This is a little confused. I might come back to it later, but it’s one of those things that I think becomes clearer when writing my way through it.
There’s a lot of ‘new writing’ outlets in Manchester.They range from small publishing houses like Comma Press, magazines - Transmission and Bewilderbliss, sold locally and online -, regular readings at the library, reading nights like No Point in Not Being Friends recently at the Deaf Institute, and more. Manchester University and Manchester Met both have Creative Writing programmes. Though my experience was pretty shoddy, the course was going through difficult times and may well have improved since then. The fact that the department tries to integrate some of its writing into the literature scene (hate that word!) is probably a good indicator.
A lot of these are probably very good. I know a lot of people involved in these kinds of things and many of them write things I enjoy reading, hearing and seeing. A lot of them, though, suffer from AchinglyHip disorder. These days, it probably has to be a disorder. it can’t just be people being twats.
So many suffer from the post-post modernist disease. One such was the play I saw this week at the Royal Exchange, 0.0008. Part of the International Festival, it was a new work with one woman performing a roving monologue in the Studio. I have no idea what it was about. On the way home, with an English studenty friend of mine, we started talking about things like structure, meaning and form.
Post-modern, as I understand it (and I may be mistaken) is often destabilising what has come before. Like every generation, it tries to destroy the one that has come before; as the Woolf generation destabilised the Tennyson, post-modernism destroys its ancestors. Using metafiction, mutating forms and questioning the idea of the almighty author to imply that everything is always twisting around. A poem becomes novel becomes play becomes scientific text becomes something else entirely, like words trying to find the right space for them to mean what they intend. It reflects the fragmented nature of post-WW2 life, when the world has come closer and further apart at the same time. They struggle with questions of meaning; what has meaning, and why, and whether it means the same to everyone - are there any universal meanings, anything which can pull those fragments together. While I struggle with aspects of modernism, mostly in the poetry actually, I also enjoy the questioning and the playing with form, making it less subject to absolute rules which cannot be broken.
Post-post modern (what else do you call it? The modernists really weren’t thinking ahead) is almost a statement that no, nothing unites us. Everything and everyone is utterly fragmented that we can’t comprehend one another’s worlds.
This is one of the problems I had with the play the other night, and with a lot of the writing at the places above. There’s a sense that there’s no hope for those fragments to come together, no hope at all. Everything’s infused with despair. The problem is that when despair is so isolated, it ceases to touch others, and that I think - in writing, this becomes a bit clearer to me - is what I want from art. I want it to touch me, somehow, to leave me with some kind of feeling that this has been an important experience. Despair can be written superbly. Sarah Kane is a fine example; her writing is torturous, despairing and still manages to touch a deep emotion.
A lot of the AchinglyHip disorder is the style of writing - when it’s flowing sentences that continue for two paragraphs, phrases that you just know the writer sat back, though, ‘fuck, I’m good,’ then went and drank whisky at the local pub while reading something they think makes them look deep and interesting when the rest of us think they look a bit poncy, really. It’s the writer-as-persona, made cool by Hemingway and the Paris modernists, and all the tortured writers who managed to drag something beautiful and creative from their pain (this is a whole other post on the depressive/creative mythology). Hemingway’s prose approaches what I’m talking about, as does Fitzgerald at times. The difference is that while they wrote something powerful and emotive, those with AchinglyHip disorder write something that impresses themselves and nobody else can understand.