The Worst Novel Ever?

REVIEWING A REVIEW

Ever see the satirical movie about the art business, “Untitled”? Toward the end of that film, an “artist” appears whose “art” consists of pencil scribblings on sticky notes. When someone interviews him about his work, he’s so intellectually feeble he can respond only with vague mutterings; gurgling his words like a two year old.

I thought of this character when reading a review at L.A. Review of Books by one Tiffany Gilbert of the latest novel by alt-lit icon Blake Butler, 300,000,000.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/god-bend

This single review shows everything wrong with the established literary game and the New York-based book business. The novel is about a man’s quest to kill everyone in the entire country. Ambitious, one could call it, I guess. It’s apparently written in standard postmodern style. Think David Foster Wallace. Only more so. The idea that Harper Perennial would invest a large sum of scarce funds into publishing and promoting this kind of work is, on the surface, incomprehensible.

The people at Harper Perennial (won’t be “perennial” for long!) need to ask themselves: What business are they in? Answer: Selling books! How do they presume to market a novel which is deliberately hostile to the reader? Tiffany Gilbert: “—Butler usually destroys understanding, favoring emotion and instinct over narrative.”

Who needs narrative?!

“Butler remains elusive, creating linguistic puzzles that we must sink into rather than solve.”

Linguistic puzzles! Haven’t we seen that before? from Nabokov, Pynchon, Foster-Wallace et.al.; from all the postmodern academy darlings praised by academy types who love “sink”ing into such shit because they apparently have nothing better to do? Justifies their standing in front of classrooms of the naive and gullible.

Tiffany Gilbert says that we as readers are “often demanding that our narratives conform to conventional rules of sense making.” (Sense making? Who wants sense making?) “Butler defies those expectations.”

Tiffany Gilbert is gushing about Blake Butler’s work, signifying his literary importance. Butler provides more than enough convoluted mish-mash for a Tiffany Gilbert to rationalize about.

Would I be surprised to learn that Tiffany Gilbert has a Phd from somewhere, and works as a university professor? Not at all. You have to be trained to buy into (or “sink into”) a compendium of nonsense. It doesn’t come naturally.

“Unlike many contemporary writers,” Tiffany Gilbert assures us, “Butler does not dabble in darkness. He is ensconced in it.”

(Great. That’s all we need from today’s art. More darkness!)

“Butler’s novel subsumes Bolano’s concerns with death, vilification, and secrecy and multiplies them tenfold.”

There’s a larger point to be made about the new generation of approved writers—their white guilt and self-hatred; their pessimism; their disbelief in God, themselves, anything and everything. Warped, miseducated creatures; casualties of a broken educational system and a twisted, hate-filled philosophy. That’s a point for another essay!

From the start the alt lit writers weren’t literary artists, but con artists. They carried a postmodern philosophy which says there is no truth, nothing means anything and it’s futile to try to know anything. A novel like 300,000,000 is the logical result. The alt lit writers have made no effort to learn the difficult essentials of writing a competent, readable novel. (It takes talent to be readable.) To learn literary tools like structure and form; pace, clarity and plot. The artful weaving of narrative threads (there’s that darn word “narrative” again!) to build interest, suspense, and momentum. The drawing of believable characters.

Why should alt lit authors bother with such quaint notions, when a Harper Perennial will publish their vomitry regardless?

The related question is: Why is Blake Butler shoving so many novels through the crumbling Big Five publishing system? Possibly because he suspects the Big Five’s days are numbered. Or because he realizes a con game can go on for only so long.

There are only so many over-trained professors out there looking for something to laud.

“—at one point, he sucks the eyes out of a miscarried fetus after killing its mother.”

Golly gosh! Isn’t that wonderful?

Did I mention the novel’s about a serial killer?

Think of the sad mindset of those individuals who’d actually care to read this novel. Or would read it. If there are in fact very many of them, this civilization’s in trouble.

The postmodern prose style—not the subject—will be most offputting to general readers.

