What bliss. Writing has been blessed with the
merchant class, at last. Like everything else, fire-and-forget sales ideals flicker
about like lost insults looking for a subject. Not that the industry was any
great monument to anything much in the past. Now, however, it’s a verbal
version of Where’s Waldo? It’s hard to see books like Catch 22, Brave
New World, or any of the other groundbreaking literature of the 20th
century being welcomed in this environment.
The basic mechanics of the writing techniques at
present are:
1.
Premise/background
2.
Problem
definition
3.
Narrative
4.
Solve
problem/if literate enough, add twist.
5.
Smile
smugly and tell everyone what a great writer you are.
Into this process you add some conceptual corn
starch, like characters. These nuisances are then categorized as
“protagonists”, “facilitators”, sympathy objects, and, strangely enough,
“filler”, where authors can produce the text equivalent of Styrofoam in
humanized forms. The filler process for characters goes well with the equally
inspiring “descriptive filler”, in which the least article or piece of
furniture can be immortalized as worthy of several hundred or thousand words.
This elegant solution to trying to make a form of
Lego out of the English language has had some impact. Now, people can more or
less follow this superhuman extravaganza of events to the extent of actually
being able to discuss the subject:
“Duhhhh… it’s about these… people? And they do
things? And then someone tries to kill them? I won’t tell you what happens…”
If it were only that interesting. Generally, the
formats don’t allow for much in the way of anything new. The vague idea of
including “modern” things usually shows up about ten years after whatever it
was happened. To this day, the internet is a hotly ignored entity, only
referred to when it’s necessary to include a bit of information which was too
complex to include in the narrative.
More likely is the backdrop of some well known media
idiom, gracious living, gracious poverty, gracious dining, gracious bowel
movements… If it contains a verb or action, it will inevitably refer to cliché.
Like most other media, the publishing industry seems to be fully convinced that
their customers are idiots, and is obviously trying to make sure that they are.
Any strain on the intellect will therefore be entirely accidental.
Some writers, however, benefit from this serene environment in which all things are as someone else said they should be. There are always a few in any class of art who just follow the breadcrumbs, and do everything they’re told to do, and benefit from the lack of built-in reasons to criticize their work. They don’t have “attitude”, they have a “can do” approach, which is a synonym for a doormat. (Not that anyone sees them that way, because most of the social interactions are fundamentally expedient, rather than personal.) They don’t have “niches” because they work on general fiction themes, or even less demandingly, celebrities, or other known factors. The decades of dumbing down have finally paid off for them. An eager audience of literal minded sheep absorbs this macro-based mediocrity. The sheep then produce contracts, and sign them up for endless series of works which could be done by a canary.
I have a vision of some niggling, fashionable
restaurant, where the process of mental menopause is a status symbol among the
flabby souls of porcine peasantry. I see small mouths in fat cheeks, and fat egos
with small minds. You can feel the decay, smell the lack of intelligence, and
taste the sour little thoughts.
You’d think I’d get out more…
So much for the stained tablecloth of evidence that
a crime has been committed. What’s bothering me is the effect this rubbish, and
the rabble that produce it, are having on the use of language.
Trash literature is definitely nothing new. The 60s
produced so much utter garbage as pulp that it’s surprising that the entire
human race didn’t suffocate. It was nearly as bad as 70s TV, and that’s well
down among the more stench-worthy sewage. The difference between actors with
gruesome hairstyles and writers with gruesome writing styles is debatable, but
I’d say the actors do less damage overall.
Literature is supposed to be the best use of
language. All any two beings have to use as a form of communication, in any
form, is language, of whatever sort. If the ability to use and understand
language is severely debased, everyone suffers.
It’s becoming very clear that education is doing much
to make a really hideous situation worse. I doubt if it’s the educators’ idea,
because it makes their job a lot less rewarding, and a lot harder. That said, I’ve
met intelligent kids who are really having to work hard to go beyond literal
readings. It’s almost like the hysterical religious dogma, ingrained to the
point of brainwashing.
Writing, more or less by definition, is a holistic
thing. A picture, of whatever quality, is produced, and that’s the frame of
reference. If you can keep the references integrated to the picture, you can do
a lot more than just write literal things. Much larger metaphors, and bigger
ideas, can be approached far more efficiently.
Some forms of writing are holistic in a different
way, joining elements to a theme, which supposedly produces a synergistic
effect, creating a larger idiom for the elements. This would be more of a quilt
than a picture, but the commonalities are used to make a single entity, with
its bigger ideas and framework. Gothic Black is a case in point, with
me. I have a series of stories which have an idiom which just doesn’t attach to
my other work. I’ve tried to produce a thematic book for the idiom, and build
up a different environment as a background. The alternative would be to come up
with some patchy collection of bits and pieces with no thematic associations,
which is a bit like eating off the floor; messy, of dubious taste, and not too
well organized.
Literalism is the best possible method of entirely
missing all of these added dimensions to any expression, let alone any book or
collection of stories. It’s a return to the pre-Modernist approach, where the “single
meaning” so reviled by Asimov and other significant writers was the rule. Problem
being, all meanings have contexts, and if you get either wrong, you’ve missed
the information. It’s the literary equivalent of Creationism, like nothing’s
ever happened since.
The original idea of “simplified communication” had
nothing to do with “simple-minded communication”. Media works in strange ways,
though, and the doctrinaire training has seeped through into areas where it’s
entirely inappropriate. Try and read
Shakespeare, literally.
No the writer does not have a “duty” to explain
everything to the reader. Therein dictatorship, and omniscient writers. No way,
not now, not ever. The reader has the inalienable right to interpret. That’s
what readers are for, and good luck to them.
Even more alarming it might make the pretty shaky
forms of expression worse. Imagine the current muck, with endless qualifiers,
maybe even a thesaurus with each book. Waldo would never be the same again. He’d
have no hope of finding out where he was, and neither would anyone else. He’d
get all insecure, and start wearing plaid. We’d have a world full of oppressed-looking
people, hunched over their dictionaries, reading a book a year.
If you teach languages, you probably know what your
language can do, when it doesn’t have
some collection of ignoramuses trying to turn it into a piece of cardboard. Ignore
the piglets and their unhygienic swill, and you’ll at least have the pleasure
of knowing you did nothing to produce it. Teach your students to write like
human beings.
It worries me, every time I see it, this drab, droning
garbage calling itself literature. It’s like a dunghill calling itself the Taj
Mahal. To paraphrase Berthold Brecht, “The sow is giving birth again.” Time for
a bit of porcine contraception, perhaps?
If they’re not trained to do this hideous thing to
the languages, they won’t know how.