CONCEPT
I recently included the following in an email to a friend, and the state of writing today. It isn’t pessimistic so much as presently dissatisfied. Please, agree or disagree; I want to have a discussion about this:
Something I’m particularly to talk with you about, with the benefit of all this new and delicious knowledge is the distinction between “experimental” and “traditional” art/writing, because it goes back to the turn of the century, and I really think it’s about ready to be outgrown. There seems to be a big split right down the middle of what’s considered “rigorous” “strenuous” “literary” fiction into the two camps: either wildly traditional, at least in America, in the psychologically profound but semantically austere line of thought, or the wildly experimental, like “This is Not a Novel” and “Gold’s Fool.” Anything that tries to negotiate the space in between is considered to be avant-garde gimmickpop, and it doesn’t do very well, and maybe that’s fair, because not a lot of work seems to go into it. The point is that the “traditional” fiction seems, in my mind to still be rehashing Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the “experimental” fiction is still mawking the Dadaists. Or, if I may be ridiculous for a moment, it’s such a disappointment politically. The art community has had a leftist bent for decades, but look at how meek and placating political art is these days… where is *isn’t* meek and placating, it’s cheap, predictable, and thrown together. I want to see something elegant and rigorous and strenuous and experimental, but in which the experimental elements are present not simply to make the composition more conspicuous, but because they are an organic part of the writing. It’s so disappointing to find this lacking in writing today.
END OF POST.