Marco Roth writes about “The Rise of the Neuronovel” in n+1: “Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder.” He thinks it shows “shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are.” I think it’s because we don’t publish enough fuck ups. If modern writers won’t be mentally unstable themselves, then they must, at the very least, try to empathize with those of that condition.
Panning for Gold as Reading and the Creativity of Outsiders
Sculpture by Kohei Nawa
Four years ago, in the back of the top deck of a commuter rail train traveling from the Ukrainian Village to Deerfield in suburban Chicago, a nice enough looking middle aged man started raving about his plan for the “Imperial City of Chicago.”
At first he just started yammering — about city sewage systems, train schedules, etc — like a cranky grandfather, to no one in particular. It was strange certainly, and mothers were gripping the hands of their children tighter as he did this, some people took the steps to the lower level of the car, but in the initial minutes, nothing was yet out of the ordinary.
Then he raised his voice even louder. He said it was time to “gentrify Cottage Grove! New industries! Get rid of the white trash there now and bring back the locals like George Wendt. Bozo’s a local. He needs a new show. Make him a newscaster. Co-anchor Victoria Principal. Make every girl in Chicago look like Victoria Principal. No one’s better looking than the next, all women will be beautiful. All the girls in Chicago will look like Victoria Principal and Morgan Fairchild. And teach them all to speak proper English like in London. A distinct accent for every neighborhood!
[Cockney voice] ‘ello i’m from the Southside of Chicago! This is BBC Chicago!’
“One of these days Southside Chicago will look like Switzerland. Take out the weeds, the garbage, the graffiti. Replace with tall buildings, with ribbon windows like in Italy. Buildings with ribbon windows or buildings that look like Buckingham Palace. Beautiful concrete, beautiful limestone. There will be two Whole Foods in Southside Chicago. one at [names street intersects] Another down on Ashland past the B Dalton. A little bit further down there.”
[He starts singing this in a Frere Jacques-like melody:] “No graffiti, no abandoned buildings in the Imperial City of Chicago!”
“Yes, yes my friends! [points to a woman sleeping] See her? Her with her eyes closed. She’s dreaming of a better Chicago! Lady, thank you for dreaming. Thank you for believing in the dream. We’ll have mauve and pink letters on these trains. German trains. There are 14 German offices in Chicago. Let there be twice as many. Let there be Mercedes Benz buses. Chrome buses. Mauve and pink letters that say ‘Deus servious imperios chicago…deus servious unum imperios chicago.’ We Shall Serve the Empire of Chicago. Mauve and pink the correct color scheme. A crest on the front of the train. We’ll take a steam ship–one of the 27 that arrive at the Chicago Port every day–and take all the bureaucrats into the ocean. Things will get better. We’ll change the weather and make it better, like San Diego’s weather. I will be in charge [He points to a young black man sitting in the
back] That’s Reginald Ferdinand Maxfield the Fifteenth. He’s my second in command in the Imperial City of Chicago.”
I cut and pasted this from an old email to someone I used to know. I transcribed all that I could, as quickly as I could in the front and back covers of Philip K Dick’s “Counter-Clock World.” Later I gave the book to him as a gift. I sometimes wonder if he sold the book to a used bookstore and maybe the next person to own that book is shaking his head and thinking, what sort of crazy person wrote this shit?
But back to the crazy man — his racism is contemptible and his story wasn’t exactly Gormennghast, nevertheless, his ranting revealed a highly involved fantasy world, the kind of imagination that too few contemporary novelists even exhibit.
There was a fascinating panel at Readcon a few weeks back about “outsider writers.” The central question: why is Henry Darger’s art found in mainstream museums and the subject of a documentary, but his 7 million word novel has never been published in any form?
At one point Elizabeth Hand, the moderator, compared Darger with JRR Tolkien as someone singularly obsessed with the world he created. Apparently Tolkein was a terrible speller and his grammar and syntax were always a mess (embarressed to admit, I’ve never read him, and can’t verify this.) You have to wonder….what if Tolkien’s work was recieved by the most type-a editors imaginable — the sort who mistake such errors with limited intellectual capacity? (Slight digression here: I found this wonderful hundred year old article in defense of poor spelling, I keep meaning to share it.) How, as critics do we determine what is Middle-earth and what is the world of the Vivian Girls?
I hate the term “outsider art,” as some touch of mental illness is a necessity for creative genius, and stigmatizing those who fall to far on the spectrum is done so, at the perpetuation of the literary careers of well-groomed perfect i-dotters and t-crossers, whose banal fiction is the real reason (not the Internet, not the Kindle, not the recession) publishing is in such desperation.