“Philistine!” a Tiffany Gilbert might say to anyone expecting that a novel make sense.

Anyway, who cares today—in the “intellectual” crowd—about the market?

But a novel is not only subject to the market, it’s subject to aesthetic rules. Rules which conform not to academy dictates, but to the hidden rules of nature and the universe. General rules appreciated by all, except for confused well-brainwashed alt litsters, or professors like Gilbert, who seem to believe there are no aesthetic rules. If nonsense is acceptable, nonsense is not only possible, but probable.

May as well have the proverbial 100 monkeys then pounding on keyboards to see what occurs. The outcome might be better than Blake Butler’s 300,000,000.

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Are there alternatives to Big Five nonsense? Yes! It comes from the DIY ebook crowd, and from New Literary Media outlets like www.newpoplit.com.

(Be sure to read, at New Pop Lit’s Opinion page, my essays on another alt lit figure, Tao Lin.)

Outside MFA versus New York

THERE HAVE BEEN  a spate of articles online about the latest goofy n+1 idea, now available in book form, called “MFA versus New York.” This has to be the most ridiculous statement made by any group of writers, at least since 2008, when the n+1 crowd publicly predicted “the end of oil”— right before vast new pools of oil were discovered across the globe, and new technologies created for obtaining it.

Their latest discussion is ridiculous because it ignores exciting real change in the literary realm: the rise of self-published ebooks.

At least some literary commentators recognize that both worlds of MFA workshops and New York “Big Six” publishing are in collapse, such as this article by Sonia Saraiya, “The Bleak State of American Fiction.”

http://www.avclub.com/article/bleak-state-american-fiction-201745

But even Sonia Saraiya is wearing blinders. She ignores ebooks and the DIY world, and refuses to consider new options. Namely, creating fiction which can be pop and “literary” (significant) BOTH. The future won’t be bleak for those who discover a way out.

Anyway, there’s more intelligence presented in the Comments section to Saraiya’s article than in the entirety of the new n+1 book.

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(An aside: Doesn’t n+1’s very title scream “pseudo-intellectual”? You just know these are the same kind of people to be found blatantly reading Derrida or other unreadable tome at the local overpriced hipster coffeehouse or bar.)

Descent Into Mindlessness

MORE PSEUDO-INTELLECTUALISM AT HTML GIANT

When last seen on the topic, I was engaged in a short debate at a post at the literary hipster site HTML Giant when my hapless opponents quickly scampered for cover. Though the post received 233 comments-- most in a day or two before I jumped in-- said post was quickly taken down from the site's list of "Popular Posts." HTML Giant is as committed to free and open debate as is the rest of the literary establishment-- which means, not very committed to it at all.

The subject of the debate was the embrace by today's so-called literary intellectuals of nonsense.

Later, at HTML Giant came another post which proved my points. Here:
http://htmlgiant.com/random/hi-i-want-to-talk-about-influence-a-little-bit/

Andrew James Weatherhead gives his self-referential take on a post at another hipster site, Montevidayo. The post he celebrates, "Influence=Deformation Zone," by aptly named Joyelle McSweeney, is loaded with Academy Speak. "Gender," "patrilineage," "heterosexist," "reproductive futurism," "linear notions of temporality," and so on. Joyelle McSweeney is clearly a person unable to think other than in the code words she ingested in the university.

Would anyone who'd not been through university indoctrination think and speak in this manner?

What passes for ideas from her, is a rejection of reality. Joyelle scorns "reproductive futurism," apparently not understanding that every living organism on this planet reproduces itself-- all life is reproduction; nature is reproduction-- without reproduction there is no future. As "sexist," oppressive, etc., as reproduction is, there's no way to do away with it and have any existence.

For those who live in a world of nonsense it doesn't matter.

The next step is to reject the law of causation: "that what comes before causes what comes after." Causation is not only an inescapable part of our world, and likely of the entire universe, but it's also the essential foundation of the tale; the story. The fundamental basis and justification for what's become known as literature.

