Trader Joe’s: The Novel
So: Tweet < Facebook status update < Blog post < Magazine column < Journal article/Book chapter < Book
I was thinking yesterday in terms of four or perhaps five different-sized portholes through which one peers out at the world, and the four or five writing genres to which they’re attached; today, I’m thinking it’s more like six. And six’s a pretty good number, right?
Here’s the problem: it’s not as if any observation—or, hell, let’s be pretentious, aperçu—can be packaged equally well in any of these genres (or, hell, let’s be pretentious: genres). There are definitely Tweet-sized aperçus and column-sized ideas; trying to milk a Tweet for an entire journal article just isn’t going to fly. Different-sized ideas deserve different-sized writing containers; we’ve all read “books,” for instance, that are just articles that repeat themselves and have wide margins.
But describing the process this way, I suspect, gets things exactly backwards. It’s not that one simply “has” an idea, or stumbles across an observation: what we experience, what we see, what we “happen across” is in fact a function of the portholes through which we’re peering—or, if the metaphor’s a bit less awkward, the glasses we happen to be wearing.
If your blueprint is the fortune-cookie slip, you’ll never write a novel. The prophet Jeremiah would, I suspect, been terrible at haiku. That is, these genres to a large extent pre-condition us to interact with the world in certain ways: when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So that the world looks a bit different according to the glasses you’re wearing, or the kind of writing you’re doing about it. And for me (as for Saul Bellow’s great character Herzog), I’m always writing: it doesn’t always get “written down,” much less published, but I experience my experience, as it were, as a kind of writing. James Joyce gets at this—what we might call the narrative imperative in consciousness—in this simple pair of sentences in his short story, “A Painful Case”:
[Mr. James Duffy] had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave aims to beggars, and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.
Prescription, fulfilled: the first sentence describes that “odd autobiographical habit,” and the second enacts it, or exemplifies it. And I get that: I’m more like Joyce’s characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom than I’d sometimes like to admit, in that sentences, sometimes just phrases, scroll like the CNN crawl across my brain.
Psychologists talk about perceptual “chunking”: the way we break sensory data into manageably sized “chunks” for processing; I guess what I’m saying is, that chunking is affected profoundly by the default writing genre that’s soft-wired in my brain at any given moment. A trip to the supermarket feels different—for all intents and purposes, is fundamentally different—if I narrate it to myself as a Twitter stream (hashtag: #TraderJoes) or an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. How, then, to keep writing flowing to those various outlets?
We’ll see if we can’t get a bit closer to an answer by the end of tomorrow’s post.
This is great–I really like your taxonomy of the different ways we process and then express our experience of the world. In recent years, my world seems more and more like an endless stream of twitter-sized bits, sometimes strongly related to each other and sometimes only vaguely connected. This actually bothers me quite a lot, because I admire the ability to step back from the chaos and regard things more analytically. Brain damage or Internet exposure? You decide.
Have you read any of Joseph Roth’s non-fiction writing? There’s a great collection of newspaper columns from Berlin in the 1920′s called “What I Saw.” A lot of the columns, especially “What I See,” have a kind of (let’s be pretentious) pointillistique quality similar to the twitter thing. But of course, there was no twitter, so he weaves them into paragraphs and pages:
“I see a girl, framed in an open window, who is a part of the wall and yearns to be freed from its embrace, which is all she knows of the world. A man, pressed into the shadows of a public square, collecting bits of paper and cigarette butts. An advertising kiosk placed at the head of a street, like its epigram, with a little weathervane on it to proclaim which way the wind is blowing down this particular street. A fat man in a cream-colored jacket smoking a cigar, he looks like a grease spot in human form on this summer’s day.”
I don’t know Joseph Roth’s work: thanks for the tip. Myself, I’m made nervous by all the Twitter doomsaying: we’ve had a whole new round of Jeremiads claiming that Twitter = ADHD = the decline of the West. I really don’t think so; I like the notion of “media ecology”–part of which, at least, means that we need different-sized “chunks” in our media diet, I think. I’m not (myself) worried that the little bites–let’s call ‘em Cheezy Poofs–will really crowd out the three-course meals. But I may be naive in equal measure as some of the pundits are dour.
I know just what you mean! When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks a nail; when all you’ve got is Twitter, everything looks like a tweet.
While we’re on the subject of Twitter, I wonder what you would make of something like the much beloved @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed. What started as a gag grew into something quite different–a kind of real-time fiction, featuring regular characters (Quaxelrod! Hambone! Carl the Intern!) and story arcs that felt quite novelistic. Still, I don’t think it would have worked nearly as well had it been published as a novel. The Twitter form was a key part of what made it so funny and so good.
I’m not sure what it all means, exactly. Does it just suggest that we had a novelist looking through the Twitter porthole, to borrow your analogy? Or does it mean that we haven’t yet figured out exactly what something like Twitter can do?
I’d thought about those text-message novels that have arisen in Japan: thing is, I don’t know anything about them. In some sense, this is an old, old story: we think new technology will help us do old tasks more efficiently; but they end up redefining out work and our relationship to work. Some will always bemoan this change; but I’m an optimist. I think these changes create new possibilities.
The @MayorEmanuel stuff is hysterically funny in many places, so it’s worth a look just for that. My favorite of the small number I’ve read: “Sweet fucking coffee, you sometimes feel like my only motherfucking friend.”
It’s pretty sweet, but risks devolving to just the one note–you know, that one frisky fricative adjective.
You might think that, but no. Like Cee Lo, @MayorEmanuel raises the f-bomb to new heights.