More on the Remix
By amy ross. Filed in books, writing |Tags: David Shields, Lauren Slater, Lying, Mark Athitakis, modernism, postmodernism, Reality Hunger, remixing, whither the novel?
Just finished reading Mark Athitakis’s energizing review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and found it unexpectedly relevant to my last post. In answer to the question, whither contemporary fiction?, Athitakis gets this out of Shields:
The mash-up, the collage, the remix—this is the stuff of the future, and this is the stuff that Shields’ great fiction of the future must embrace. More Davis and Sorrentino, less Langer and Franzen. It will be brief, it won’t pretend to hide the author, and in its formal invention it will resist all efforts to assimiliate it.
So, there we are: back at begging/borrowing/stealing our material, either from other writers or from our own lives.
The thing is, philosophically, I’m pretty much behind this idea. But as a writer? I just can’t think of that much I really want to steal. In fact, I’ve tried to insert other writers’ words into my prose, but it always stands out, looking awkward — it just doesn’t flow right with the other stuff, the stuff I’ve actually written (probably to the credit of these other authors). Is it hopelessly regressive of me to even care about things like “flow”? Maybe I should boldly flaunt the seams in my writing! But I don’t know — although I’m sure it can be well done, I don’t really find anything inherently interesting about doing that.
And then there’s the other angle, the mixing of memoir and fiction to gloriously postmodern effect. Once again, I appreciate the idea, and I’ve seen it done marvelously well (I recently read Lauren Slater’s maybe-memoir, Lying, for class and was pretty much blown away). But as a writer… God, I’m just not all that interested in my own damn life (and so I hardly expect anyone else to be). Except for little slivers here and there, it’s not a story I feel compelled to tell, even with a fictional gloss over it.
So where does that leave us, as writers? I don’t want to write what Athitakis calls “more hackneyed novels with stale plots,” and anyway, I’m not hopelessly devoted to traditional narrative. But how do you write a non-traditional narrative that doesn’t sound just like all the other non-traditional narratives of your day? How do we make it exciting, and not just a gimmick? And just how exciting and original is this concept, anyway? Didn’t Joyce and the other modernists employ pretty similar techniques? In almost a century, haven’t we come up with any new tricks? If what we want is to create something fresh and new, is borrowing the best way to do that?
Um, yeah. I don’t know. But as I try to plot out my next novel, these are the questions that stress me out.
Wednesday, February 17th 2010 at 11:16 am |
Seems to me that it’s more important to have something you are trying to say or accomplish, a new way in which you want your audience to see the world, and then think, how can I use these tools that are available to me, which include the work of other writers, to get my point across to my audience? A set of tools isn’t much good without a project to use them on.
Letters of Abigail Adams on their own: boring. Letters of Abigail Adams quoted to show that even in the 1700′s women were dying to get a chance to participate in the government: priceless.
But maybe this is an historian’s look at things. I could see where a writer might legitimately be more concerned with the writing itself and less with the message.
Wednesday, February 17th 2010 at 11:51 am |
haven’t you heard that the medium is the message? ;)
no seriously, for me I think the two are totally interdependent. cool pomo techniques in the service of a bland, hackneyed story is just a gimmick for gimmickry’s sake. But while a compelling, original story told in the same old ways can be great, critically acclaimed, even a best-seller — it’s not going to change the world.
And yet, it’s not simply a matter of squishing the two things together. You need a story that serves a technique, a technique that serves the story, or else it’s all pointless. Right now I have some technique ideas and some story ideas but I can’t get them to line up with each other.
Thursday, February 18th 2010 at 8:10 pm |
You’re asking fascinating questions, anyway, even though I know nothing about what the answer is! I do like what you said in your comment that the story and technique need to be essential to each other, not one forced upon the other just for the sake of being innovative or whatever.
*goes back to writing stale plot in traditional narrative structure* :)
Thursday, February 18th 2010 at 9:00 pm |
Thanks. I don’t think there’s one good answer… And the problem with answers is I see them all the time: books that make me go “Oh! That was a great idea!” But by then it’s already been done… ;)