Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "demented"

This blog is about writing, and for the most part it's been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone along. There are more of these than I've written about so far, but rehashing the past, while interesting to me and I would hope to those who drop in to read these slim offerings, is not going forward really.

And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.

My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.

Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.

There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":

In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.

This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.

This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.

Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.

But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.

So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?

If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.

A few months back I ran into someone on a bus in Glasgow I’d known long before, Duncan MacGillivray. Duncan is an artist, a real one. He has a degree in ceramics from a university in Dundee, but has since got keen on printmaking, specifically lithography. He etches steel plates and then hand-colours them to produce mostly one-off prints. They are pretty good, I reckon, so if you ever happen to be in Glasgow - or indeed happen to be in Glasgow right now - you can stop by the Glasgow Print Studio near the Trongate and ask to see some of his stuff, which is kept in the collection and is for sale.

The thing that most fascinated me with Duncan’s approach is that he is using a technology designed to produce many copies of something, but usually he makes just one. When he concedes a point to the technology, he might make five or six of a basic image, but each is a one-off nonetheless.

To me, that’s counter-intuitive – doing something not only not the norm, but implicitly critical of it – contradicting the obvious, or as an online dictionary I just checked says, common sense.

Going against the grain in this way can lead to path-breaking art and to commercial success. Duncan’s unique and interesting voice hits the high notes for me, and I hope he makes it. It would be nice to see.

Looking at Duncan’s prints sent me scurrying to the net to find a copy of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin was one of the most creative members of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy, a refugee from the Nazis who fled to Paris and after the fall of France tried to escape to Spain. Halted at the border, he committed suicide.

Work of art is easily Benjamin’s best-known work, but I was surprised at how bad it was/is, bursting with an arrogance it never justified. Arrogance is all very well when it comes from people who have earned it, but it is hard to see now what the excitement was when Benjamin was alive. His essay is mainly about photography and film, and he pours scorn on other thinkers about these new art forms, without really having much to say that is very interesting himself.

Benjamin made a great deal of the fact that film-making is typically* a kind of pastiche, in which scenes are filmed out of sequence and put together later as they are to be screened. It is true this is a form of assembly line production, but while the assembly line was taken to be a hallmark of the industrial age, this division of labour has been known about intellectually for a long time – see Adam Smith – and practised even longer. In art, renaissance studios produced paintings using many hands – Leonardo first came to prominence painting the backdrops in the studio where he was an apprentice. What film-making involves is an extension of approaches already long practised. What is different is the huge audience technology allows, and on that, Benjamin is tedious.

Benjamin aside, the role of technology in art is important. What Duncan does, undermining the premise of infinitely reproducible technology by producing unique prints, is just one counter-intuitive approach. As a writer, I’ve used the internet and online publishing to skirt around the former gatekeepers of literature, who are now definitely up against it and in doing that have saved a few trees from the ignominy of pulp for fiction. The net, the PC and the many programmes enabling its use, and more have quickly transformed literature in more ways than we might know or indeed desire.

When I first published on the net, like many other writers** I was confident that it wouldn't be long before my reputation grew, that by some magic I would go from being a legend in if not just my own lunch hour, the lunch hour of my friends, acquaintances and personal enemies, to something wider and more exalted.

The way this was going to happen was on a pebble in a pond basis, aka the ripple effect. One person would read, tell another, who would read and tell another…and shazam! if not fame or notoriety or something like that, a greater readership than, in fact, I actually have several years later.

This is all my fellow e-authors’ fault, just as their lack of success is partly my doing. The internet has democratised writing – anyone who can string a few words together can be a “published author” willy-nilly, and not just thousands but it seems millions of people have done just that.

That’s terrific in itself. But whereas in the past the gatekeepers of literature lived in publishing houses, the gatekeeper today is the thicket of titles crowding the net. Any writer writes – or at least should write – to be read, but getting read when there are millions of others jostling for attention is definitely a problem.

Even when I put the first novels onto the net getting on to four years ago – four, including early ones and what was then the most recent, Demented – the crowd was already doing what crowds do best – crowding out. And to counter this, writers and their friends have tried any number of wrinkles well beyond the ripple effect.

That’s not all. The crowd has created opportunities for people who promise to help, for a fee. “Vanity” publishers will edit, publish, and promote any writer’s work, and there are marketers and editors and formatters and who knows what all occupying niches in the vast netscape, all designed in one way or another to give a writer a purchase into prominence. There is a vast and indeed burgeoning industry out there.

But beyond that is self-help, what the impecunious writer has for a resource: her or his own efforts. There are how to guides that are both free and cost to help do this, and the various strategies and tactics for jumping out from the crowd to be viewed and hopefully read include a blog such as this one.

I have tried a few of these apart from this blog, holding my nose as I’ve done it. It’s not that I look down on the people who are professional marketers, but that I have an instinctive dislike at having to do it as an amateur. As to the blog, as a marketing tool it doesn't seem to work – there are plenty of readers but they don’t pop along to my books. I keep writing it because people seem to get something from it, and it is fun, writing about writing.

So I am not at all sure of the usefulness of the many things people are urged to do to get their work recognised and read. It may be that it’s just the way it is. If there are millions of wannabe best-selling writers, there are probably hundreds of thousands trying the things suggested. Yet so far as I know only one, Fifty shades of grey, has “gone viral” and been published in hard cover by an established publisher.

And more! Fifty shades earned its spurs from its content, not a marketing ploy, or that is how I see it.

So I’m back to my original premise – the micro-pebbles thrown into the vast e-universe, into space where there is no ether wind, and no ripples, so far anyway. Seizing the opportunities new technology offers has not revealed the praxis, as Antonio Gramsci used to say, to overcome the barriers the opportunities have created.

Duncan’s approach seems to use a technology to undermine it. My counter-intuitive tactic so far seems only a reflection of a curmudgeonly nature. But it’s the only one I know today. I write and hope. That’s it.

* Yet Luis Bunuel, one of the greats of cinema, made his films sequentially, starting from the first scene and working through to the end, and what was in the can was what was screened more or less. But he was the exception to prove the rule.

** Norman Mailer wrote that when he was drafted into the Army in WWII, the big question in his mind was whether the classic novel of that war would be about the European or Pacific theatre.