Existential Anxiety Versus Narrative Anxiety

OH NOES!  Not the anxiety agains!   Just when you thought you’ve beaten this dead horse, I bring in a cowboy shaman and we raise that suckah back from the dead.  Only because one thing has been bothering me- this idea of narrative anxiety- that our world has become fragmented, thus making it harder to create cognitive narratives- feels like it’s missing something.

In the earlier posts I talked about forcing people to see things they don’t normally wish to see- (or rather, I as primary reader force myself past my comfort zones, which is the same thing, I think, since you can’t predict what symbolic narratives the reader brings to the table) and I think that is also key to this anxiety, this uncomfortableness, this feeling strange.  Which isn’t really part of narrative anxiety, but instead, I think, part of existential anxiety, what Sartre called our Monstrous Freedom, what Kierkegaard called Original Sin.

Basically, this is caused by us having unlimited freedoms, kept only in check by ourselves and our society.  The realization of these freedoms (the fact that I could go outside, stab someone and walk back inside and still be me- the one who performs the action, even though I consider myself an ethical person) causes anxiety, it causes fear because we are not safe anymore even inside of ourselves.

Yeah/nay?  Also- sorry for a light lack of posting, I’ve been pretty ill lately, and only today really had the strength to post anything.

My protagonist is Keanu Reeves

Think of the Matrix.  Think of the first half hour.  Think of Keanu Reeves trying to figure out wtf is going on.  Think of the expression on his face.

I think that expression is near universal to protagonists in the Next Weird.   These are protagonists are not the certain questers of Big Fantasy.  They usually know something has to be done, they just don’t have a clue what it is.  What follows is something like a bastardized detective story.  Instead of searching for clues to solve the mystery however, they are searching for clues to the what mystery is itself.

Does that ring true for anyone else?

Let’s put up a structure, to hang the words across.

 People are going to be lost if we assume that they know what we know, so I feel giving a rough outline might prove to be beneficial.  Note: these are only my ideas, feel free to yell and scream and throw food at me.

So here we go- I made a statement, sometime last year, that New Weird’s time has moved on and that something else is brewing undergound.  I said this because of several things: the writers of the New Weird had moved on, the popular consensus of the New Weird had nothing to do with the movement itself AND there was a lot of works being written by new writers that did not fit into New Weird, Slipstream or Interstitial, but contained some of the ideas but did them in different, interesting ways.

Now, I could easily say post-slipstream (although slipstream isn’t really a thing or a movement, but basic a loose idea that was never nailed down) or post-interstitial (same as slipstream), but there seems to be a  more personal identification with the writers of this new sub-genre than with any of the others.

So let me start by saying what I think this new subgenre consists of:
- Weirdness without reason, without rational.  Ala Slipstream/Interstitial
-A logic that is as much dream logic as it is real logic
-A Lack of genre furniture (or rather, a lack of genre furniture used in the traditional way- genre furniture is usually changed or made Weird by the way it is charged with dream logic- a great example of this is Sedia’s Zombie Lenin story over at Fantasy Mag. The zombie here is not genre zombie.  It is dream zombie.  It is symbolic zombie)
-The weird is not part of an affront to reality, a change to reality or even as a supernatural force.  It is instead a natural outgrowth of reality.
-It has a philosophical underpinning
-It breaks with narrative tradition and structure, yet retains some narrative expectancy and cohesion- enough that a writer will feel a dynamic between the two.
-Experimenting with Secondary World logic and rules, using different places and times, making it not a genre staple but rather a slippery thing

Note- I did not mention any specific relation to any other genre/subgenre.  In my original posts I made a bad assumption that this sort of writing could only take place in a contemporary reality, albeit one that is so changed and so different that it could never truly be our world.

But that’s ignoring the tendency for the writers to explore steam punk and clock punk and pickety punk and whatever.  There are next weird space operas, next weird post-cyberpunk madness, next weird steam worlds and clock powered robots.  The key element in the next weird, is, I think, Weird.  It’s weird taken to the next level, pushed on beyond what people have seen.

In fact, we can judge other next weird stories by the quality of their originality and strangeness.  It can be seen as a rebirth of wonder, of a way of jump starting a genre (f/sf/h) that has become stale and no longer awe inducing because it’s tropes have been stolen and paraded around in video games, D&D sessions and slick hollywood movies.  The furniture of genre has become one without awe, one without imagination, one that is stale and  purged of anything interesting.

The next weird pushes this.  It is weird in structure, in content, in idea and shape.  It is weird in self and soul.  It pushes lines and boundaries to experiment not in an act of revolution and rebellion, but rather as an act of rebirth,  as a fountain of youth and a regeneration of what is lost.  It is the graal to our fisherking of genre, made wasteland by the Delores stroke of mediocrity and mass media prolification.

