Guerres Imaginaires

The weekend of the 11th and 12th of December Glasgow hosts a conference entitled "On or about December 1910, human character changed": Centenary reflections and contemporary debates: Modernism and beyond. I'm part of an organising team for a parallel postgraduate symposium called Interceptions: Theory's Modernism and Modernism's Theory. A while ago, I wrote a small article on "future-war fiction" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the 1910 Centenary Reflections conference blog. You can see that version here. Below is a longer version.

On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. It was enormously popular (no doubt helped by marketing that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street), greatly increasing the Mail's circulation and translated into 27 languages. Somewhat surprisingly for a bestseller, the book made some interesting formal choices, couching the events as a military history with excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Subscribing to the theory that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, the book stressed the importance of preparation and training. Nevertheless, apparently unable to countenance a total German victory, Le Queux describes a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who lead an uprising against the invading hoardes. A film version, retitled If England Were Invaded, was released in October 1914.

Having been an art student in Paris in the 1880s, Le Queux went on to become a journalist and prolific author. One of three books he published in 1910 was the intriguingly titled The Unknown Tomorrow, with an even more intriguing subtitle of How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor. 2010 eyes may find equally fascinating the title of a 1913 book by Le Queux The Lost Million, somewhat underestimating the carnage to be wrought over the subsequent five years. Two books published in 1914 bear the titles The German Spy, A Present-day Story and The War of the Nations.

In his article "Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900", I.F. Clarke notes that after Francis Cheynell's Civil War-infused Aulicus his Dream of the Kings Sudden Comming to London, published in May 1644, the future-war genre failed rather conclusively to take off. Until, that is, the year 1871, the year of the Paris Commune and the unification Germany. Clarke's article traces the explosion in stories of guerres imaginaires across Britain, France and Germany, all if which imagined variations on "the next European war" utilising the new weaponry made possible by technological development. Some writers (notably H.G. Wells in his 1914 book The World Set Free) went as far as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.

The tone of this "massive European interest in The Next Great War, der nächste Krieg, La Guerre de demain" was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories, nor the popular press that took over.

"With you I would have liked to depart for the Great War, which we are all expecting and which is so long in coming. Under your flag I still hope to see it, if there is a god of battle and he can hear me. To while away the waiting I have dreamed of this war, this holy war in which we shall be victorious." So wrote Commandant Šmile Augustin Cyprien Driant (known as Capitaine Driant), dedicating his book War in Open Country (1888) to his old regiment.

Compare the above to Marinetti and the Futurists, describing in 1909 how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war -- the world's only hygiene -- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".

If, then, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human consciousness, human character, one may be forgiven for thinking that it was long in the making. Long in the making, and wide in its reach, too; not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. Woolf may well have been right about the “human” scale of it. With these future-war tales and fantasies, it appears people were longing for a change, desperate in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”.

New Fave Blog

I read a lot of literature-related blogs, usually ones attached to small presses or groups of writers - HTMLGiant and Big Other are the main two I read, but there are a lot of others - the Millions, the Constant Conversation and Nomadics are also particular favourites. I think it was through one of these that I discovered Kate Zambreno's blog, Frances Farmer is My Sister which is my current fave blog. I like it because of its roughness - her writing seems to flow out of her and she makes all these connections and digressions. She mixes personal experience with literary and academic ideas in a really compelling way. Whenever I read it, I always find some sort of inspiration for my own academic work - the way she connects ideas together, bringing in Deleuze with say, contemporary zombie films (I'm not sure if she did that, or whether that's just the sort of thing she would do) and creates a sort of theme-driven essay/personal memoir that circulates around the same ideas but in increasingly interesting ways. She's currently writing a book of essays for Semiotext(e) which given her blog and Semiotext(e)'s back catalogue, should be absolutely fantastic. Shame we've got to wait til autumn of 2011. Meanwhile, there are her novels to read...

Dissolving and Inventing

The books to read list just gets bigger. David Shields has compiled a reading list, made up of "books, each of which asks what is for me the only serious question: given that we die, and given that there is no god, how do we find purpose in existence?" He "seem[s] to like books that help you get out of bed, but just barely. These books do that, with ferocious and, for me, life-affirming honesty."

We are re-watching the West Wing at the moment, so those quotes are ringing in my ears like the mawkish/inspirational round-up lines at the end of each episode, but if you can ignore that, then they might be useful. Or failing that, the actual books might well be.

of the Year

I've been thinking about my faves of the year for a while, and here they are.

Album
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca



This is the only album this year that I've listened to over and over again. It's just perfect. "Stillness is the Move" would have got song of the year too, where it not for Al's "Distractions From Studies" compilation with had Noir Desir's gem on it:

Song
Noir Desir - Le Vent nous Portera (Rubber Room re-rub)



Late in the year, Al made me an excellent compilation. This wasn't necessarily the best song on it, but it's the one I've played again and again and again.

