side, if I read any more New Weird in the future, I'm going to stick to female authors.

This also overlaps with formulaic writing I mentioned above - I lost count of how many stories involved the narrator/main character going on a vacation to mend a strained relationship (or recover in the minor variant where the female antagonist bails/breaks up before the vacation date).

...

So after dropping a shipping out a box full of New Weird to an online reseller, I've gone back to my dusty old authors and don't plan to leave for a while. I was never too fond of Machen, but I decided to reread him and have gained more appreciation for his work. I read Byron's Manfred and Kafka's The Burrow for the first time and rank both among some of the best writing I've ever encountered. And then I've been trying to round up translations of Michel De Ghelderode's plays after being blow way by Spells. In between, I've been closing out the translations I've never gotten around to from Calvino, Cortazar, and Meyrink (I just obtained a copy of The Opal and Other Stories). The only living authors I've enjoyed lately are Lincoln Michael, Rhys Hughes, and Paul Auster, and I'm awaiting books by Damien Murphy. I scrapped the other New Weird authors I was planning to read, instead deciding to go through the Romantic poets.

Justin Isis · 09-21-2017