Chapter 6: Velcro Fiction
Fiction is at an impasse. With the advent of Franco Moretti's abstract models of the history of literature, fiction enters the epicycle of the What being written losing prominence to the When, the Why, and the How. Novels, short stories... these are only important as building blocks in relation to other building blocks, important now for the structure they unknowingly co-create rather than the worlds they depict within. This is sad, brutal, and inevitable.
If fiction, then, is destined to be nothing more significant than a leaf in a tree or an ant crawling along the forest floor, to what ends does the fiction writer write? For certainly it takes a certain amount of ego-eccentricity and willful self delusion-dissolution to even attempt the archaic act at this point. No one reads anymore, we are told, least of all Franco Moretti. The writer can no longer expect more than a handful of readers to be taken along on his obsessive (and obsessively precious) word adventures, with many of these being over-reading professional literary addicts who, though not jaded, have certainly seen enough to know all too well the limits of fictive literature (i.e. those forces pointed to by the story itself.
So why bother?
Let's take a recent example: Cory Doctorow's masterful short story "Anda's Game", wherein a tween girl in Britain finds a way to feed her diabetes-fomenting sweets habit by video gaming for real money (I won't spoil the whole thing, but it's a good read). As a precious literary object taken on its own, it is quite a feat: Doctorow's attention to the nuances of gamer jargon, British schoolgirl slang, and free market economics is something to envy. But it is not without an attendent "let down" to the fact of a short story's true impotence in relation to much more powerful culture-objects as alcohol, television, and pornography.
Perhaps it is to literature's great merit that it lacks the bone-and-gristle addictive capacity of our dirtier vices (save for those of us currently hell-bent on finishing Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos 4-part space epic), but that is part of its dissappointment: something so capable of stimulating critical thinking, attention to detail, and empathy should be more compelling an attraction than, say, a wife-approved coke hooker romp through the gold chocolate streets of VH1 rocketeer Hypno-Vegas. But the world lit behaves as though so many smooth stones on the bottom of a rushing stream: not without its localized afficianados (those rock snails and river snakes and catfish currently inhabiting your local Barnes and Noble cafe), but a virtual non-participant in relation to the velocity charge of the Main Stream. Were it that these rocks were somehow "stickier".
It is not as though Lit hasn't tried. Every year, great monsoons of these Lit Rocks pelt the Main Stream, many containing the finest of craftsmanship and breathtakingly surreal-comic plots and heart-jettisoning operatic mood shifts fit for the surface of a Cumulonimbus sucking off an active volcano, but still, the effect on the true Heart of culture and the Bowels of the political body is all but neglible. No, Lit's salvation must come from outside literature itself; it must come from the stories we tell about the stories contained in novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems. While the stories contained within these forms have changed with the flows and counter-flows of time, the Story of stories has not.
This Book Will Shave Your Life
Enter Velcro Fiction: imaginative literature intent on intentional uptake into the larger power-bodies of Culture and Power. These are river stones disguised as food, meant to be eaten by fish, spit up and shat out and generally disruptive as they simultaneously seek to build, via contigent proximity to other fiction-stones suspended in the "air" of the Main Stream, something like a permanent, fluctuating castle.
Let's back up.
What is Velcro made of? Like all such connection relays, it requires two elements -- or surfaces -- through which to be effective. One is the unruly fur mass. The other is the orderly, rigid, Spartan plasti-forest of hooks. Now, fiction has never been without its hooks: it's the first line of any story -- the lead (note the fishing anology?) -- but these have never been the main intent of a story. There are hooks, yes, but a novel or short story's general strategy is to contain a few main hooks (a protagonist, an antagonist, a compelling problem) while relying more on the story's general -- and weak -- gravitational pull to keep the reader interested. While it works in a short term sense, once the story is finished, the reader continues on to other things, the story's effect not but a small stain on his consciousness demanding little beyond the brief commitment he made to tearing through its pages.
But what if a story was all hooks, and took as a main objective not the maintenance of a coherent narrative flow -- staying true to its internal pseudo-world -- but the maintenance of a lasting relationship with the reader, one that effects the reader's actions pains and grimaces long after the "story" is released from his awareness? How does one, in other words, construct a story like a velcro patch, something both undeniably sticky but non-destructive in the ultimate sense (rather than, to extend the analogy further, the destructive one-time stickiness of a bumper sticker, or the spines of a cactus), both reusable, yet, unforgettable.