What happens next? McSweeney, Weatherhead, and their ilk don't want to know.

It's part of a philosophy of intentional ignorance. Which explains a lot. Our programmed intellectuals have been trained not to notice much of anything, even when it concerns themselves. So, college students compile enormous personal debts, the cost of education continually rises, all the while campuses expand around them, gleaming new buildings on all sides, purchases of more real estate by the institutions, pushing out, in many cases, such as at U of Penn and Columbia, long-time ethnic neighborhoods. Our intellectuals who are paying so much for the privilege of becoming intellectuals can make no connection. No links acceptable. After all, that would be to accept causation, patrilineage, etc., and that won't do.

This is called, in layman's terms, being a sucker.

Much the same can be said about the current debt crisis, about which their generation will become, necessarily, the Bag Holders. (Boomers are only beginning to retire. Americans are living longer than ever. The demographics are inescapable. But-- do our young intellectuals really want to live in the real world? No signs of it.)

Andrew James Weatherhead applauds Joyelle McSweeney's rejection of "traditional ideas lineage." How far do they wish to take that? Will they reject sentences? The alphabet? Language?

"Influence should be open to be whatever you want it to be--"

Yet when you examine their stated influences, they're always influences approved by the literary establishment at that particular point of time, from Agamben to Sebald to Robbe-Grillet to Roberto Bolano. (Bolano was ignored by U.S. intellectuals until he died and one of the major book conglomerates began publishing and hyping his work. Our herd of pseudo-intellectuals quickly got in line.)

An American writers group, the Underground Literary Alliance-- whose literary influences came from an entirely different source-- found throughout its existence that U.S. literature's pseudo-intellectuals weren't at all as open as they pretend. The ULA instead was the target of their attacks, including from leading lit-hipster figures and leading lit-hipster pseudo-intellectual publications like The Believer. The ULA's activist campaign began in 2001 with a full-page article in the Village Voice titled "Start Making Sense." Pseudo-Intellectuals may be open to many things. Making sense is scarcely one of them.

What literary hipsters, especially of the pseudo-intellectual variety, are about is pose. The pose is all.

Joyelle McSweeny calls for thinking outside structures and strictures. Yet, McSweeney made sure to acquire her proper hierarchical degrees from the proper linear educational system, from giant institutions which, um, are structures which set down a great many strictures, including about literature. So did Andrew James Weatherhead, no doubt. As did likely most if not all of the entire lit-hipster crowd.

Are they intellectual frauds?

They appear to be pets of the current literary system, following, in linear fashion, all the rules, step-by-step. They exist within a cage yet assure themselves that they're free. The actual structure and production of literature, from overpriced writing programs to government/non-profit funding to the giant book conglomerates isn't a concern. This multi-layered system isn't addressed. It's hardly looked at. When you have the sense of an ant, such a notion is incomprehensible.

Joyelle's much-applauded essay, which starts from a point of nonsense, can go in only one direction, linear or not. It devolves into incomprehensible jargon:

"I use a term for this mutagenic zone; stealing a phrase from the Swedish poet Aase Berg, I call it the deformation zone. Translation is the ultimate manifestation of Art’s deformation zone, for entering yourself in Art’s mutagenic properties, for being entered and altered and destroyed, if necessary, by Art’s rogatives. Translation is anachronistic, it happens in real time and across time; it happensbackwards; it changes he who takes and he who gives; no boundaries can stand up to this innundation; everything is rendered a membrane by translation. Translation is bio-identical to Art’s influence, spreads and eats and leaks more tets, more Art. It makes too many versions, breeds new hybrid languages, and obscures priority. . . ."

And so on. It reads like the scrawl of a severely brain-damaged person.

Situation hopeless.

(NOTE: Joyelle McSweeney has a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard, a graduate degree from Oxford University, and an MFA from Iowa. She teaches English at Notre Dame University. Andrew Weatherhead is an MFA student at the New School.)