14 Comments
Nov 11Liked by Adam Pearson

I think you're right about the Sally Rooney route. This is what movies do. Movies have to deal with this because the internet (phones and screens) has made much of our lives unfilmable. The camera used to have access to all our drama and experience... now we've gone where it can't follow.

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Sep 11Liked by Adam Pearson

Very interesting Adam. Great to have meaty, no-holds-barred pieces. Thank you for keeping it high-brow!

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Sep 10Liked by Adam Pearson

Very good. I am worried that my manifesto was unclear though. I was not extolling the need for Internet novels. Boiled down, it was two things that comprised Lit 2.0: a) an attempt to make meaningful literature out of the informal everyday language that the Internet has helped democratize; b) an understanding that the Internet is so ubiquitous, an Internet novel is pointless. It would be like being excited about a TV-age novel or a Videogame-age novel.

In other words, if I write a novel about, say, taking care of my dying aunt. The novel will be closest to my reality because it can contain the interiority of someone who scrolls on TikTok while she is sleeping, for example. A movie would either gloss over that or find a corny way to show how online we are ("going viral").

As for the language, it would be informal. The idea of "informal art" or "informal lit" is hard for lit geeks to grasp which is why I point to stand-up or hip-hop. Excessive refinement in either genre diminishes its vitality.

Short of it: I neither look forward to Internet novels nor think they are necessary. Sorry if the Honor Levy reference at the top of my post was confusing.

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I didn’t think your manifesto was a call for more Internet novels (I know I originally said I was writing a counter-manifesto to Lit 2.0 but a couple months of reading and pondering made me change course). At least the examples of lit 2.0 you’ve cited since made it clear that’s not what you were calling for.

Still, internet novels aren’t strictly defined, so where does simply embracing online language end and the internet novel being? For me, I think it has to do with what takes up the bulk of the narrative. To your example, if your protagonist is scrolling TikTok trying to distract himself from feelings of helplessness due to watching his aunt fade, but the focus of the novel is about your protagonists relationship with his aunt, that’s not an internet novel. It’s just a novel taking place in the 2020s. Now if his dying aunt is just background noise distracting him from his real focus: his online life, and much of the text itself is either the narrator interacting online or his head is stuck online in some way, that could be an Internet novel. It’s all about what’s taking center stage in the story. With that I know I’m kind of pushing it by classifying “My First Book” as an Internet novel (not least because it’s a story collection and not a novel).

I guess if there’s one thing I don’t understand, it’s what you mean by “informal language.” To my understanding, colloquial narration (speaking in the character’s “voice”) has been the status quo at least since WWII. Is there some other aspect of form you’re referring to?

I’ll eventually write too against what I call “the cult of plain language” proliferated by Vonnegut/Elmore Leonard type writing advice, and more specifically, the underlying notion that the voice you use for daily conversation is your singular “authentic” voice, but that’s much later down the line.

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Looking forward to reading that as well.

From the post:

There was a brief window of time when Lit 2.0 would not have been necessary. When Walt Whitman wished to write about everyday people, using free verse to capture the vital rhythm of everyday speech, it seemed that the colloquial, informal, everyday voice would be all there was. Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes all carried the torch. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, literature became more academic. There was an increase in diversity. Diversity of ethnicity and sexual preference, anyway. But the neoliberal political perspective and academic language grew more and more prevalent in literature. And let’s not be coy, literature has always had class implications.

Lit 2.0 can better reflect our current reality because, for the past twenty years, we are all writing more than ever. Think how much of your life is spent deleting typing errors. Ask anybody. This was uncommon as recently as the ‘90s. “Everyday people” does not only mean blue collar anymore. There are wage slaves in cubicles without voices in literature.

As Richard Seymour writes in The Twittering Machine:

We are, abruptly, writing more than we ever have before. Our ‘scripturient’ disease, the writing symptom, shows, in part, how much was waiting to be expressed before the digital upheaval incited a new revolution in mass literacy. Handwriting was once the privilege of a few, before the first explosion of mass literacy in the late nineteenth century. Where it was taught, penmanship was indexed to social class, gender and occupation: merchants, lawyers, women and upper-class men were taught distinct letterform styles. The very appearance and configuration of the shapes and spacing of letters allowed a reader to quickly understand its social significance. Even in the printed word, there emerged an association of letterform with social class: think, today, of the different fonts deployed by ‘popular’ newspapers and those of the broadsheets. Writing has always been laden with hierarchies of significance and signification. What distinguishes the new mass literacy from its nineteenth-century predecessor is the spread of writing, in the homogenized fonts of the computer, the smartphone, the Twittering Machine. The characteristic experience of literacy prior to the Internet was reading; now it is writing. Amid a collapse in trust in the old media, whose commercial strategies and political affiliations have drawn it further and further away from the priorities of its audiences, the people formerly known as the audience have become the producers

