In response to "Will Self and Modernism"

In response to the "Will Self: Modernism and Me" thread on the Guardian (with minor additions and typos corrected). 

I have enjoyed Wil Self's writings on these pages before, but this particular piece, I must say, is unfortunately self-indulgent beyond words, even though I hate to agree with those naysayers who have an aversion towards so-called 'big' words. It is ironic that Will Self counts Franz Kafka as one of his literary heros, for it was Franz Kafka who said, in critiquing Charles Dickens:

" Dickens's opulence and great, careless prodigality, but in consequence passages of awful insipidity in which he wearily works over effects he has already acheived... There is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style... his use of vague, abstract metaphors." (Kafka cited in Gabriel Josiponvici's -- yep, the same Josiponvici of whom Self waxed lyrical about in his article above -- introduction to Franz Kafka's "Collected Stories", Everyman's Library, p. xv, my emphasis.)

Although Dickens' and Self's verbosity are of very different kinds, I think Kafka's trenchant critique against heartless overfloridity can be equally stinging where Self's writing in the above piece is concerned. Many commenters have already pointed out passages of "awful insipidity" and heartless, overwrought style in Self's writing above, so I won't belabour them here. I just want to say that it is a bit unfair to portray those critical of Self's style above as brainless philistines who can't be bothered learning big words. I myself love reading philosophical tracts by Continental philosophers in my spare time (yes, really); that doesn't mean that I am not allergic to overly florid writing that wants to wear the stamp of cleverness so earnestly on its sleeve. I can stomach, nay, actually admire, playful cleverness; but Self is just too woodenly displaying his learning (evidenced by the number of thesaurus words conspicuously showcased) in the above article for me to enjoy this piece. Sorry Will.

I also must agree with quite a few commenters here and say that Will Self has got his idea of modernism arse-backwards. What he's straining for is actually not modernism, but post-modernism. What he perceives as his "modernist" critique of pre-modernist writing (or Romantic writing) is actually postmodernist critique of modernist writing (linearity of structure; idea of straightforward progress; technical mastery -- all these are stylistic markers not just of modernist architecture but also of modernist literature, fuelled by a postwar optimism that in retrospect could look trite and naive and non-human.)

So unfortunately Self's bellyaching about not being able to find a 'modernist' way forward is precisely because he's misunderstanding about the task that lays before him. Sure, he made a side note about postmodernist writing not being up to the job by merely "copy-and-pasting" narratives. But that's doing postmodernism a disservice, since bricolage and pastiche are not the only tools at the postmodernist's disposal.

The things that Self admits to hankering after -- chief amongst which being the insertion of authorial will inside the story as a way to destablise and democratise text -- is something that another British novelist, the unabashedly postmodernist Mr. Gilbert Adair, does extremely well. Unfortunately, Will Self gave no indication that he's ever read the late Mr. Adair's work. And this omission seems especially jarring when Self goes on and on about how much he is hoping to find a way out of the modernist morasse to which English fiction has descended. And especially when he wrote about how JG Ballard found a way out via science fiction; he seems to have not realised that another British novelist has also found a way forward via pastiching genre fiction (in Adair's case, it's detective fiction), where Adair entertainingly inverts the well-worn tropes of detective novels to create wonderful spaces not visible in conventional narrative arcs and characterisation.

So whilst I applaud Will Self for nailing the malaise of English novels on its head by arguing that the avant-garde is not about saying the 'unsayable' by merely injecting the taboo into the conventional a la Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh; that it is actually about writing the 'unwritable' by boldly experimenting with form and confounding readers' narratival expectations; Self is entirely mistaken by casting himself as the Lone Mariner in the above article struggling against the tide where none had gone before him. Not only has the late Gilbert Adair already shown us the way through the murky waters of English fiction by his rhetorical brilliance; other contemporary writers are also figuring out ways to move the English novel forward (cf. Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell). Although Egan and Mitchell may well be described as 'bantamweight' writers (to borrow another commenter's useful metaphor), and Adair's novels are sadly neglected by the mainstream (not unexpected given that he was one of the very first to have bravely swam against the conventional tide), it is completely disingenuous (and self-indulgent) of Self to portray himself as a lone voice in the wilderness and forget to pay his debt to others already shining the beacon before him.Rather than being the first truly 'modernist' (or 'postmodern') English novel as Self is so painstakingly portraying his latest work as, 'Umbrella' will have to compare itself with the benchmark set by the late Adair.

Against e-book promotion on the Guardian summer reading thread

In reply to this book thread "Summer reading 2012":

Thank you to those contributors above who proudly admit that they don't own a kindle even if Guardian keeps on plugging its advertorials whenever they could for Kindles and IPads (of the latter, if you read the Technology pages, even hardcore Apple fans such as meestersmith are sick of the bias shown by the Guardian when Charles was reviewing the latest Android device).

It's a shame that the Guardian can't seem to give the whole e-book thing a rest, even when simply asking authors / journos to nominate their summer reading.

It seems to be assumed that one MUST now, by decree of the Guardian-sanctioned literati, leave Big Fat Books behind as you are only allowed to consume them in electronic form, because to do otherwise will cause untold damage to your wrists and wallet (via luggage charge) and most importantly, will be Deeply Unhip in An Electronic Age.

