sometimes i just want to stay put

other times i take up a position

i have reached

by foot

and stare at the crosses below

marking the spot

where others have landed

when they,

decided to go.

 but in the meantime i am going to wait here with my head down as if i have just appeared.

by keith jafrate
One thing that has struck me since I began reading submissions for the text is how much contemporary writing is ruined by being over-controlled, by an over-reliance on form for form’s sake. Or perhaps you could say an over-investment in form for form’s sake. At first I thought it was only the work I received for the magazine, but bit by bit I began to see a relation between this work and the work of established writers, in that the first category was so clearly, and too often, a poor imitation of the second. So I began to wonder about the reasons for this. After all, to loosen control of one’s technique is not necessarily to promote nonsense. Bill Frisell losing control on a guitar is likely to sound significantly more articulate than I would, and I suppose thinking about this I saw how much my ideas about writing, about form, control etc, are derived from music, from jazz and in particular free jazz, a music where pre-conceived structures are abandoned in favour of organic forms discovered through improvisation. Obviously, the better the player’s technique, the more interesting the discoveries, and only musicians with a solid command of their technique and, at least to some extent, a personal vocabulary within it, will play free jazz well.

How can this transfer to writing? To me it seems obvious that control and artistic success are not synonymous for the writer, that issues of content, context, intention, emotion and politics will not be resolved and unified simply by writers palliating their anger or outrage, or for that matter their impulsiveness, in order to pass for good writers. To me, if we are to address important contemporary issues, our control, our technique, should serve our intentions, not dominate them to the exclusion of all provocative or inexact sounds. For me, writing that places control above all other qualities runs the risk of becoming indistinguishable from work produced by thousands of clerics, effectively bolstering a bad situation by leaving it unscratched, however liberal their intentions. And these clerics are unable to relinquish ‘control’ precisely because their technical accomplishments are insufficient to allow them to do so.

So there is also, I think, a kind of sociological angle to all this: who defines writing? It’s easy to say writers define it for themselves, but this is an ideal I don’t see much put into practice, given that writing, like the other arts, has become dominated by materialist issues of the wrong kind. By which I mean not how do we all get fed, clothed, housed and educated, but how does the individual writer get his or her share of the pickings on offer to those who can write in the way market forces dictate. At the present time, it seems to me, the market prefers control, prefers detachment and irony, as well as downright insignificance; it dislikes work expressing the inelegant condition of the working class, for example, unless the writer addressing this can be sold as in some way a caricature, I mean as a working class writer (or for that matter a black writer), someone whose work can be disabled by niche marketing. There are good writers around, of course, there always are, but I would say your average jobbing aspirant is being sold models where control is paramount, and that this serves to censor much that might be dangerous out of their writing. Writers are learning their craft with many of its possibilities obscured, by the bad examples many successful writers are setting them (and successful teachers of writing too).

So I suppose it all comes down to how we define control in this context. Ragged writing is ragged writing is ragged writing. The question is: how did it get that way? Who defines ‘ragged’? It seems to me, from the experience of working in literature development for the last fifteen years, and as a writer for the last thirty, that terms like ‘ragged’ come from a kind of aversion therapy school of criticism, which discourages unsuitable emotions as well as bad writing, I mean proscribes content by restricting form. One of the ways I judge writing, including submissions to the text, is by trying to judge the honesty of the writer’s intentions, or the honesty of his or her emotions, and I suppose a key distinction for me is whether the writing is willed or felt, whether its source is ambition or emotion. I see a lot of writing that is technically good, some of it technically very refined, but which is lifeless. For example, urban ugliness was very much the vogue with male writers who submitted to the text towards the end of the last century, and I still get some work that describes this urban scenario very well, but which also doesn’t actually seem to give a fuck about it. I mean, I see a lot of writing, by men and women I should add, full of a kind of technical fear, a kind of formal self-denial, as if the writer were over-conscious of the reading editor, or critic, or teacher, or subsidising quango employee, and believed fervently (and it seems this is often the only thing they’re fervent about) that only ‘controlled’ writing will pass these censors, examiners, definers and labelers. Writing is dominated at present by issues of control, and one effect of this is a massive self-censorship among writers themselves, egged on by an odd assortment of people in possession of the various fields writers want to enter: academics, commercial editors, radio producers etc.

So, to me the idea of ‘control’ carries with it a huge, submerged issue. I absolutely do not advocate blather, and too much searing emotion is as dull as too little, but I do believe that certain socio-political issues have become entangled with certain technical issues with regard to writing, and that these seem connected to the idea of control. Self-control can be an internalised form of social control, and this can come about when issues of personal well-being, even of personal survival, are made more pressing than issues relating to the common good, are in fact separated from issues relating to the common good. In writing as in a thousand other contexts, the last twenty years in England have been about punishing the collective thinker in favour of the individualistic, and establishing a set of ‘standards’ by which to arbitrate between the two. Attempting to think on behalf of, into, with, through the collective has been repeatedly punished, its opposite rewarded. So writing has become controlled, in all senses, afflicted with a paranoid conformism characterised, I think, precisely by its control, its detachment from any potentially control-removing ideas.

I think this is a topical judgment. I don’t aspire to, or very much believe in, eternal truths about literature. I mean simply that to advocate control at this time, a long way into an era of economic fascism, is to submit too easily to bad current thinking. How does this actually transfer to writing? I think it must be in starting points, in first principles: if we say the idea of control is more important than the idea of strong emotion, or if we assert that strong or even genuine emotion can only be conveyed (or learnt) through control, we are simply telling a lie. Ditto for political analysis. While I believe all writers should address political issues, I do not believe writers are politicians. There is no necessity for them to conform to anybody’s ideas (including mine) or to present their own in any form other than that which pleases them best. They are under no obligation to be lucid or balanced, connected to the zeitgeist or conversant with contemporary values in literature. If these values are sick, they may even be obliged to disregard them.

