Context
Recent Bay Area Writing
Brent Cunningham
It is no longer news that the myth of the
"solitary literary genius" has been faring poorly in academic and
theoretical circles. This demise has also had affects on the producers
of literature, the writers. Many young writers I meet now offhandedly
assert that interesting writing comes not primarily from "individual
talent" but from dialogue, argument, petty and not-so-petty politics,
collaborative ventures, divisions; in short, from interaction with
others. But valuing the social and interactive dimension of language is
not the same as saying that just any social interaction produces
interesting work. Significant writing scenes require both specific
points of reference (a set of theories, a politics, a set of
forerunners, a stylistics) and consistent gathering spaces (cafes,
living rooms, university classrooms, theaters, Internet communities).
Neither of these prerequisites simply happen; the cultivation of common
references and common meeting spaces—that is, of a literary
culture—occurs over time, actively tended by participants. This
is precisely the rare situation that currently exists in the San
Francisco Bay Area. Although it would take many books to do its history
justice, the roots of this literary culture go back at least as far as
the "San Francisco Renaissance" and the Beat movement. Figures like
Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Walen and Joanne
Kyger helped lay the groundwork for many essential institutions which
still serve as gathering places (New College, the Poetry Center at San
Francisco State, the Zen Center, a host of small presses, etc.). Adding
to this still-extant culture, the effects of Language poetry
reverberate widely here. In the 1970s, a group of writers (including
Bay Area writers like Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson, Bob
Perelman, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian) began publishing poems,
essays, missives and manifestos which attempted to explicitly
foreground the theoretical and political aspects of poetry. In the wake
of the academic success of this project (which among other things has
helped keep the phrase "Language poetry" in the lexicon of most young
writers here), any Bay Area writing that now wishes to call itself
apolitical or atheoretical is almost automatically viewed as
articulating itself in opposition to Language writing. Many of
the West Coast Language poets have left the area, and young writers
tend to have conflicting opinions about the exact nature and value of
their contribution. Undeniably, however, the institutions Language
poets helped set up or maintain (including Watten’s famous series at
the New Langton Arts cultural center, or the Grand Piano reading
series, which later became the Canessa Park series) remain vital public
forums for new work. Yet, even in light of these major
forerunners and contemporaries (and there are others), I would argue
that a group of largely gay and lesbian writers currently provides the
Bay Area literary scene with much of its flavor and context. Often
called the "New Narrative" writers (including the late Kathy Acker,
Robert Glück, Camille Roy, Bruce Boone, Michael Amnasan, Dennis Cooper,
Steve Abbott, Sam D’Allesandro, Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy), many
of them have been delicately balanced between fiction and poetry for
decades, with an often marked preference for the former. Presses like
Hard Press, Serpent’s Tail, Black Star Series and Semiotext(e)
published and continue to publish them, although both Acker and Cooper
moved onto the significantly larger Grove/Atlantic. Except for novels
by either of the latter two, a list of some of their best-known New
Narrative works might include works of fiction as obscure as Glück’s Margery Kempe, Killian’s Little Men, Amnasan’s Beyond the Safety of Dreams, Roy’s Swarm and Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker. The question of what makes narrative "new" for these writers is highly
contentious, although it certainly involves some interrogation of
standard narrative techniques, and hence an interrogation of the
politics of representation. Glück himself, in a note published on the
new Web site "Narrativity"
includes the following as likely New Narrative characteristics:
awareness of artifice, poetic disjunction applied to fiction, the
presence of metatext or frames, distorted autobiography, transgressive
or explicit sexual content, gossip as legitimate art. Glück also finds
theoretical roots (i.e. this "coherent set of references") for the New
Narrative project in figures like Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Louis
Althusser and Georges Bataille. Glück’s list of attributes
aside, many younger poets and fiction writers currently living in the
Bay Area have encountered the social effects of this group well before
discovering their aesthetic principles. For almost two decades now,
events flowing from the New Narrative "scene" have been able to