Me. I just shake my head sadly at this state of affairs wrought by people so brainwashed by consumerism that they suddenly find all kind of faults with physical books that have been perfectly serving us readers for centuries until the corporates want to start selling us a new bottle. I can't express this more eloquently than Zygmunt Bauman himself, whose physical book (I lament the fact that I even had to put the word "physical" to denote a book!) I've just finished recently:

"One kind of distress is a side-effect of living in a consumer society. In such a society, the roads are many and scattered, but they all lead through shops. Any life pursuit, and most significantly the pursuit of dignity, self-esteem and happiness, requires the mediation of the market; and the world in which such pursuits are inscribed is made up of commodities -- objects judged, appreciated or rejected according to the satisfaction they bring to the world's consumers. They are also expected to be easy to use and bring satisfaction immediately and in a user-friendly manner, calling for little or no effort and certainly no sacrifice on the user's side... One way or another, the offending object (not up to its promise, too awkward for trouble-free use, or squeezed dry of the pleasures it was capable of giving) is disposed of. One does not swear oaths of loyalty to things whose sole purpose is to satisfy a need, a desire or a want."

(p. 107 from "Liquid Life")

I am genuinely saddened by the trend that more and more readers and even writers themselves see books as the "offending object", now all of a sudden "too awkward for trouble-free use" just because the people who want to sell us new gadgets have told us that you can't carry real books on travel holidays anymore as they are all by definition "too bulky" simply by dint of their "crime" of existing in real three-dimensional space.

Who would have thought that we readers are just mere consumers of literature? Somehow in the last couple of years, simply because of the appearance of an electronic reading gadget on the market, many readers are all of a sudden turning up their noses at physical books, books that have served us for centuries if not millenia. Those of us who dare to question the value proposition of e-books have been unceremoniously insulted and jeered on book threads as stick-in-the-mud Luddites who fail to "get with the programme", and the most damning insult of all, as people who "fetishise" books as an "object"!!!!! This, spoken by the very same people who never reckon with their own unthinking gadget fetishism, who never stopped to ask themselves, Why the hell am I complaining about physical books and looking down on physical book lovers just because I personally prefer a newfangled reading gadget?

If we (and by we, I meant real book lovers) have really objectified reading the way the e-book evangelists have accused us of, we would have no qualms about dumping the old book in favour of a new gadget exactly the way the e-book evangelists have themselves behaved. But no, it is actually precisely because we don't fetishise books as objects that we are not persuaded of the value of newfangled gadgets purporting to give us "new books". It is precisely because we book lovers see ourselves as far more than mere book consumers that we do actually swear oaths of loyalty to our physical books -- those friends with whom we have travelled and journeyed far and wide to distant horizons, and deeply into the human condition, those friends who carry our personal history within their pages by the way we've scrawled marginalia and dog-earred them and by the bookmarks and dedications we made within their bodies. Only self-interested sociopaths will turn their nose upon their loyal and dependable friends of hundreds of years' standing, and sneer at those old-fashioned enough to want to remain loyal to their old friends.

(Btw, my comments are pre-modded for some time now because I previously criticised Guardian journalists for their soft-pedalling of our demand for real justice on the LIBOR scandal, so I won't be too surprised if the mods too deem this too critical to see the light of day).

Amended to add:

Oh, and "Liquid Life" by Zygmunt Bauman is a great read for all seasons, but especially great for summer of 2012 as its arguments are very pertinent to recent events as uncovered in the banking sector -- you do have to read through to the final chapters though to get the full force of Bauman's argument, but it is a slim book and it even has a picture of people swimming and relaxing in an azure blue pool on the cover if one needs to pretend one's reading a light-weight summer book rather than a solid but succinct treatise of political philosophy on one's holiday.

Metropolis finale

"The mediator between the head and the hand must be the heart."

--- Fritz Lang, Metropolis

Bookish quotation 3 for deckchair competition

Roddy Doyle:

"I knew all the books in the house. I knew their shapes and smells. I knew what pages would open if I held them with the spine on the ground and let the sides drop."

-- Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, p.75 (and what a beautiful argument against e-books!) (by the way, apropos of the Julian Barnes thread, this was one of the first hardback books I got, it was a bargain-priced £1.99 and it still has that sticker on the jacket to prove it! Hard-back, with dust jacket still intact, alas, it was only a reprint edition in 1993, so not a first edition, oh well (it probably wouldn't have been just 1.99 even in early 90s bargain prices!). Anyway, this is one of my favourite books ever and I like having it physically with me, and now, opening the book again to locate the quote after all these years, I'm a little sad to see the pages slightly yellowing around the edges already, even though it still looks pristine outside. But then I got reading one of my favourite passages again, that quietly heart-breaking part about how Paddy was trying so hard to mediate between his da and his ma by remembering his spellings and syllables, which had so much resonance for me when I first read it and still finds the passage resonating again after all these years... thanks for the chance to revisit a lost country.)

Bookish quotation 1 for deckchair competition

Yiyun Li

"I want to interfere with history, making things up at will, adding layers to legend... The scenes always move me, as they are the central scenes of a hero's story. I want the story to be about bravery. But always I am stopped."

(excerpted from "What has that to do with me?", first appeared in the Gettysburg Review, vol. 16 no. 2, re-printed at the end of the "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers". Here Li was not referring to her stories, but about the difficulty of recounting history, specifically that from her own experiences before she left China for America. It struck me that, as the powers-that-be have no qualms about re-writing history, the writers themselves conversely become ever more cautious about the way they tell their stories.)

Bookish quotation 2 for deckchair competition

Zadie Smith:

"But you'll like it."

"Why, because she's black?"

"No - becuase it's really good wriitng."

-- from "Changing My Mind" p. 3

"The truth is, black women writers, while writing many wonderful things, have been no more or less successful at avoiding falsification of human experience than any other group of writers."

-- from "Changing My Mind" p. 9 (I feel that the above second quote would make a great companion deckchair to Yiyun Li's quote I cited above -- that is, provided that both of these quotes are selected rather than disqualified from the competition due to word length as well as the fact that they aren't exactly paens to literature but about the difficulty of relating truth in fiction.) And, as I too don't have a Kindle (not that I would even if I could), I shall stop here and come back another time with other selections that may be more to the spirit of the exercise.