Fitzpatrick praised the image for its economy. I would like to close this manifesto by focusing on another humbler element of our attention economy: texting. Texting arose in an era when phones did not have much choice in the media they displayed. The junky ringtone versions of top 40 songs of the Y2K era was enough to get people excited. Approaching 30 when texting was invented, I wasn’t sure what the appeal was. Then one day, I realized its appeal: gossip. Well, that’s where it started anyway, for most of us. Then we realized it was a place for secrets. Now I look at it and I realize, like the image, it works because of its economy. The online world is a world of high compression. Information needs to travel fast. Making films is as laborious as it gets. Even watching a film demands attention. A book is interactive in the sense that you have to turn the page. A movie demands you listen and watch. Not a bad thing. But it doesn’t fit the zeitgeist either. What’s more, after all the innovations and advances in digital filmmaking, video creators still don’t make narrative short films as much as they do video essays. Why? It’s easier. Simple as that

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Sep 10Liked by Adam Pearson

Or to digest it:

Since the 70s, definitely the 80s, literature has ossified into writers writing for writers. Academics writing for academics. Journalists writing for journalists. Now that more people are writing online than ever -- literally everyone -- there is an opportunity for non-academic literature.

Sam Kahn's latest criticized the "write what you know" dictum. Couldn't agree more -- if we are talking about traditional writers writing about being writers. Or filmmakers making movies about movies. Everything has become incestuous now. This is what I dislike about Dime Square stuff. The scene is the story.

Yes, an "authentic" voice can be performative. All I would want is that the writer hew closer to the voice they use online or with friends as opposed to the God voice. Again, this Lit 2.0 would be separate from Lit 1.0. All that formal writing you like would still exist in Lit 1.0. I don't see why this must be zero sum.

All told, still looking forward to your "authentic" piece, even if it is further down the line.

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I definitely agree with Sam’s criticism of “write what you know” and about Dimes Square. I am rooting for Dimes Square, despite what this piece might indicate. They’re supposed to be free from the ideological capture of arts institutions and I’d like to see them do something more (as they might have put in the 90s) dangerous. And I mean artistically, not ideologically. You certainly don’t need to go outside of mainstream publishing to write about yourself or your “scene.” Matthew Gasda’s book should be arriving in the mail soon (not the plays), so we will see how that is.

I do think we are wanting slightly different things from writers, but like you said, it’s not a zero sum game. And my goal isn’t to tell people how to write, more to signal that what they think might be unfriendly to the market is something someone still wants to read. But more on that when I gather my thought to tackle the piece.

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"As for the language, it would be informal. The idea of "informal art" or "informal lit" is hard for lit geeks to grasp..."

Not really this is straight out of how Jack Kerouac wrote daddyo, though his "spontaneous prosedy," had grater range than most recent writing, and does not reach Kerouac's Dionysian ecstasies, or flagellant monk lows, nor does it have the intelligence or groundedness in history of the best beat writing.

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Happy to see that we have your internet novel article you mentioned a while back. The only one I’ve read is The Novelist, which just by chance someone recommended to me about a month ago. It’s short so I figured why not, read it over the weekend. Ultimately I would say it’s forgettable. Not bad, not great, just a quick read where you say, ya, that was fine. I did think the descriptions of being on one’s phone were accurate and perceptive.

My main issue was that Castro keeps mentioning Thomas Bernhard and The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, and I’ve read Bernhard, then I read The Mezzanine after The Novelist, and there’s just no comparison. Bernhard and Baker are masters. I feel like Castro kind of shoots himself in the foot by trying to put his work in their league. In any case, his book led to me reading The Mezzanine, so I’m grateful for that.

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Yes, I had forgotten that autofiction was around before the internet and that Baker was doing what it looks like Castro's trying to do in the 90s. It's been a while since I read The Mezzanine but I remember it as having a feeling of joy, as if it were written to express his delight in the present moment and the minutiae of life and to show off his virtuosity. I haven't read The Novelist but I don't think this is the mood.

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That’s pretty accurate as to the differences in the two books, as far as I can remember. And since you bring up The Mezzanine, I wrote about it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/derekneal/p/the-mezzanine-by-nicholson-baker?r=76737&utm_medium=ios

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That’s pretty accurate as to the differences in the two books, as far as I can remember. And since you bring up The Mezzanine, I wrote about it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/derekneal/p/the-mezzanine-by-nicholson-baker?r=76737&utm_medium=ios

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I have been working on a review of The Novelist for a week or so. What did you think of the protag?

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Boring. And making “Jordan Castro” a named character in attempt to detract from the protagonist being an author stand-in was unconvincing.

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