Innovative Writing 3

In my last post I noted how restrictively "correct" the university environment can be for writers (and teachers) seeking to do innovative work. Since that word "correct" is now a piece of code, I thought I ought to clarify that I didn't mean "politically correct." There are quite a few writers who think of themselves as "innovative" (if attendance at &Now is a measure), who are the opposite of correct in that sense, whose idea of innovation is quite ordinary point-of-view narrative marked by some violence of imagery or language, some sexual (yawn) explicitness with a naming of parts and a pinch of violence (ooh) against or exploitation of women, some racism carefully attributed to characters within the story. One such writer read before an audience in the Hallwalls Cinema at this last &Now. He was fulsomely introduced and lavishly applauded. He is a visiting professor at some university or other.

No, by "correctness," I simply meant the constant tic of looking over your shoulder to gauge what the departmental taste-makers will approve of. University academics need to keep up with each other's work, and in most areas of research and scholarship this is of course their best practice. In most areas there is an ongoing conversation that can be tough to join if you haven't been following it, and you certainly don't want to join it at a stage that has already been passed. But most disciplines carry on that conversation within the dominant paradigm that sets the questions valid to be asked by that community. Writers don't form that kind of community. It's good that they should get together and celebrate each other from time to time, but what they mostly actually talk about, if they are university writers, is gossip and academic politics. Readers have something to say to each other; writers mostly gather to form or to cement alliances.

Of course this problem of correctness extends outside of universities. There is, as I was saying, a dominant paradigm in mainstream publishing and a canon of correctness that can rival in its strictness the templates that the romance-publishers issue for prospective romance-writers. Even outside of that world there can be a back-drag towards the "hip," usually by a representation of edgy lifestyles, done in what one could call the Loud Style. Print has no actual volume, but you know what I mean. Its complement could be called the Mutter, a style that keeps its eyes downcast and its hair in front of its face, delivering snippets of inwardness. I realize that these styles are practiced by a generation younger than my own, and therefore I do not comment on the value of it. Writing can only have value for readers who are in a position to make use of it, and there are a variety of uses to which writing can be put, morbid fantasies among them.

Innovative writing, though, is (I contend) the writing that creates a new readership by suggesting the new uses that can be made of what that readership is being asked to read, what content and what language-uses, and not writing that addresses a pre-existing community ("market" would be the more accurate term) organized around certain lifestyle markers, whether those are the pipe-tweed-and-elbow-patches set that Henry Miller detested or the droopy waifs of today. In other words innovative writing demands readers who have some confidence in their ability to deal with something never seen before, readers restless with the offerings that dribble or spout from the usual pipelines.

Therefore one question that could occupy innovative writers is how to train innovative readers with some critical sense about what actually constitutes innovation. We need more anthologies of what Queneau called les fous littéraires, and we need those anthologies to break away from the warhorses of Modernism and Post-Modernism. We have Rothenberg, Kostelanetz, Messerli, Gross & Quasha, but what else do we have? (Please help me fill in my ignorance.) And could an anthology, or a series, of folies littéraire be addressed to readers instead of students, so that the goal could be delight instead of improvement? How about an &Now purely for readers?

To be continued.