assemble large groups of the more avant-garde literati, bringing
diverse writers into social situations, and thus into dialogue. Glück,
Killian, Bellamy and Roy in particular have used readings, literary
events and classes at a variety of local schools to create a kind of
mobile university of innovative writing. Glück, who currently teaches
writing at San Francisco State, also ran the Small Press Traffic
reading series from 1977 to 1985; today it is one of the most
successful reading series in San Francisco, recently relocating from
New College in the Mission District to a theater at the San Francisco
campus of the California College of Arts & Crafts. Killian, a
presence at nearly every avant-garde reading in San Francisco,
periodically brings together many of the better writers in the area as
both actors and audience in his campy-yet-trenchant plays. Bellamy, who
frequently teaches workshops and recently taught at Mills College in
Oakland, has also been central to the success of the Small Press
Traffic reading series and serves on their board, while Camille Roy has
used her spot on the New Langton board to help preserve a commitment to
innovative local literature after Watten’s departure (Langton’s annual
literary awards remain one of the few prizes in San Francisco that tend
to go to more experimental writers). Arguably modeled on the
inclusive politics of the gay community, the New Narrative locus has
gradually become a case study in how to build not a movement, but a
context. Even the aesthetic principles that Glück lays out for New
Narrative writing exist primarily as proposals to be questioned, not as
entry requirements. And because there are consistent physical (or
virtual) spaces to meet in—not just conceptual and aesthetic
spaces—involvement has more to do with showing up than with adhering to
a specific notion of what writing should be. This is not to say that
literary politics and aesthetics are not contentious, especially since
the readings are seldom "open." But this is precisely the point. New
Narrative writers hold that literature is serious enough to require a
politics and an adaptable focal point, whereas many of the local open
readings—although perhaps more superficially egalitarian—begin with the
conviction that nothing beyond personal expression is at stake. This
feeling that foundational artistic questions are being asked and
debated attracts writers who may exhibit few if any of Glück’s New
Narrative markers, as well as attracting many influential local authors
who are clearly in dialogue with New Narrative principles and styles
(for instance Leslie Scalapino, Norma Cole, Laura Moriarty, Nathaniel
Mackey, Aaron Shurin). What difference does such a living
culture and context make? First, it means that new work can be examined
and critiqued not just as instances of talent but as writing in
dialogue with specific histories. Even more, I think that writing
inside such a context is the only way younger writers learn to
radically question staid assumptions about writing itself. It is only
by contact with a cacophony of articulated positions that writers are
shocked into rethinking their inherited sense of what a poem should do,
what a story should do, what language is, and, ultimately, what it
means to be a writer. To show some of the ongoing effects of
this context, I want to take a brief look at three new works by younger
writers living in the Bay Area. None of these works accepts that
writing is primarily a display of talent, ability, or craft; all three
respond overtly or covertly to the particular literary situation in San
Francisco. In particular, as works of experimental prose, they address
many of the issues raised by Glück’s principles of New Narrativity. But
even past that interaction, all three works possess a sharp awareness
that their aesthetic proposals will be taken seriously by other
writers, and that therefore those proposals need to take themselves
seriously. Juice (Renee Gladman, Kelsey Street Press,
2000): Of the three, Gladman focuses most closely on the subtlest level
of meaning and sequitur. Her concentration on the particular nuances of
narrative can be read, at least in part, as a response to the more
overt political stances of Language writing, given that Language poets
tended to argue that narrative in general, and subtle character studies
in particular, functioned as aesthetisized distractions from social and
material conditions. But, as with many New Narrative writers, Gladman’s
answer to Language writing is complex, having deep sympathies with the
radicalness of their project even as it reinstates some of the
narrative techniques of canonized fiction. Sentence to sentence, Juice is remarkably successful at undermining normal narrative logic,
especially in its casual refusal to maintain "recurrent motifs." A
digression about "the spirits," for instance, very much resembles a
spirit, coming out of nowhere and disappearing back into nowhere.