Writing a novel is hard work. I’m trying to remember now a quote from Haruki Murakami about writing novels, something about how the the dream must be vivid and continuous, and you have to actually see the hallway and the door in your mind if you write about such things or else you aren’t going to take anyone else there. (A quote I pinned to my wall when I worked on my — regrettably — long abandoned novel.)
Fiction writing requires two primary skills that are often at odds with each other — focus and fantasy. The Clear Channel-ization of fiction means we fail to see much of either. If you are never in the “hallway,” as Murakami may or may not have ever put it, the author of the book you are reading was probably checking his Facebook while writing that passage. And the lack of fantasy, the failure of imagination, goes without saying. Few people can manage to tell a story better than boy grows up in upper-middle class suburbs, goes to college, meets girl, gets married, has child, the end.
Without having looked it, I’d be willing to bet Henry Darger’s seven million word novel has focus and fantasy in spades. So what is missing from it? Cohesion. In addition to focus and fantasy, cohesion is needed or a novel tests a reader’s patience. It’s that whole cliche about how you need to know the rules first in order to know how to break them. Technique matters. But then there’s that other cliche: do you long for “technically masterful” sex?
Now to use that wretched term just one last time, “outsider artists” and “outsider musicians” — like Darger, Freddy Johnson, Roky Erickson — don’t require the same amount of attention as an “outsider writer” would. While I’m certainly not weighing the medium as better for this reason, reading a novel requires far more persistence and patience from the audience than listening to a song or looking at an illustration,
But maybe to enjoy that book by Darger I’ve never read and probably never will, and all those other crazy person-pened works of fiction like it, one has to do an entirely different kind of reading. Instead of line by line, maybe we should skim this kind of work to find gems. Panning for gold as reading. As web surfers we are already used to this kind of semi-engaged reading. It’s what I do from time to time with my unabridged copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy (a great sprawling document of the author’s madness.)
I’ve picked up a number of little self-published zine-like novels from gutter punks, homeless persons, other displaced, society-rejected persons and usually found at least a line or something that had stayed with me. In those kind of texts, you find a lot of repetition; grandiosity or obscenity or cliche or “Imperial City”-like tegious fantasy. The bulk of the text will not connect. It may as well be in another language. Glossolalia as writing. But sometimes you skim and you find just one line that gets right to the heart of the human condition.
That brief eloquence is the pain that only an amateur can exhibit. Your average best-selling novelist knows his mom is reading. He’s afraid to say a lot of things. And when it comes to emotions he never gets… to that hallway I probably imagined Murakami once talked about. (By the way over the course of writing this post I’ve combed through dozens of Murakami interviews and still can’t find that quote. Found this though: “Many readers assume that I enjoy writing such sexual scenes, but that’s not true at all. When I’m writing such a scene, I’m so embarrassed and ashamed that I don’t know what to do with myself. But each time, I say to myself: Haruki, this is your duty! You must not stop!”)
Previously: Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered.
Unfortunately Rick Moody’s essay on Artaud in The Beliver never quite delivers what the description supposes its about “How sickness is, and isn’t, a prerequisite for poetry.” Nevertheless, there are some interesting if meandering bits about the literary fetish for crazy. Here’s what I think of the matter: Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity (via.) Previously.
The Economist reviews Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History starting with the anecdote on the curious habits of 19th century polymath Francis Galton, who would “estimated boredom levels by counting fidgets; in Africa he used a sextant and tape-measure to calculate the proportions of the buttocks of a “Hottentot” woman from afar. Galton also created a “beauty-map” marking every woman who passed as, “attractive, indifferent or repellent.” Davis’ book also discusses obsession as a creative tool, “And so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity.”
Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
“Experimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show.” – George Saunders (via.)
The other night, I attended “No More Bush Tour” at PA’s Lounge, a bunch of bands celebrating the last days of the shrub, including Bobb Trimble, whose obscure early-80s psychedelic records were rereleased on Secretly Canadian last year, the hypnotic Fahey-like guitar sounds of Jack Rose and several others. Between the acts there were literary readings, most memorably Damon Krukowski, (of Damon and Naomi, the best two-thirds of Galaxie 500.)
Krukowski and Yang run Exact Change, publishing experimental classics like Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, and Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring. It’s an impressive catalogue of books (beautifully designed by Yang.)
They focus on Surrealism, Dada, and Pataphysics, and all of the books are at least 50 years old. Nevertheless, Yang and Krukowski receive a fair share of requests to publish new work over the years. Many of the queries are strange. Very strange. One writer says he will “expose Marquis de Sade as the rank amateur he is” with his forthcoming novel including such horrors as “AIDS in preschools,” and other gruesome situations. Another was an extremely bizarre and lengthly erotic work — with numbered paragraphs — about a “brand new spiritual organ.”