Am I right? If not, feel free to bash my skull with wordz.

Weirdpunk

I hate the -punk suffix.  It’s overused and abused to the point of non-meaning.  Weirdpunk is a terrible name and should never be used by anyone ever.

That said, is Whatever Weird punk?

I mean in the way cyberpunk was actually punk, and in the way Steampunk magazine defines punk.

“Too much of what passes as steampunk denies the punk, in all of its guises. Punk—the fuse used for lighting cannons.  Punk—the downtrodden and dirty. Punk—the aggressive, do-it-ourself ethic. We stand on the shaky shoulders of opiumaddicts, esthete dandies, inventors of perpetual motion machines, mutineers, hucksters, gamblers, explorers, madmen and bluestockings. We laugh at experts and consult motheaten tomes of forgotten possibilities. We sneer at utopias while awaiting the new ruins to reveal themselves. We are a community of mechanical magicians enchanted by the real world and beholden to the mystery of possibility. We do not have the luxury of niceties or the possession of politeness; we are
rebuilding yesterday to ensure our tomorrow. Our corsets are stitched with safety pins and our top hats hide vicious mohawks.  We are fashion’s jackals running wild in the tailor shop.”

Obviously a lot of that quote pertains specifically to steampunk, the ethos behind it is what I’m talking about.  I’m talking  about punk in terms of the dissatisfaction it implies, the sense of revolution, the anger.  I mean punk as a movement before it became a label, a branding element.  I mean punk in terms of improvisation and bricolage, in terms of stripping down the basics.

Are we punk?

Do we draw any inspiration from punk?

Maybe?  Perhaps?  Thoughts, comments, questions?

Why are we weird?

So we’re beginning to come to some sort of consensus on the fact that our texts/narratives (I’m not sure on the exact nomenclature) express anxiety, and that that anxiety stems from a postmodern/pseudomodern worldview, from the fractured nature of our world, from all the potential disasters over which we have absolutely no control.

But why do we express that as the weird?

I’m absolutely sure that there are other ways to address this existential unease.  Why do we (as writers) adopt this transgressive, aggressive narrative attitude, slinging sheer oddness in the readers’ faces?  What do we think we’re achieving with that?

The obvious part of the answer (and I am delving deeply into subjectivity here) is that the weird reflects this anxiety–these are psychological threats and to manifest them in reality they’re going to appear to be weird.  And, in a directly related way, the weird elicits these feelings of anxiety that we express.

But other things can be used to reflect and evoke anxiety.  So, again, why this thing?

A Glimpse of Narrative Anxiety

One of the phrases that became key in the comments of my post the other day was “narrative anxiety,” and the commenters had some insight into what this phrase meant to them. And, in doing so, indirectly cemented the point I was trying to make with the phrase. This is, of course, not to diminish any of their definitions or discussions, which are all very thought-provoking, but I was going somewhere else. So, before I get to that, here’s a few key comments that I’ll be responding to.

Darin Bradley: “Anxiety, as its bandied about in the cogno-theory clubs, isn’t about being nervous or hesitant or un-articulatory—its the base motivation behind cognition, expression, action, and even perception. You, the body-mind that is Teppo, are anxious about the state of the world “out there”—you are anxious about the need to acquire and consume food, water, air. You are anxious about the possibility of being threatened for these things. About the possibility of being extinguished. These are all extrapolations of the base, genetic drive that Richard Dawkins explored in The Selfish Gene.

These anxieties inform textual or narrative anxiety—a spillover of PoMo metanarrative, in that the cultural discourse that developed you, the Teppo-consciousness, was already anxious about them. Bringing the collision of existential- and narrative anxieties into direct, primary focus seems to be one of the most easily identifiable hallmarks of The Unnamed Weird these days.”

Paul Jessup: “It’s all about exploring anxiety, about pushing buttons, about making people uncomfortable and face that thing they keep sliding by.”

Sam Taylor: “Most of the stories I’ve been reading dance around the edge of meaning and twist old symbols and archetypes in surprising ways, but the story doesn’t *mean* anything. Because it’s not supposed to mean anything. Because truth doesn’t mean anything. Because otherwise the writer is just Aesop.”

Jonathan Wood: “Distancing readers from reality, from humanity, allows a wealth of philosophizing to be done, of ideas to be tested.”

I wasn’t talking about the reader; I was referencing the writer. The narrative anxiety is his (or hers, or its). Dr. Bradley sees it as more basal, more Maslow-ian, and yes, while that is part of the narrative and the motivation within the narrative, it’s not part of the writer’s anxiety.

