Surviving Tremors: A Time of Too Many Isms?
Everybody seems to want something to shake dust and mold from assumed stagnant foundations. Ask any independent literary webzine editor what she wants and the words “original” and “new” will inevitably nestle into the response. This original and new work may come by way of various splintered isms, for better or worse.
Literary isms sprout often, and lately it seems that so many of them tout the same anti-mainstream agenda. From Brutalism to The Offbeat Generation to self-depreciative referents like Joseph Ridgwell’s fictional The Shambleists, angst against the establishment propagates widely. I get it, I truly do. I’m for it. But if everything is new, will there be anything left for academia to latch onto in order to generate necessary conversation regarding trends? This is a genuine question, in want of discussion.
The role of academia is to legitimize underground isms and propagate discourse about their work in order to better understand the limitations and potential of a society. The Beats, for example, came to prominence in the 1950s and only later got their own canons and college courses. What started as a small group of kids riding a mix of angst, drugs, and pens, swelled into something widely appreciated and of understood importance. From Ism to study to understanding; this is the process.
But what is now? Are we at a time when nothing is intriguing us enough as an underground collective to warrant the future attention of academics? Should I be worried that if every story is new, then a lack of structure won’t support such future conversation? Are we too splintered to be someday taken seriously by the larger community?
Or am I just nearsighted and suffering the egotistical impression that my generation is experiencing something unique? During the lead up to The Beats’s mid-century prominence, were there dozens of other, similar underground trends that either died away or congealed into what we know today as The Beats?
I’m worried that yes, we are too splintered and that yes, the coming generation lacks focus. Though I believe in a survival of the fittest mentality when it comes to contextualizing trends, I still fear that a choking ‘anti’ mentality is keeping us from searching for answers, and instead is allowing us to too easily dismiss everything.
Also:
What happens to the splinters once they get legitimized by academia? Do they abandon their original anti values in favor of widespread acceptance, or do they simply try to redefine what it means to be “underground?”
If someone like Stephen King wrote a piece fitting to an underground ism’s mission, would he (and his massive audience) be accepted or would he be shunned?
I’d argue that these -isms, these focuses, have never really existed in a (literary) underground – the call for them seems, at least these days, more a hope for the notoriety given to groups like the Beats.
But even the Beats, I’d say they only existed in academia, and as Kerouac and Ginsberg’s name for thier friends, but mostly they were a clique who got popular. I’m sure there were other literary movements going on even then, they just weren’t picked up by the academics, by the papers.
Can anyone really say that Naked Lunch and On the Road bear any similarity? I couldn’t. They’re as different as literature comes; one is a calculated ode to society, a satire and paregoric phillipic. The other is a love letter!
But they were used to contextualise a youth movement which they referenced: a “rejection of mainstream American values, experimentation with drugs, alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern spirituality”, and in an attempt to contextualise those movements the academics bestowed attributes to the novels that actually contextualised them – but it was the mythology surrounding the books that provided a context, not the books themselves. The Beat movement came after the fact.
I think it’s a mistake in approaching the underground as a collective – maybe I’m wrong, I’ve never much desired to be part of the social-web of zines and movements, the few folk I have conversed with and the handful of communities joined has been more coincidence than a desire to get to know what’s happening in the underground. To me, though, they seem like a series of cliques of writers without an overarching agenda or similarity, beyond a lack of book deals – I don’t mean clique in a bad way, either – simply looking for a few folk to share work with in the thankless pits of obscurity. I think that is as it should be. I don’t think we’re splintered. For every Bizarro site, every author of Brutaliterature, there are more folk at places like the OWC, who, for lack of mainstream publicity, simply link to their work and go about reading others. I don’t think a manifesto is neccessary – like yourself, I guess. Though you’ve managed not to sneer at the undergroundists, I do think its important to point out any artificial artistic call-to-arms is more an attempt at branding and marketing, and though hypocritical in its plea for academic obscurity just as distasteful in a plea for academic notoriety. Non-chalance is the way to go. No manifesto. Just write. These generational signifiers are methods of control, I reckon. I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore. Where am I? I wanted to find your interview with that Shipp guy. Christ.
Absolutely beautiful response.
“I don’t think a manifesto is neccessary…”
–That’s my hope, that a manifesto is never necessary. My hope is, as you imply as well (“the few folk I have conversed with and the handful of communities joined has been more coincidence than a desire to get to know what’s happening in the underground”) that we come into these things searching for a shared expierence, and should a movement evolve, then great. But to START a movement seems too rife with ego.
But you are right, I think that artistic call-to-arms mentalities are driven by branding, without having to succomb to branding-as-a-dirty-word, as in “I’ve got a webpage, so fuck your ad in the Daily Star” – Guess what Mr. Underground…both methods serve the same purpose.
So, I say, embrace your natural direction. Sooner or later, you’ll find kindreds. No need to stand in front of tanks as a motivator, only as a response.