Idle Chatter
By Morgan Meis
Monday, May 23, 2005
These are the opening comments from the panel discussion about the fate of the novel, fiction vs. non-fiction, etc., at Flux Factory around the NOVEL show. I publish them here as they relate, at least indirectly, to issues of neo-sincerity and other idly chatterous concerns.
It's not often expressed in exactly this way but one of the characteristic features of modern thought, or what is sometimes referred to as the 'high modern', is that it is worried about nearly everything all the time. You could call it hyper-criticality or uber-reflexivity or any number of lovely sounding phrases but it still comes down to worrying and it still comes down to death--the death of painting, the death of sculpture, the death of theater, the death of God, the death of philosophy, and, of course, the death of the novel.
All this killing and death had something to do, I think, with the idea that modern works of art were required to make the definitive statement about their particular form or medium and by doing so to exhaust the possibilities. Let's look at painting for an example. One of the things you could say about Barnett Newman, for instance, is that he tried to find the most essential gesture of painting, making a line, or a mark, on a canvass, and express that move in its innermost essence. Lay it bare you might say, get directly to the heart of the matter. It's as if he wanted to say 'here is painting at its greatest depth and purest moment, everything else is just extra, don't bother messing around with pigments anymore, I completed painting and I killed painting, … fuck you, I win' There was a terrible and terribly productive competitiveness to the abstract painters around those times. They were in a race toward the center of truth.
And you could look at a lot of the great works of minimalism in this way. Here's the truth of wood, here's the truth of metal, here's the truth of light, here's the truth of shape. Boom, it's done. Once you've said the truth, there isn't really anything else to say. It is a killer instinct, that truth instinct. Truth and death, friends forever. And the kind of modern artist I'm talking about would stay up very late in lofts around the city watching, I don't know, Cassavetes movies, smoking galloises, occasionally punching their friends and rivals, and worrying desperately about whether or not they were even close to capturing the truth. They wanted to be close to death in their commitment to the absoluteness of their project. And though I'm teasing them a little bit about that it was a very serious thing indeed. I'm always amazed by the works that came out of it. If you can, for instance, wander around the Dia Beacon and not be affected by the fact that something profound was achieved then you are, I'm afraid, just a little bit stupid. The fact that modernism's claims to truth are completely insane and surely wrong is no excuse for being a ninny. Rothko thought about painting so hard that... he... died. He thought himself to death. Whatever you think of contemporary artists like Jeff Koons or writers like Dave Eggers, and I'd be happy to defend either of them, they would be just as interested in thinking themselves to death as in eating a shit sandwich.
Times have changed, which is never a bad thing by the way. And it has changed for writing too. The modernist mind loved the novel for a few years back there because it seemed like the novel had a special lens into contemporary experience. Life itself, was thought of as something experienced much like in the narrative structure of the novel: an independent bourgeois subject looking out upon the manifold and so forth. The novel was going to tell us about being modern people, it was going to sort out all the alienation, or at least be the definitive statement on the matter. The novel, I dare say it, was going to tell us who we are, or who we had become. If you stop and think for a moment, you'll reflect that that is some serious shit to have on your table.
When Joyce talked about wanting "to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" he actually meant it. He wasn't just letting something fly, a bit of bragadociousness at the pub. He actually meant to do it.
When William Gaddis said:
"That's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight..." he wasn't talking about spinning a good yarn. He was talking about telling the frickin truth, once and for all, expose the entire world as a fraud. Boom, it's done. And if Gaddis really believed what he was saying when he said that, . . . and I'm perfectly prepared to take him at his word that he did, then he also had to believe that anyone who was going to put pen to paper after that was going to indulge in the utterly pointless practice of adding appendages to the Last Word—full caps. No one will ever know the extent to which being a great modernist also meant being a bit of an asshole. But it certainly meant being a special kind of person.
Well, nobody really thinks about the novel that way any more, not really, not really really. Some people may pretend to but they're lying and you know it, and I know it, and more importantly they know it. William Gaddis already feels like he is calling out to us from another world, another sensibility.
Beckett said it best and said it rightly when he said 'I can't go on, I'll go on." One of the most interesting things about the world is that it simply churns away, relentlessly, pitilessly, ... it keeps going, which is the final and devastating response to every millenarian impulse cooked up by minds so far. The world does not give even two shits about all our grandiosity, which is no reason, by the way, to stop trying.
So, all that said, I do think it is an interesting thing to stop and reflect here and there on seemingly masturbatory subjects like 'whither the novel' or 'what is the state of fiction' or other such poppycock. Stuff matters, literature matters, meaning matters, I would propose. I would also propose that the practices of those who still go on writing fiction and writing novels has changed from what it was in those heady modernist days, it has entered a new and different phase that is partly characterized by forms of hybridization and a new synthesis and tension between fiction and non-fiction. But I leave it as an open question as to how, and why and for what.