"There are certain things about the spirits I figured out" it begins,
sudden, shocking, full of confidence, apropos of nothing. Not unlike
some of Richard Brautigan’s better work, Gladman approaches writing as
if its rules have been established by an alien race, and the
singularity of this style quickly blurs the ostensible subject matter
(autobiography? life in America?) with "marginal" details like the
narrator’s preference for juice. This blurring is similar in spirit to
some of the revaluing proposed by New Narrative writing, where gossip
can be high art and transgressive sex is all-American. But Gladman’s
restructuring of literary values is generally more idiosyncratic; that
is, she allows the act of writing to level, displace and alter her
subject until there is a real question as to whether the subject is
known to her. Yet the tone seldom wavers, implying that this loss of a
subject does not produce anxiety for Gladman, though neither is
irresolution assumed to be the product of her own talent or
sophistication. Rather, the "talent" consists of letting the refraction
and strangeness of the written simply enter, carrying with it the
question of what this stuff (language? narrative? life?) might be for. Pamela: A Novel (Pamela Lu, Atelos Press, 1998): Although just as compelling as Juice, Pamela Lu’s first novel is perhaps easier to sum up, simply because it
insists on a single theme with multiple variations. Using Lu’s words,
one might phrase it thusly: "The very fact of our existence, amidst the
flux of the circular debates about the state of our existence, felt
like a parody of these debates themselves; hence we could only be real,
really real, when we mimicked the representations of ourselves as they
appeared in theory, commercials, and general conversation, which in
turn seemed to suggest that we had missed being real by fifty years or
so." This mimicking of representations, in turn, provides Pamela: A Novel with
its subject matter. Instead of detailing events in the lives of its
characters, the book takes the explanations its characters have for
each other and turns them into narrative. The project is fascinating,
the writing exact and purposeful, but what is most striking about Pamela is the way its postmodern obsession with modes of explanation fails to
alleviate the characters’ relentless searching. Thought and
communication only underscore the disturbing insufficiency of critical detachment. This
is the sort of extension of New Narrative concerns that many new Bay
Area works are attempting. In this case, the circularity of Pamela essentially asks whether utilizing Glück’s "frames and artifice" produces a more useful art or only a different art. While I suspect that Lu is familiar with New Narrative novels, the direct influence of those books is beside the point; Pamela is about interactions with younger San Francisco writers, and the
questions which exist "in the air" for Lu’s characters—questions of
self-representation and identity, autobiography and artifice—certainly
feed off the concerns explored by Glück, Acker, Killian, Bellamy and
Roy. Lu herself suggests an awareness of a living context when she
quotes Elaine de Kooning at the beginning of the book: "Any artist,
however, who looks only into his own life for his ideas is still going
to find the irresistible ideas of other artists there." 33549 (Taylor Brady, Leroy Press, 2000): 33549 is chapter one, book one of Brady’s work-in progress Research. Brady goes even further than Lu, in a sense, by enacting the usurpation of the real. Disintegrating, two-page long sentences
imply that experience itself has been swallowed by abstract
intellectualizing and conflicting ideologies. All subjects (human or
grammatical) retreat in the convolutions of time and syntax. Under such
circumstances, Brady offers the following: "My solution and, I would
find after the fact, that of many of my contemporaries, was to cover
every surface liberally with dents, nicks, scratches and pops in what I
saw, perhaps not in so many words, as a humanizing deployment of the
noise of post-humanity . . ." Brady’s proposed solution is reminiscent
of both Althusser’s position that a materialist art need to create
moments of "rupture" and of Walter Benjamin’s conviction that history
must be told from the marginal position. The autobiographical material in 33549 (if it is to be trusted as autobiography at all) leaves little doubt
that Brady read Althusser and Benjamin before arriving in the Bay Area.
But the resonance between Brady’s sense of narrative and Glück’s New
Narrative principles is suggestive and striking. Glück’s notion of
multiple "frames" has much in common with Brady’s almost neo Cubist
attempt to simultaneously tell his Florida childhood from many
perspectives. The following passage is a good example, where
autobiographical, political, psychological and metaphysical frames
collide with the question of where poems come from:
Given as I was to such alarms, and unable to refrain from their
public expression, in however duplicitous and aesthetically coded a
fashion, it was no surprise, though no less a terror to me, when my
poor dead Auntie Terrible, looking something like Nancy Reagan in her
guise as the first human face of public relations for the state of
permanent ‘low-intensity’ armed conflict, began her visitations in my
dreams, interrogating me with mock-aristocratic condescension about my
plans for life as a radically circumscribed public intellectual, and
suggesting to me topics for poems—a notebook of projects out of which I
continue to work at the present day. . . .
Even if Brady is not specifically responding to New Narrative
aesthetics, the fact that a work this Proustian in its complexity has
been published and widely read owes much to the New Narrative context,
just as both Gladman and Lu’s books needed San Francisco’s writing
scene for both their content and their initial reception. I imagine
that the direct influence of New Narrative novels on current Bay Area
writing will soon be worthy of more specific scholarly attention; but,
in the meantime, the New Narrative novelists continue to both write and
set up events, their followers continue to read New Narrative novels
and attend the events, and as a result complicated questions of
representation and narrative are being grounded directly in the daily
lives (and, incidentally, not especially academic lives) of local
emerging writers.