Fantasy is, let’s face it, not written by or for individuals who are suffering from a lack of the basic elements of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While fantasy may be escapism, or metaphorically socio-political; it is not grounded in the resolution of a need for food or shelter or basic human comforts. A writer may write something for purely financial reasons, but that reason isn’t part of the text (well, not thematically; it might be apparent due to a lack of engagement, but “getting paid” isn’t a motivation that propels the book). I am defining fantasy and the Whatever Weird as material that is written for needs superior (as in higher on the hierarchy, not necessarily qualitatively or morally better) to the basal genetic needs. And while stories and books may be written to “push buttons,” it’s an end and not the means. It is not the motivation–the anxiety–that propels the author to create the work.

Mr. Taylor spies the first part well enough–”stories that twist old symbols and archetypes in surprising ways”–but he doesn’t ask why, instead he dodges that question by saying that they’re “not supposed to mean anything.” If so, then why were they written? To push buttons? Mr. Wood thinks this distancing might be to allow “ideas to be tested,” while Mr. Jessup believes that it is meant to be a source of confusion–the anxiety “at work” comes from the reader’s “want” of an explanation. These are all perspectives of the reader, or rather the perspective of an external agent who is anticipating the writer’s motivation.

I think Mr. Wood was close, but the word I would use instead is “self.” The Next Weird allows us to test ourselves.

Death of Postmodernism? – Part of a larger whole?

Well, I’ve been reading Alan Kirby’s “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” and I thought I’d start a discussion on the article.

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm

Moneyshots:
“Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born…”

He then goes on to theorize about Post-PostModernism (“Pseudo-Modernism”) and how to alleviate the current emptiness and vaccuity he sees in it:

“Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener…”

(i.e., voting on American Idol, using the internet to seach for information, playing a storyline based video game where your decisions affect the plot, etc. Reminds me of those old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, really.)

Now here’s the part I find fascinating:
“Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.”

(My take:) This causes a disconnect between consequential reality because of the constant massive, desensitizing illusion. Because of the “Matrix”, if you want to call it that, the web of movies and popmedia that culture has built to support and sustain not only our sense of safety and superiority and invlunerabilty, but also to feed our revenge-fantasies that good always triumphs over evil.

“the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability.”

(My take:) The whole pattern is an Oroborus feeding on its own tail, and games like Neverwinter Nights even give the player the ability to make their own adventures and world settings and trade them with others, making a new class of author. FPS’s on desktops allow you to create your own maps and do the same. But most kids use XBoxes or Playstation or Wii’s, they don’t play games on computers. So even this type of authorship is dying.

“A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time… Their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.”

(My take:) While this is terrifying and alien to me, it also seems like a challenge. How can I make a non-linear text on flat paper that is read in a different order with a different “meaning” every time? (I mean, all stories are read differently every time, but how would I make that sort of ephemerality even more extreme? )

And then there’s this:
“There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980. Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Hence the name ‘pseudo-modernism’ also connotes the tension between the sophistication of the technological means, and the vapidity or ignorance of the content conveyed by it.”

(My take:) I think this informs a lot of what I’m writing (born in 1975 as I was), bridging that vapid gap and leaving the droning noise behind and tearing down the conformity so that something newer and more real than CGI can exist and trying to make something new and sparkling and ephemeral as a faerie’s wings before you eat them. Crunch crunch crunch.
…And that’s why I like this pseudo-horror, pseudo-weird, because it is something new that challenges the reader and says, “You haven’t seen everything yet. You have no idea what’s left.” I’m too old to be playing in the kiddie-pen, but I am too young to not have been deeply scarred by the new technology. And I think a lot of us are in that boat.

Just as further evidence, take this:
“…whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other.”
“…pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble.”
“In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire.”

I love that

“Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.”
(My take:) Food for thought. Writing is a fugue/trance state for most of us, just like Kung Fu or First Person Shooters. Perhaps it’s postmodern of me to analyze my own habits with a sense of irony, but most of my hobbies take me into fugue. Is there an innate danger to this? Joseph Campbell said to follow your bliss. This was widely attacked as an encouragement to be Hedonistic or as an excuse to do drugs, but is there an even more dangerous side to this? The loss of self to fugue?

—

I think that the conflict between the Postmodern and the Pseudomodern is a strong and driving engine in our society today. What is happening seems to be a merging of the two — because when there are two opposite and extreme philosophies, the truth usually lies in the middle. What the greeks called Synthesis. And that’s what I think I see happening all over the place. I think we may be part of a larger whole a new trend that’s taking off.