Velcro: built for effienciency, effective at certain degrees of pull-pressure, relatively indestructible, non-discriminating (any fuzz-mass will do), reusable, mutable, adaptable, useful. Velcro fiction as binding agent, functional attractor, temporary bond-surface, strong in direct proportion to mass and size and regularity of hooks.
What the surface and texture of a "velcro story" look like, where any point of the printed page is immediately compelling, not just by virture of its relationship to other fictive elements (i.e. the character name "Bob" is only interesting insofar as he plays a key role in the systems of danger and desire flowing through the linguistic microcosm), but because of what it is in and of itself: something hook-shaped and glue-prone. Shock literature, erotica, lengthy descriptions of viscera: these are the obvious examples, yet so compelling are their "hooks", and so deadly are their bites, that they render the reader rash-encrusted and codependent for the rest of his life. Theirs is a hook which inverts the reader/read relationship, tractor beaming the reader within and underneath the text in such a way that prevents all further interaction with the World (Main) Stream that brought the reader into the fiction-stone's gravity well in the first place.
Such tactics are not only unfair, they destabilize the entire ecosystem, creating energy vortices and whirlpools in the middle of pristine lakes where the time of water molecules is better spent following and adapting to larger currents and preparing for the polar freezes farther up the pike. "Shock" lit, my friends, is better seen as a field of hook-shaped daggers rather than the "temporary compulsion micro-structures" of the velcroid plasti-seal. This is not to say that sex, drugs, violence, and gruesome detail are not to be deployed throughout the hook field of a fiction field's hook panel, only they must be used sparingly in the service of a Something Greater, lest the skin of the reader-host be impaled and violated to such a degree that "floating" (remember: the real aim of the fiction-stone is uptake into the reader-fish so as to create fluctuating dreamcastles in the Main Stream "sky", where further avenues of interest may then descend) becomes impossible.
It is the Something Greater that we now turn our attention to.
All readers are different, which renders hook homogeneity the first casualty in the creation of true Velcro Fiction (VF). Where Steve, age 39, is "grabbed" by a story featuring copious email exchanges, Sally, age 19, is looking for something with a Romantic-Existentialist malaise. While Brenda, age 62, is looking for a lengthy meditation on death, John-Mule, age 8, just needs something with a lot of pretty colors and lights. VF must contain all of these hooks, and more, and they must be somewhat evenly distributed across the surface of the story.
"But aren't we just trying to Lowest-Common-Denominator ourselves into a cheap universal appeal?" you may be asking. "What about the depths achieved in a story where the writer has committed to a singular family of hooks intent on pulling a few self-selected readers deep into its healing broths? Is it really all just about success, or money, or the number of forests felled in order to table our linear imaginings?"
This ignores a fundamental element of literature, and reading in general: that people interpret things differently. And a story which makes space for multiple -- if not myriad -- interpretations, is one that will be perceived, accepted, used, and achieved in multidinous ways, rendering your "one-size-fits-all" theorem abject and crude. It is not that we wish to see 6 billion people floating through the World Main Stream using our story-stones all in the same way, allowing to think the same thoughts through them, catalyzing the same belief structures and behavior categories, etc. That's for cheap hackwork like Harry Potter, not true VF.
[The writer takes a snooty snort and continues his lambast, if only elsewhere and hidden on this blog-page.]
It is not with consensual and widespread uptake that our aims are achieved, that's only Step 1, a crass but necessary groundwork. It is the interaction of uptaked story-stones in the reader-fish swimming the Main Stream that truly interests us. A story with a vast array of hooks apparent in every single sentence -- a military memory in sentence 1, a meditation on Flash design in sentence 55, wistful memories of repairing bikes with a grandfather in sentence 1231 -- is hardly a story in itself, but a catalyst for stories, a virtually empty shell into which pour the hopes and dreams and wanderings and imaginings of thousands of attentive souls winding their honest souls through the desire-trap treachery of this innocent forest stream Life.