Film
The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke)



This, along with his Hidden, could and should easily make any "films of the decade" list someone wanted to write. This film blew me away, it was so, so, so masterful, this is a director at his very peak. It carefully and deliberately builds a case, but so slyly does it achieve this that you don't realise for an hour or two that it's being done, and when finally it hits you what's been happening since the very beginning, all the little hints and clues, it's devastating. Even more so for the fact that nothing comes of it, no resolution, no understanding, it just continues.

Honourable mentions go to:

The Class (dir. Laurent Cantet)



- a really vital, alive piece of film-making, I could have watched the kids for hours and hours and hours

Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)



- one of the really enjoyable cinema experiences of the year, with the ultimate "if-I-were-going-to-get-married-I-would-have-a-wedding-like-that" wedding

In The City of Sylvia (dir. José Luis Guerín)



- a deceptive depiction of voyeurism and obsession, with a subtle critique of objectification and image-making, all done through a beautifully composed scenes, long, langorous takes and slinky, summery light

Let The Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson)



- eerie and scary, it grabs you and draws you in to a Swedish netherworld of snow, murder and puberty

Great films on DVD:

The Antoine Doinel series (dir. Francois Truffaut), watched for the first time in their entirety this year, and absolutely wonderful!

In A Lonely Place (dir. Nicholas Ray)
- fantastic noir with Humphrey Bogart as good as I've ever seen him. (And I don't really like him that much).

The Best of Youth (dir. Marco Tullio Giordana)
- a revelation, an engrossing 6 hour portrait of an Italian family across 50 years of local and international history.

Book
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust



- clearly the book of my year, it took a quarter of it to read, and deserves all those superlatives given it over the 90 or so years it's been around.

This Friday

A double-bill of academic wizardry (or downright dilletantism). Me and Derek are giving papers at the work-in-progess seminars in the English Literature department. Either number 4 or 5 Uni Gardens, can't remember. 1pm.

Derek's paper is called something like "Chasing Rainbows and Granite with Virginia Woolf" (Derek, if you read this, please correct me!) and takes up that famous quote in relation to sexual difference. Mine's called "The Problem of the Contemporary: The Altermodern and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland" and will be the finest 2000 words of my longer piece for the Aberdeen publication next year.

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.

Comment Story

In reading this post on HTMLGiant, I found a nice mini-story, tucked away in the comments. Here it is:

I wish I could drink coffee with Werner Herzog after work on Wednesdays and I could listen to him complain about work. I would say, “Yes. It is always like that.” And then he would continue to talk, and I would blow on the surface of my coffee to cool it off while I listened to him talk. If he was your boyfriend, you would interrupt us and make him take you home so he could fix you dinner. And then when you arrived the next Wednesday, I would say, “Hey,” but I would not look at you.

"Isn't the reader smart just for opening a book?"

Great little story about an event at the PEN World Voices Festival, which has just finished in New York.

In a discussion between Paul Auster and Enrique Vila-Matas, the conversation focusses on readers being judged in the same way that authors are:

"Then it was time for questions, and a woman's voice piped up from the front: "Don't you think you were a little hard on the reader?" she said. "Isn't a reader smart just for opening a book?"

"That's what I said," Auster retorted.

"But don't they get what they get?" she said, and went on to say that readers shouldn't have to have any prejudices or expectations about what a book is; that reading should be like sex."

"I agree with you completely," he said, and went on again about the critics.

"You should relax; this is your wife interjecting!" she said, and a gasp went through he crowd. It seemed that, just as a character in one of Auster's books wanders into the life of the author, we had become caught in the middle of a minor domestic dispute! But Auster accepted her comments, as Vila-Mates looked on bemusedly."

The rest is here.

World Literature and the Altermodern

A thesis is emerging. Or an area of study at least.

In 1827 Goethe coined the phrase "world literature" to describe the increased availability of writing from other countries and in other languages. Marx and Engels picked it up and used it in describing characteristics of the bourgeois economy. Recently, David Damrosch has asked What Is World Literature? According to Wikipedia, Damrosch "define[s] world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively".

I'm wondering whether these ideas can be pulled into an essay about the relevance or usefulness of Bourriaud's altermodern theories (and other, non-literary theories of contemporary twenty-first globalization) to literature.

If I ask myself the question - are there any altermodern books? the first name that pops into my head is David Mitchell. Especially Cloud Atlas.

I await a reply from Bourriaud to the four questions I emailed him last week. Let's hope he illuminates this question for me a bit.