#11 Saying something new
Getting "deep and foamy" with Roland Barthes, David Foster Wallace, Richard Hoggart, Oulipo writers, Joseph Henrich and Neil Hannon.
I’ve spent the past year talking about my current work in progress instead of writing it. But since last month’s piece I’ve written 23,000 words, bringing me up to 40,000. This is a surprise; the thing could be finished and out on submission by autumn. And about time too. A lot has changed since I started writing my novel—four years, four rewrites and three titles ago—not least my perspective on the novel itself. I spent my time doing all the right things, getting the structure right, the tense right, the tone right, the narrative voice right, the plot right. Now I want to make something new. By which I mean, something different (opposite) to what I’ve done before, and also something entirely new in a literary sense. Or: I want to get it all wrong.
But how?
Deep and foamy
Roland Barthes was an early adopter of Substack, and his short blog posts published every month during 1954-56 by Les Lettres nouvelle are collected in Mythologies. In ‘Soap-powders and detergents’, inspired by the first World Detergent Conference in Paris, 1954, Barthes provides a contrasting “psycho-analysis of purifying liquids (chlorinated, for example) with that of soap-powders (Lux, Persil) or that of detergents (Omo)”:
Matter here is endowed with value-bearing states. Omo uses two of these, which are rather novel in the category of detergents: the deep and the foamy. To say that Omo cleans in depth (see the Cinéma Publicité advertisement) is to assume that linen is deep, which no one had previously thought, and this unquestionably results in exalting it, by establishing it as an object favourable to those obscure tendencies to enfold and caress which are found in every human body. As for foam, it is well known that it signifies luxury. To begin with, it appears to lack any usefulness; then, its abundant, easy, almost infinite proliferation allows one to suppose there is in the substance from which it issues a vigorous germ…
The writing is strange, at once cold and witty, the product of both a sincere, academic volition and an ironic, overactive imagination. Barthes returns again and again to food: margarine becomes a corollary for the army and the church (“a little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil”), and wine becomes the defining French myth (“Wine gives thus a foundation for a collective morality”), as does steak and chips (“Steak is a part of the same sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state”).
Barthes says something new about food. This is clever – food being a universal, ever-present thing in our lives (we all eat it). So, we can say something new about something universal. Perhaps bodies (everybody’s got one), or sleep (everybody does it), or the land and the water (everybody lives on it), or death (everybody’s heading there). These are guaranteed hot topics, they never go out of fashion.
But to philosophise deeply about shallow things is a familiar trope, très Barthesian. In a bookshop years ago, I recall seeing a book on stoic philosophy in The Simpsons. This shtick is 70 years old already.
Pleading or ideological
On Bingo, Barbie and Barthes: 50 Years of Cultural Studies (BBC Sounds), Laurie Taylor paraphrases The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1957):
Its basic theme is there are different types of literacy. Our society has only taught us to be literate in a certain way: we can read. But we haven't learnt to be critically literate, to discriminate, to get beyond the special pleading or ideological manipulation of popular culture.
I knew nothing about the cultural studies movement at Birmingham University from the mid-1960s. It proposed that any part of life was up for grabs as an object of study (e.g. soap, margarine, wine, steak, The Simpsons), which seems important to me as these dominant paradigms, these ways of reading the world, these “myths”, influence everything we see and do. This is my kind of conspiracy theory. Not the Lizard People or Illuminati, but the cage of our own perception.
Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. (‘Myth Today’, Barthes)
Myth-makers and water-sellers
The same (new) thing was said by David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College, in his ‘This is Water’ address:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
The point is “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about”. I was 19 when a university supervisor assigned me Wallace’s piece. I found it eye-opening, illuminating, epiphanic. I saw the world differently. At our next session, my supervisor explained the first time he’d read ‘This is Water’ as a young man, he’d found it eye-opening, illuminating, epiphanic. How did my study group respond? I said nothing, I’m not sure why.
Wallace’s sincere advocacy for “attention and awareness and discipline” still feels new…
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
… And yet it’s been co-opted by myth-makers, ideological-manipulators and water-sellers themselves. Example: this website where I reread ‘This is Water’ belongs to a man called James Clear who sells his habit book and his habit tracking app and his newsletter subscription. Talk about default setting, talk about constant gnawing.
Cultural commentator I am not. But I’ve always seen the reading apparatus used for books and the world as the same. About 12 years ago I wrote a short-lived blog called Really Practical Criticism which promised ‘close readings of modern life’. In an ironic, academic way I analysed TV shows, newspaper articles and advertisements (i.e. myths and water). What I didn't know in my blog about seeing through the day’s cultural paradigms, was that I was following a cultural paradigm set by Barthes, Hoggart, et al. Which is ironic and instructive. There’s always another level of meaning; the thing being interpreted can always itself be interpreted. We can always level up, break the fourth wall.
I remember once ending up in Topshop with my mum and a few other people. After a while, when the others had picked some outfits to try on, my mum commented on the arrangement of the tables, shelves and rails. They’d been assessing the jeans, she’d been analysing the juxtaposition. This different way of seeing is interesting and produces totally different outcomes: it’s cheaper for a start, but you end up without any new clothes.