The story-stones, the multiple VFs shared and discussed and squabble over in the rare air of the World Main Stream, created sparks of common understanding between readers just as much as they diversify their options and enlivens their perspectives, creating what is in essence a massive and vast energy reef/pancake of ascending hive-power and ever-increasing speed, a dreamcastle prone for lift-off given the additional a crucial number of even newer VF stories.
VF stories, laying like stones on the bottom of a pond, brightly compelling and impossible to cast away in the interim, glorious fields of desire-hooks wrapping the entire species in its fiction-skin, rendering a race like so many schools and meta-schools of wish weaving in and out of each other, all of them covered in these brightly-colored stones, with the stones banging into each other, forming sparks, forming temporary structures, their hooks connecting with each other as much as they do with the minds of their human hosts, forming arches and domes and balustrades and pilasters and flying butresses and faux stone abutments and indoor ski centers and skyscrapers shaped in the names of loved ones: the unknowing reader, his entire conscious covered by a field of stories he cannot shake, the Story of these stories lifting his feet from the surface of the earth and compelling his hands towards service, to building the coherent energy flux-structures which he and his future spawn will thus inhabit.
Postscript
It is obvious that the author has had little to say about the injunctions required in the creation of authentic VF. Suffice it to say the crux of the matter lies within the behavior the "hook" itself: an odd-looking object which, upon further inspection, passively attaches itself to the reader as he pulls away. A hook, in other words, is a promise, and while not empty, it certainly has others intentions beyond its surface advertisements. And an authentic VF story-stone, a narrative field riddled with promises (like the surface of a NASCAR cruiser, or a Chinese website drowning in pop-up ads), has no choice but to attract -- and stick to -- a wide/wild swath of humanity, so much so that it becomes an expected tapestry of the environment (again, much like the hypersizzle-swath of our outdoor commercial signage displays -- billboards, to the layperson), and object approached full knowledge that its hook-promises are "lies", but a willful participation in these lies irregardless. A VF book which promises a million things to a million readers -- only to use their sucker-fluid for purposes of its own design (and theirs, albeir unknowingly) -- has no choice to succeed. Such strategems should be enough foreplay for the would-be writer of authentic VF to begin his self-stroking.
If fiction, then, is destined to be nothing more significant than a leaf in a tree or an ant crawling along the forest floor, to what ends does the fiction writer write? For certainly it takes a certain amount of ego-eccentricity and willful self delusion-dissolution to even attempt the archaic act at this point. No one reads anymore, we are told, least of all Franco Moretti. The writer can no longer expect more than a handful of readers to be taken along on his obsessive (and obsessively precious) word adventures, with many of these being over-reading professional literary addicts who, though not jaded, have certainly seen enough to know all too well the limits of fictive literature (i.e. those forces pointed to by the story itself.
So why bother?
Let's take a recent example: Cory Doctorow's masterful short story "Anda's Game", wherein a tween girl in Britain finds a way to feed her diabetes-fomenting sweets habit by video gaming for real money (I won't spoil the whole thing, but it's a good read). As a precious literary object taken on its own, it is quite a feat: Doctorow's attention to the nuances of gamer jargon, British schoolgirl slang, and free market economics is something to envy. But it is not without an attendent "let down" to the fact of a short story's true impotence in relation to much more powerful culture-objects as alcohol, television, and pornography.
Perhaps it is to literature's great merit that it lacks the bone-and-gristle addictive capacity of our dirtier vices (save for those of us currently hell-bent on finishing Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos 4-part space epic), but that is part of its dissappointment: something so capable of stimulating critical thinking, attention to detail, and empathy should be more compelling an attraction than, say, a wife-approved coke hooker romp through the gold chocolate streets of VH1 rocketeer Hypno-Vegas. But the world lit behaves as though so many smooth stones on the bottom of a rushing stream: not without its localized afficianados (those rock snails and river snakes and catfish currently inhabiting your local Barnes and Noble cafe), but a virtual non-participant in relation to the velocity charge of the Main Stream. Were it that these rocks were somehow "stickier".