I was reminded of the room in the Museum of Jurassic Technology with letters to Mount Wilson Observatory from amateur astronomers. (”Hydrogen, was created by Electricity between Nitrogen and Oxygen and the three forms the Trinity of Life Even as Electricity, Nitrogen and Etholeum form the trinity of all planetary existance. Electricity the (passtime p) thru Nitrogen the passtime Entrance ( ) Hydrogen between Nitrogen and Oxygen and these ( ) forms the air and the water with the surface of the earth.and that of the water between which is the trinity of the worlds existance. By the gathering of the water below and above to form the firmament which in the beginning God called Heaven, and wherein we live.”) And of the colorful stories of friends of mine who looked over the slush piles at their respective publications
Once I was a judge for a film script competition and it was a frustrating experience because, while everything I read was silly, I felt morally obligated to read closely in case I should glaze over the one line that might reveal a seemingly horrible script as a Hal Hartley-style farce.
A letter to Krukowski pronounces “we’re all insane unless something’s going wrong.” A crazy person zen koan that is kind of endearing, and an example of how the Diane Arbus question never went away.
One might look at the variations of “outsider art” and the mixed emotions of exploitation, sympathy, and curiosity of its spectators. And outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston, Roky Erickson, and the documentaries about them that never quite articulated whether their (in Erickson’s case, new-found) success was based on talent or novelty.
Very often, I turn to Paul West’s “Mem, Mem, Mem,” published in The American Scholar (and Harper’s) last autumn, as an example of sifting a golden kernel out of what might otherwise seem like nonsense. In it, West, once a first rate literature scholar, describes his condition of both Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia the only way he can now: in aphasiac language.
You disentangle the least bit of wiry fluff that has been haunting your tongue for half an hour, and assign it to the unwilling project of the human mess. These rank as contributions in some way or other, but the assorted confectioneries are too massive to eat, and the strand of henpecked fluff is too narrow, which makes them both second-rate substitutes and sees them out. What I’m trying to say, in language ever more oblique, is that the human psyche can sometimes see evidence of what is not present to the senses.
The book, The Shadow Factory, was released last April.
The other question this raises is whether we accept “crazy” experimental things from people so long as they appear upstanding. A recent Washington Post article on Jeff Koons says the most surprising thing about Koons is how polite and sane he appears. I find that least surprising. As Mikita Brottman said, “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” Naturally, the normal articulate ones are those most likely to receive grants and succeed in other ways.
Then there’s JG Ballard, whose novel Crash famously received the verdict “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!” from a publisher. That it was ever published must have something to do with Ballard’s record of several conventional(-ish) novels prior and that’s he’s Cambridge educated, undeniably intelligent, and presentable.
Were JG Ballard completely inarticulate about his ideas, and were that his only work, would Crash have the same power? Do we look at the man behind the curtain because we are too timid to align our sympathies with the work of a person who might genuinely be mad?
When it comes to experimental literature (or film, art, etc,) I find myself less capable of explaining what it is I like or dislike about it. And I am reluctant to suggest many of these titles to others simply because I can’t determine whether it’s the work that’s so moving or the result of projecting my own values and ideas on vague atmospheric paragraphs.
This is all a very long way to go about mentioning Mattathias Schwartz’s riveting New York Times magazine piece, The Trolls Among Us.
There’s not much I can build on what was already written (so very well!) by Schwartz, and commented on just about everywhere else. But it’s applicable here, because you find the strangest comments on the most MSM websites: CNN, New York Times. Conviction that their words are worthy of being printed in the grey lady. Finally the crazies have a platform. And so long as it’s left unmoderated, if there is a Cassandra among them, we might find her.
Automatic drawings by Unica Zurn
Previously:
Why Read at All?
Unica Zurn and Rachel Feinstein Currin: Fantasies Embodied
Related links:
- Damon and Naomi
- Damon Krukowski interviewed in The Modern World
- Naomi Yang interviewed in Dust Bureau
- Unica Zurn on Myspace
- “Under-Appreciated Existing Legal Remedies for Trolling, Defamation and Other “Malwebolent” Invasions of Privacy,” TLF
- The Chimeras of Unica Zurn, artnet
- Who cares about Ann Quin? Lee Rourke
”It may be possible that young people who have no experience of a world without online societies put less value on their real world identities and can therefore be at risk in their real lives, perhaps more vulnerable to impulsive behaviour or even suicide. This is definitely a line of reasoning that warrants more investigation and research.” – Dr Himanshu Tyagi at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (via.)
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