So, this is about “how you construct meaning from experience” (Wallace) which we can apply to Barthes thus:
‘Huh, deep and foamy? I'd never constructed that meaning from that experience before, but it was there all along. So that’s the reason I bought Persil.’ (Note: please read in George Saunders’ Story Club voice for best results)
Peculiar and prosperous
But there’s always another level of meaning. What Barthes, Hoggart and Wallace didn’t know was that they were WEIRD: “raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic”. (Of course, they did know this.) Joseph Henrich’s book The Weirdest People in the World—‘How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous’—details the fact that:
unlike most who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, nonconformist, analytical and control-oriented. They focused on themselves – their attributes, accomplishments and aspirations – over their relationships and social roles.
Henrich attributes our “exotic mental ability” to “reading” (by which he means “being literate”) where “until relatively recently, never more than 10 percent of any society’s populations could read”. He then traces this phenomenon through 16th-century Protestantism, specifically Lutheran, which through
a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves […] inadvertently laid the foundation for universal, state-funded schooling by promoting the idea that it was the government’s responsibility to educate the populace.
This I find eye-opening, illuminating, epiphanic (and also a little confusing). When I see other cultures which live communally, when I consider that instead of seeing my family I communicate with them on WhatsApp, when I find myself financially rich but somehow spiritually poor, I get that “the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing”. That this isn’t how it’s meant to be. Which is exactly what a WEIRD person would think.
Modern and ancient
There is a blindness in habitual thinking which I want to resist, as a writer. The notion of what a book can be, the idea of how a story is comprised. The Oulipo writers in 1960s France rewrote the literary rulebook “systematically and scientifically”, according to François Le Lionnais’s first manifesto:
Must one adhere to the old tricks of the trade and obstinately refuse to imagine new possibilities? The partisans of the status quo don’t hesitate to answer in the affirmative. Their conviction rests less on reasoned reflection than on force of habit and the impressive series of masterpieces (and also, alas, pieces less masterly) which has been obtained according to the present rules and regulations. […] Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses? We don’t believe that it should. (Penguin Book of Oulipo, edited by Philip Terry)
Raymond Queneau’s ‘Hundred Thousand Billion Poems’ comprised by each line being cut and rearranged… Harry Mathews’s ‘35 Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare’ rehashing Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” (for instance, antonymy: “Nothing and something: this was an answer”)… George Perec and Joe Brainard’s text in which every sentence begins “I remember”… The N+7 method, the clinamen, anticipatory plagiarism… If there was ever an electric shock for the turgid corpse of literature, this is it. What’s beautiful about “potential literature” (the “li” and “po” of Oulipo) is that it isn’t only a literary product itself, but a provocation, an invitation to imagine what could be.
Right and wrong
The ironic thing about Ezra Pound’s modernist maxim ‘Make It New’ is that it’s become old, rehashed, a sequel. Barthes is himself a myth, cultural studies has studied itself to death, and Oulipo’s days are numbered. The legacy of all this is cynicism and irony, the sense that everything is an object of study and therefore nothing can be genuine, especially through the lens of social media. There is no way to create sincere art about—or in a world of—TikTok. It’s all water. (Even making this point is pointless.) So, what’s new? There must be something urgent to say, about something other than AI, which, again, is already a dominant myth itself.
The writer’s task could be to reveal the presuppositions—through story, poetry, fiction, criticism, Substack—to themselves and to readers. To me, this is a good read. Not thought-provoking but thought-alternating, though-illuminating. Writing is a process of discovering what you thought all along, using words. It should be transformative for the writer and reader, otherwise we are merely ‘literary content creators’, and then why are we even bothering?
This brings me back to this nearly-finished novel of mine, that structured thing full of beats and scenes. Plots and subplots. Inciting incident, rising action, climax and denouement. The book comes in five parts, for god's sake! So much of fiction is so narrow. We love our heroes to be flawed, our adults to have childhood traumas, our stories to be both personal and political, to make a point but not too strongly. But I want to do something sincere and human, to say something new.
Better than that, I want to forget. I’d like to forget the rules ever existed and to create in that childlike state of accidental anarchy. To do it because it feels good. As Neil Hannon from the band The Divine Comedy says on The Long History of Ignorance (BBC Radio 4):
Some of the most original things that I created were at the beginning of my career. Basically, when you don’t really know what you’re doing, then you try things and you just sort of throw stuff at the wall, and you go: “Well, I like the sound of that”. When I was young […] I just started doing it, and I didn’t know whether I was doing it right.
The problem is: once you know how to write a song, writing a song becomes much harder. I’m no longer young, but I cherish this time of innocence when I am unpublished, when my music is amateur, when there is no reputation to uphold. When it’s still possible to forget. When instead of getting it right, I can get it wrong.
Another piece which features only male writers. There’s probably something to be said about that and how it’s not new (in addition to: sorry).