It is not as though Lit hasn't tried. Every year, great monsoons of these Lit Rocks pelt the Main Stream, many containing the finest of craftsmanship and breathtakingly surreal-comic plots and heart-jettisoning operatic mood shifts fit for the surface of a Cumulonimbus sucking off an active volcano, but still, the effect on the true Heart of culture and the Bowels of the political body is all but neglible. No, Lit's salvation must come from outside literature itself; it must come from the stories we tell about the stories contained in novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems. While the stories contained within these forms have changed with the flows and counter-flows of time, the Story of stories has not.
This Book Will Shave Your Life
Enter Velcro Fiction: imaginative literature intent on intentional uptake into the larger power-bodies of Culture and Power. These are river stones disguised as food, meant to be eaten by fish, spit up and shat out and generally disruptive as they simultaneously seek to build, via contigent proximity to other fiction-stones suspended in the "air" of the Main Stream, something like a permanent, fluctuating castle.
Let's back up.
What is Velcro made of? Like all such connection relays, it requires two elements -- or surfaces -- through which to be effective. One is the unruly fur mass. The other is the orderly, rigid, Spartan plasti-forest of hooks. Now, fiction has never been without its hooks: it's the first line of any story -- the lead (note the fishing anology?) -- but these have never been the main intent of a story. There are hooks, yes, but a novel or short story's general strategy is to contain a few main hooks (a protagonist, an antagonist, a compelling problem) while relying more on the story's general -- and weak -- gravitational pull to keep the reader interested. While it works in a short term sense, once the story is finished, the reader continues on to other things, the story's effect not but a small stain on his consciousness demanding little beyond the brief commitment he made to tearing through its pages.
But what if a story was all hooks, and took as a main objective not the maintenance of a coherent narrative flow -- staying true to its internal pseudo-world -- but the maintenance of a lasting relationship with the reader, one that effects the reader's actions pains and grimaces long after the "story" is released from his awareness? How does one, in other words, construct a story like a velcro patch, something both undeniably sticky but non-destructive in the ultimate sense (rather than, to extend the analogy further, the destructive one-time stickiness of a bumper sticker, or the spines of a cactus), both reusable, yet, unforgettable.
Velcro: built for effienciency, effective at certain degrees of pull-pressure, relatively indestructible, non-discriminating (any fuzz-mass will do), reusable, mutable, adaptable, useful. Velcro fiction as binding agent, functional attractor, temporary bond-surface, strong in direct proportion to mass and size and regularity of hooks.
What the surface and texture of a "velcro story" look like, where any point of the printed page is immediately compelling, not just by virture of its relationship to other fictive elements (i.e. the character name "Bob" is only interesting insofar as he plays a key role in the systems of danger and desire flowing through the linguistic microcosm), but because of what it is in and of itself: something hook-shaped and glue-prone. Shock literature, erotica, lengthy descriptions of viscera: these are the obvious examples, yet so compelling are their "hooks", and so deadly are their bites, that they render the reader rash-encrusted and codependent for the rest of his life. Theirs is a hook which inverts the reader/read relationship, tractor beaming the reader within and underneath the text in such a way that prevents all further interaction with the World (Main) Stream that brought the reader into the fiction-stone's gravity well in the first place.
Such tactics are not only unfair, they destabilize the entire ecosystem, creating energy vortices and whirlpools in the middle of pristine lakes where the time of water molecules is better spent following and adapting to larger currents and preparing for the polar freezes farther up the pike. "Shock" lit, my friends, is better seen as a field of hook-shaped daggers rather than the "temporary compulsion micro-structures" of the velcroid plasti-seal. This is not to say that sex, drugs, violence, and gruesome detail are not to be deployed throughout the hook field of a fiction field's hook panel, only they must be used sparingly in the service of a Something Greater, lest the skin of the reader-host be impaled and violated to such a degree that "floating" (remember: the real aim of the fiction-stone is uptake into the reader-fish so as to create fluctuating dreamcastles in the Main Stream "sky", where further avenues of interest may then descend) becomes impossible.
It is the Something Greater that we now turn our attention to.
All readers are different, which renders hook homogeneity the first casualty in the creation of true Velcro Fiction (VF). Where Steve, age 39, is "grabbed" by a story featuring copious email exchanges, Sally, age 19, is looking for something with a Romantic-Existentialist malaise. While Brenda, age 62, is looking for a lengthy meditation on death, John-Mule, age 8, just needs something with a lot of pretty colors and lights. VF must contain all of these hooks, and more, and they must be somewhat evenly distributed across the surface of the story.