Back to first principles then. I think that control is often what a bad writer uses to disguise lack of emotion, lack of connectedness, lack of commitment. But I don’t think the work I receive which has abandoned all attempt at technical maturity in favour of an adolescent, this-is-just-how-I-want-to-say-it pretentiousness is preferable. The issue is, having acquired technical control of our work, do we then simply extend that control to the work as a whole? For me, this technical control is a means to an end, is part and part only of a larger process. Great writing has arisen from calm and mature reasoning, but it has also arisen from raging innocence. I don’t think writing can be judged simply by the level of control it demonstrates, and to insist that control is paramount in good writing seems to me likely to exclude huge areas of experience: intuition, instinct, chance, coincidence, curiousity, impulse, improvisation and, last but definitely not least, outside influence. I don’t think a piece of writing exists in the way a piece of machinery exists, and does not require all its parts to be precisely and always efficient, utile, defineable.

What it does require is a genuine intention to express something by using all the available resources language has to offer, of which control is one, but only one, just as self-control is one of an infinite number of possible attitudes. To claim, as I have heard writers claim, that no effective writing can exist which has not humbled itself at the altar of control is to fly in the face of the facts. Furthermore, to claim anything about writing is to claim it from a partial position, and this should not be disguised, but rather admitted frankly. My job as an editor is to allow writers space to make their own choices, not to impose a definition of writing upon them. So I tend to reject work which has succumbed voluntarily to definitions, and carries too obviously the dead hands of convention and the market about its throat, which is over-reliant on a tidy conception of the short story or the poem, to the exclusion of any adventure or mistake or opacity or doubt or offence. There are enough outlets for writing of this kind; the text will not be one of them. But I also, and without fail, reject work which is merely posing as uncontrolled or radical. My arrogance is I think I can tell the difference between the authentic and the ragged or inept.

I’m not pretending there’s no agenda to my work. There is: it is to try and contribute to the overthrow and removal of those things and people that have turned my country into a brutal, materialist, cultureless purgatory. It’s possible to say we all share responsibility for what has happened here, as some on the left did say about Thatcher, but to what extent I share responsibility for the deaths in Dunblane or the creation of a monetarist managerial stratum in the NHS is debatable. Neither did I miss any penalties in Euro 96. To me there’s an absurdity inherent in the idea of collective responsibility (the “it’s your own fault for getting used to a national health service” politics of the universal right) when collectivity itself is being constantly denied in the culture around us, and collective action as a means to address change is being constantly opposed, even, under the previous government, partially criminalised. Not that we need assent to these things and processes: the question is how do we most effectively confront them. By control? Wasn’t Kinnock’s attitude to the miners’ strike of 84/85 a matter of control? Isn’t Blair’s New Labour a product of control, i.e. one kind of political process being cowed into aping its opponent merely to gain control, regardless of ideology. How does this apply to writing? As a writer, and now an editor, it seems to me that the process of control is at the heart of the literary-political system I work in and against, and the idea of control is central to writing which this system allows to become popular or successful. Why else would so many writers be satisfied to create work that disregards so many models from other literatures, in order to conform to the English preference for understatement, domesticity, restraint, irony, failure?

Some writers appear to believe that the most effective way to express anything is through control. To me, this idea arises from a distinct cultural and political context, which mitigates against what I can only call the liberationist processes I’m looking for in the writing I receive. I don’t think for a minute there is only one kind or way of writing effectively. My point is that an over-attention to control seems, from my experience, to make writers too self-regarding, too precious about their own status as writers to risk new forms of expression and new ideas, and they can find themselves sentenced to a kind of macho gradualism which they feel compelled to accept because others before them have accepted it. Work of this type seems to aspire to a bloodless undeniability, as if writing were a kind of argument the writer must win at all costs, maintaining a seamless, impregnable style which is also, to me, in danger of ending up without feeling, even without significance. Over the years I’ve read scores of texts by those who aspire to this kind of controlled writing, and I’ve seen them fail for lack of personality, for too great a willingness to submit to what is, to me, a standardised, male kind of writing, where the text is always right, the implied morality of the text always sold as the sole possible morality. In fact, where control is not solely a technical matter. This is true of writers both of the left and the right, and effectively creates a common subtext to their writing nothing to do with concrete political programmes, but expressing a personal politic in which detachment and control are preferred to involvement, passion and revolt. The subject of such writing could well be passion and revolt, but it cannot convey these unless its aesthetic has somehow absorbed them. To me, control is as much an expression of limitation as achievement, and I think we should be sensitive as writers and readers to the fact that any aesthetic that advocates control is a value system: it will limit as well as assist. As an editor, I have the liberty to search in the work of other writers for those values I believe should be promoted, and for aesthetic systems that represent by their process those values. I am against control.
Posted in essays Tagged: new writers write what you feel ]]> http://drinkscabinet.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/240/feed/ 0 drinkscabinet http://drinkscabinet.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/withnail-and-i-hamlet/ http://drinkscabinet.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/withnail-and-i-hamlet/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:08:53 +0000 drinkscabinet http://drinkscabinet.wordpress.com/?p=223 ]]>

Along the road

You’re never going to win

You’re never going to win

Take off those running shoes

and take off the cross

you’re never going to win

you’re never going to win

It’s just the nature of time

To disregard the finishing line

you’re never going to win

you’re never going to win

there’s no home help in the sky

it’s just dust and water

and you and I

you’re never going to win

you’re never going to win.