Keitai shosetsu

I'm currently preparing my PhD proposal on precariousness and contemporary fiction. To give a gloss on it, it will question contemporary literature's ability to adequately represent a world grown out of postmodernism and postmodernity in the last ten years, a world which I think is primarily characterised by precariousness, from the quotidian (lifestyle trends and job security or lack of) to the extraordinary - those attempts by Western governments to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists or the banking crisis/credit crunch/recession/depression.

I'm going to look at some novels by writers who tackle this world one way or another, with some doing better than others, and end up saying that they're all pretty much failing. In the same way that the early twentieth century needed modernism's upheaval, I think this period needs its own shake-up. No author, at least no author of mass readership, has, for instance, gotten to grips with the internet in any significant way, either as subject matter or - and this is what I'm most interested in - form. You can tell how insufficient literature is when Joseph O'Neill's beautifully written but formally conservative Netherland is praised as "new territory, or at least new subject matter, claimed for fiction" for talking about Google Earth.

Today I've been reading parts of Randall Stevenson's 12th volume of the Oxford English Literary History covering 1960-2000 The Last of England? and discovering how David Lodge wondered at this division of subject matter and form in an essay from 1971 called "The Novelist at the Crossroads". There is most likely a long line of essays of this nature. I suppose it's a fairly fundamental question. I'm about to read Jonathan Franzen's infamous "Harper's essay", now collected in the book How To Be Alone, about the evils of the experimental novel. That Franzen is such a big seller may well not be unconnected to the lack of the sort of experimentation seen at modernism's height.

So I'm searching high and low for glimpses of new forms. I have a suspicion that the internet may have something up its sleeve, though I'm not sure what it will be like and when it will appear. Today, though, I discovered keitai shosetsu, the Japanese phenomenon of the cellphone novel. Dana Goodyear is widely commended for writing the best English-language article on the literary form of teenagers and 20-somethings, but I discovered it through this article by Barry Yourgrau on Salon.com. The cellphone novel, is, written by "Japan's vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee."

They are extremely popular: "In 2007 -- keitai shosetsu's annus mirabilis --half the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones. Overall list-topper "Love Sky," by the self-styled "Mika," has sold 2. 9 million copies." Even "Jakucho Setouchi, the Marguerite Duras of Japan, revealed herself as "Purple," author of a keitai shosetsu, "Tomorrow's Rainbow," about a teen's search for love after her parents' traumatizing divorce. Delightfully, Setouchi is also a celebrated 86-year-old Buddhist nun who wrote a contemporary update of "The Tales of Genji," Japan's racy ur-novel classic."

The precariousness that I'm interested in appears here, in connection with a new form of literature. Yourgrau explains how his attempts were hindered by writing them longhand first, then typing up the finished pieces. Not so the more "genuine" ones: "Keitai shosetsu, however, exist in vast online pools, where writers and readers can dynamically engage with each other. And that's key. Yoshi shaped "Deep Sky" based on ongoing hits and e-mails." It is in these Mills and Boon-style stories that perhaps what I'm looking for reveals itself most clearly. These are novels that not just through subject matter but crucially through form engage with contemporary lived experience. They do not look down on this experience from a rarefied distance, but speak directly out of it. They have precariousness built into their very distribution - text messages are easily lost, deleted or ignored, and their authors canvas opinions on storylines through the same medium that those storylines are distributed. Whether these cellphone novels come to be seen as a sort of twenty-first century imagism is of course unlikely (although thinking about it, there is a certain similarity in the vividness of the imagery, the short bursts of text etc), and apparently the American equivalent, Twitter fiction, hasn't taken off to nearly the extent that keitai shosetsu has, but I'm sure its the first of many new forms. To me at least, they claim far more "new territory" for fiction than Joseph O'Neill does.

Growing Up

Every now and again I remember this photo blog. Found this photo on there today. Love it!

