I Recant because I can

My first twelve posts, newsletters, missives—whatever you want to call them—basically amounted to a melodramatic mic drop in an empty room. So, why am I dropping more?

Call it stubbornness. Obstinance. Masochism.

I recently read M. Allen Cunningham’s book The Honorable Obscurity Handbook. Through his collection of essays I realized I’d let myself get too obsessed with getting noticed as the only sign of success. I also feel as if I found a kindred literary spirit, which feels hard to do anymore, especially where I live.

If it wasn’t clear from my tractate (if you read any of it), I see writing fiction as an art form, and a source of moral truth when done honestly and well. Some might respond that they aren’t looking to be preached at, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to simply be entertained. It says something about our society’s lack of understanding that morality is almost exclusively associated with religious “preaching” and that entertainment is only good if it refuses to mean anything else. The best art is always rebellious, which comes from an individual, non-secular moral grounding—an insistence upon fundamental human dignity and worth—and, yes, sometimes that rebellion can mean asserting the right to be meaningless. But asserting the right to be meaningless and refusing all meaning are different things. Asserting the right to be meaningless is a direct resistance to cynical, dogmatic ideologies and didactic proscriptions that threaten to outlaw any meanings that opposes the approved ideology—it is a means of exposing the hollowness of those overbearing, and controlling urges in society. Refusing all meaning is nihilism—the serious embrace of complete meaninglessness—and it opens people up to being manipulation by those with cynical authoritarian urges to make all meaning bow to their will.

Art is always a major part of every social movement or ideology and you can tell what kind of movement or ideology you’re dealing with by the art associated with it, and the art that opposes it. Curiously enough, art that doesn’t oppose or support any ideology, but is mass produced and sold in volume is capitalist art.

Under capitalist pressures, all art forms slowly become genericized, simplified, and formalized to make them more dependably marketable. This art’s entire reason for existing is to extract money from people, and it can’t be done efficiently when the art is challenging, of highly individuated.

Back in 2015, Lenika Cruz wrote an article for The Atlantic titled In Music, Uniformity Sells, which looked at a study done by the Medical University of Vienna that found the more popular a musical style becomes, the more simplified and repetitive the majority of songs in that style become. There’s less originality, less daring, less experimentation with the style and less exploration of similar styles. That simplified style then becomes accessible to musicians with lesser talent. And it’s often those less talented musicians who, because they’re operating on a simplified set of parameters, and in a formulaic way, capture the most attention by shear repetition of a successful, but simple, formula. They are able to make far more money than an artist doing better, more interesting, and more complex art because those simplified renditions of the style hit that part of the human brain we assume is only active in lower animals stuck in Skinner Boxes. We have never been liberated from the power of operant conditioning.

The same trend toward the generic also happens in literature. We see it when agents demand writers provide recent comparable titles in their query letters, and reject queries that don’t include them. We see it in the bookstores and in online retail spaces when there are “thematic” displays or suggestions of books that all fall into similar themes and storylines, like YA dystopian sci-fi stories where defiant teenaged girls lead social rebellions, or the endless parade of snarky, wry investigators tracking down inept criminals. Those of us who are attuned to the nuance of structure, from the sentence to the paragraph, also see a uniformity in style among a lot of “popular” writers. It’s a simplified, high modernist style similar to journalism—call it Semi-Hemingway lite. If a writer can execute that simplistic style, tap into a trend (without being too obvious about it), and be a little inventive with their plot twists, they’ll fit right in on those Big Five release schedules.

The pressure to conform to the profit driven aesthetic of American publishing is severe. Our entire social structure elevates our concerns over money to the top of everyone’s priority list whether they want that concern there or not—paying rent, buying food, going to the doctor, even relaxing, are things that seem to take more and more money out of our pockets every year. So, I don’t blame agents and the people who work at the Big Five Publishers and the assorted, remaining mid-sized publishers, for trying to survive in this dehumanizing capitalist system. I do think they should stop trying to convince us—the writers and readers—that their tastes are any more refined or discerning than yours or mine. Knowing what will sell to the most people and knowing what is truly good art are two different things, especially in capitalist aesthetics where they are almost wholly divorced from, and independent of, each other.

But the truth is that entertainment and meaningful art are not mutually exclusive. Meaningful art is useless if it does not draw our attention to itself.

So, I suppose I’ll occasionally drop a missive here when I have something to say about literary art. I doubt it’ll be that often, nor very regular. But that’s ok. I refuse to operate at the speed of the internet, and I refuse to bombard your inbox with a steady stream of babble hoping to get your attention by the shear weight of my output. When you hear from me, it’ll be because I have somewhere worth saying, and not because I’m generating “content” for my brand.

Resistance is never futile.