On What to Write and How to Write It and How Not to Write It
The 1st day of the 1st month of the 3rd year
I’ve tried a couple of times to write a manifesto. Just for myself, y’know.
The most recent attempt, in relation to writing in the context of the Climate and Ecological Emergency, got as far as one sentence:
That ban was all I could manage. Positivity had I none.
The previous attempt, more general, got as far as:
The only full manifesto I’ve written happened about thirteen years ago, according to the date of the file.
I called it the —
QUANTUM prose MANIFESTO
And here it is, in full.
Without comment.
Until tomorrow.
As compared with interactive glowing-screen entertainments of all varieties, the novel is too dull to survive – the novel as it mostly stands.
How can any single-authored project compete with movies or computer games for which the credits last the duration of two power ballads?
Being more entertaining (fun fun fun) is, for the novel, impossible; being more unique is vocational; being truer is the only public justification.
‘Truer’ meaning closer to subjective reality; closer to the reality that goes on inside our heads behind the retinas.
‘Reality’ meaning subjectivity as subjectively witnessed by the subject – the subject with a body, the subject with a language.
Novels must fully colonize the invisible and the unseeable.
The single-authored project can bring us closer to one head; one head is more fascinating than a collectively sculpted and generally pleasing impression of headness.
Novels must at least attempt to astound, sentence by sentence.
(Notice, I’m raising the bar higher than I think I’ll be able to jump.)
Not ‘Show don’t tell’ but ‘Show don’t show’.
Fascination, not fun fun fun.
The paragraph really is dead. No-one understands what paragraphs are for. We lead lives without these temporary, minor pauses. Yes, we continue to experience major chapter breaks (death, marriage, depression, illness) – and these remain valid. Everything else is syncopated, overlapping, a flickering field.
Novels struggle to portray simultaneity; novels can’t cope with true multiplicity; novels mimic slow, fake communities; novels are wonderful at constructing wishful worlds.
The genre public does not want this, the exacting sentence-by-sentence novel – which might just be why it is essential.
The sentence is dead; Long live the sentence.
(It is the reader desires the Ivory Tower, not the writer.)
The only justification for the novel is and has always been an immediate engagement with the interior life of others – from Robinson Crusoe to Emma Bovary to Strether to Leopold Bloom to Moses Herzog to Oscar Wao.
All conventional literary novels are now historical novels – either overtly or in disguise.
The most successful non-genre writers become their own genres – and, in the process, die to all interest.
If you are content to be read ritually, that is as mental comfort food, there is no reason for you not to write ritually.
Any contemporary literary novel that is not technologically based, that does not acknowledge in its sentence structure our constant instant communication, is a wishful historical novel.
Science fiction, your time is now.
Comfort food is the diet of the ivory tower.
Despair at Western culture has always been one of Western culture’s most powerful engines; the novel’s own self-despair is no exception – see Beckett.
If these are the last rites, there is no reason for them to be any less glorious than the baptism.
Why quantum prose?
Because the astounding sentence has to be both particle and wave.
Because, subjectively, we can be indeterminately in two places at once.
Because, subjectively, we can exist plurally in two or more times, in two or more dimensions, at once.