Oorutaichi

Catching up with Click Opera I came across this guy:



I think he's great, and pretty much agree with everything Momus says about him in this earlier post on him. I love how he creates complex web-like music, where he takes sounds and styles from all over the place and instead of just putting them all together and offering that to the listener, he twists each one and then twists the one-to-one relation each bit has with another and then twists the entire thing. It's a succession of subversions that makes the whole thing really exciting. (Here's the video that Momus links to, it's my fave one I think).



I'm currently flying free with regards to the Masters, insofar as I have no fixed deadline. I am reading various books that will be useful and keeping my eyes and ears open as usual. This guy's music caught my attention for the way it both is and represents a navigation through a world of signs that Bourriaud's altermodern theories talk about. Oorutaichi is obviously a man of his time, not fighting against this plethora of signs but using them all in the service of great music. It occured to me whilst watching the videos that blogging is an exemplary activity in this world, being a personal meandering through a forest of signs, everything connected one way or another to everything else.

David Mitchell Attains Japanese Thought. Or Does He?

The paper I'm giving at the University of Aberdeen in July focusses on the contemporary British writer David Mitchell and whether or not he can be considered an altermodern writer. I call him a British writer a little provocatively, because the altermodern, and definitely Mitchell's novels, question the traditional sense of nationality.

In The Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud discusses Victor Segalen, his book Essay on Exoticism and his ideas of diversity-as-energy and positive experiences of difference. Recounting how Segalen travelled to and through China and came to write a collection of prose poems Steles, Bourriaud defines Segalen's importance to the altermodern as this: "if the book [Essay on Exoticism] encourages us to seek to understand foreign cultures, it is so as to better appreciate what establishes our own difference. One cannot become Chinese, but one can attain the ability to articulate Chinese thought; one cannot claim as empathy what is merely a tourist's clear conscience, but one can translate".

My thought, which came to me whilst doing the washing up earlier, was that Mitchell attains a similar ability vis-a-vis Japan. Having re-read Cloud Atlas, I have just finished number9dream and am now moving on to Ghostwritten. It is number9dream that interests me here.

What struck me initially was how similar to some of Haruki Murakami's narrator-heroes Mitchell's narrator Eiji Miyake is. His thoughtfulness, stubborness and naivete are all found in Kafka on the Shore's narrator, as well as that of Sputnik Sweetheart and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Now, there are quite a few assumptions being made here - which naturally were I to follow this line of thought I would chase up - concerning how typical of "Japanese thought" Murakami's characters are. And there is certainly room for debate, given the obvious debt of influence he and his characters owe to Western culture - Beatles songs, jazz, pasta. But assuming that Murakami is able to articulate a recognisably Japanese mindset, then the similarities to Mitchell would suggest that the non-Japanese writer gets pretty close too.

My gut instinct says that number9dream doesn't seem mannered. Eiji doesn't come across as the character stuck between a British background and a Japanese present that you might expect. He doesn't seem caricatured or two-dimensional. And in those moments where characters use familiarly "British" words like "bloody", the effect is to make them more vivid and memorable. One might even be able to argue that Mitchell's background actually helps him see Japan more clearly: his experience of difference is translated into country-boy Eiji's impressions of megalopolis Tokyo.

These are very much early thoughts, but suggest that there is some mileage in the David Mitchell-Altermodern idea.

A Little Thought About David Mitchell

By rights I shouldn't like David Mitchell. His writing is slightly cyber-punky, Matrix-y and Bladerunner-y; all things I steer pretty well clear of. Whilst not overly elaborate it's not spare - fast becoming my favourite writing style - either. It's punchy and quick and he weaves a good yarn. Now yarnin', as Zachry in Cloud Atlas calls storytelling, is something I do like. And it's probably what makes me like him as much as I do. He has a similar storytelling prowess to Haruki Murakami and weaves in and out of reality much like him. (I'm too ignorant to say whether it's the Japanese connection - Mitchell lived and taught in Tokyo for many years). That not-sparse prose is given to occasional flourishes but not exaggerated ones. It is calm and somewhat measured but reveals a joy of the wriggliness of language too.