"But aren't we just trying to Lowest-Common-Denominator ourselves into a cheap universal appeal?" you may be asking. "What about the depths achieved in a story where the writer has committed to a singular family of hooks intent on pulling a few self-selected readers deep into its healing broths? Is it really all just about success, or money, or the number of forests felled in order to table our linear imaginings?"
This ignores a fundamental element of literature, and reading in general: that people interpret things differently. And a story which makes space for multiple -- if not myriad -- interpretations, is one that will be perceived, accepted, used, and achieved in multidinous ways, rendering your "one-size-fits-all" theorem abject and crude. It is not that we wish to see 6 billion people floating through the World Main Stream using our story-stones all in the same way, allowing to think the same thoughts through them, catalyzing the same belief structures and behavior categories, etc. That's for cheap hackwork like Harry Potter, not true VF.
[The writer takes a snooty snort and continues his lambast, if only elsewhere and hidden on this blog-page.]
It is not with consensual and widespread uptake that our aims are achieved, that's only Step 1, a crass but necessary groundwork. It is the interaction of uptaked story-stones in the reader-fish swimming the Main Stream that truly interests us. A story with a vast array of hooks apparent in every single sentence -- a military memory in sentence 1, a meditation on Flash design in sentence 55, wistful memories of repairing bikes with a grandfather in sentence 1231 -- is hardly a story in itself, but a catalyst for stories, a virtually empty shell into which pour the hopes and dreams and wanderings and imaginings of thousands of attentive souls winding their honest souls through the desire-trap treachery of this innocent forest stream Life.
The story-stones, the multiple VFs shared and discussed and squabble over in the rare air of the World Main Stream, created sparks of common understanding between readers just as much as they diversify their options and enlivens their perspectives, creating what is in essence a massive and vast energy reef/pancake of ascending hive-power and ever-increasing speed, a dreamcastle prone for lift-off given the additional a crucial number of even newer VF stories.
VF stories, laying like stones on the bottom of a pond, brightly compelling and impossible to cast away in the interim, glorious fields of desire-hooks wrapping the entire species in its fiction-skin, rendering a race like so many schools and meta-schools of wish weaving in and out of each other, all of them covered in these brightly-colored stones, with the stones banging into each other, forming sparks, forming temporary structures, their hooks connecting with each other as much as they do with the minds of their human hosts, forming arches and domes and balustrades and pilasters and flying butresses and faux stone abutments and indoor ski centers and skyscrapers shaped in the names of loved ones: the unknowing reader, his entire conscious covered by a field of stories he cannot shake, the Story of these stories lifting his feet from the surface of the earth and compelling his hands towards service, to building the coherent energy flux-structures which he and his future spawn will thus inhabit.
Postscript
It is obvious that the author has had little to say about the injunctions required in the creation of authentic VF. Suffice it to say the crux of the matter lies within the behavior the "hook" itself: an odd-looking object which, upon further inspection, passively attaches itself to the reader as he pulls away. A hook, in other words, is a promise, and while not empty, it certainly has others intentions beyond its surface advertisements. And an authentic VF story-stone, a narrative field riddled with promises (like the surface of a NASCAR cruiser, or a Chinese website drowning in pop-up ads), has no choice but to attract -- and stick to -- a wide/wild swath of humanity, so much so that it becomes an expected tapestry of the environment (again, much like the hypersizzle-swath of our outdoor commercial signage displays -- billboards, to the layperson), and object approached full knowledge that its hook-promises are "lies", but a willful participation in these lies irregardless. A VF book which promises a million things to a million readers -- only to use their sucker-fluid for purposes of its own design (and theirs, albeir unknowingly) -- has no choice to succeed. Such strategems should be enough foreplay for the would-be writer of authentic VF to begin his self-stroking.
2 Comments:
hey im glad you wrote more into this book. I like this piece. Im going to have to go back, when I have some time, and read all the entries again. later
hey,
just leaving a coment here , cuz i can, about the writers block entry. I liked it, but shit, if thats writers block, then you got nothing to worry about. been super busy, but we should get together soon, I wanna here your recordings, and these library computers don't play audio. talk to you layer.
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