Another Angle on the Weird

My son was playing with some foam shapes in the tub tonight and he held up a “2″ and a “4″ and said, “Look, Daddy. Forty-two.” And I laughed, and said, “Of course.” What other random number would he pull out of the tub? And then I realized he didn’t get the reference, and the more I thought about it, I’m not entirely sure any of us are really in on Douglas Adams’ joke. In some ways, his entire world-view was weird. But, if you will, weird by reasons of technology. I mean, we all accepted his weird because it was explained away by “Science Fiction.” Firmly reining in Clarke’s Law, Adams demurred, “No, any incomprehensible technology is still technology.”

In a roundabout way, we’re talking about the same thing. It’s still weird; it doesn’t matter how you label it. And yes, as Mr. Jessup mentioned earlier today, it’s a psychological weird. It’s not just the world shifting, it is our place–our perception of it–that has shifted. Dr. Bradley says in his little piece on the weird:

People are the manner of their stories–for example, a story presenting the “magic” as it is conceived within the cultural ideology of colonized people represents how they conceive of existence not only narratively but in the “real” world as well. Ill defining as this is, it demonstrates that there has been a narrative anxiety about the importance of understanding the self before understanding the landscape and whatever events occur there beyond the scope of a people’s worldview (making them “magic”).

We write to communicate, don’t we? To share something of ourselves or our condition to the rest of the world. If our view, if you will, is narratively anxious, then how we can hope to render into communicable text (or touch, to hang a reference out to Cat Valente’s recent LJ post about human contact) what we hope to share with another intelligence? Is the weird a way of saying, “This may seem like magic, but that is only because you do not have the wealth of history and inference and connotations bound up in the words I am stringing together.” Any metaphor, significantly removed from cultural tide pool, is indistinguishably weird. But that doesn’t mean it is any less potent, or any less pregnant with meaning.

If the New Weird argued that magic had a place in urban, modern, settings, then we ask you consider why do we still insist on calling it “magic.” Why do we lash ourselves to any of the language used in the last three hundred years to describe the “un”-human? Yes, “faery” and “vampire” and “lycanthropy” are useful tools because they give our audience something familiar, something to which they can cling as they are thrown into the textual sea, but these words are also boat anchors that will drag you down. We are children of the 21st century. We are hurtling towards “trans-” and “post-” in our humanity. Why is our language, our fantastic literature, not already there? Why is it not showing us the way? Urging us ever on?

To sling back around to Cat Valente’s ‘O Human Child’ post again: “Bereft of that naked, bare ability to ask for simple contact without background radiation of adult weirdness, weren’t we really just holding our arms out to each other and plaintively whispering I want to touch you again?” Is that not what we strive to do with language? Is that not what we strive to discover in ourselves by writing? To get beneath our own fleshy armor and our psychic shields, and touch that luminous part of ourselves that makes such creative acts possible.

Isn’t it weird that we’ve stopped asking ourselves what is beyond the limits of our imaginations? That we’ve given up on the fantastic possibility of the creative impulse (to be fair, I’m talking the vast majority of the world who is content to sit at home and wait for the Martians to drop in and show us that we’re not the top of the food chain). Isn’t it weird that we made up all the words that became holy writ, and now we’re afraid to wonder how else they might be arranged. Isn’t it weird that we spend our lives struggling so hard on basal, menial, material tasks that we are too tired to dream? Isn’t it weird that Douglas Adams said that the answer was “42,” and no one presented a counter-argument.

The Next Weird should teach us all how to forget what it is to be “human.” We’re done with that, gang. It’s time to move on.

What’s in a name?

Something which has come up (a little bit) in comments is whether it’s a good idea to give whatever it is we’re doing a name.

There are certainly arguments against.  Names are, often, linked to definitions.  A name will carry with it certain connotations which become linked in someone’s name.  Those connotations, that definition can limit a movement.  A name allows other people to define what a label stands for. There are ways around this, but I’m not really sure that the Interstitial movement’s attempt to define themselves as that which cannot be defined is really that successful.

However, I believe naming this type of writing, this attitude to narrative/subject/setting does have some merits.  For one it stops other people naming it. It stops others defining us.  It stops others from turning what we’re trying to keep descriptive into something definitive.

And, to be honest, we’re all here because we’re trying to sell our writing.  That may not be the main motivator behind taking part in this specific blog, but it’s in the background behind pretty much all out personal blogs I’d guess.  If not, and I have maligned you, then I salute you for you are more noble than I.  But giving writing a handy-dandy label, saying (essentially) that you will find some things here that you’ve found and liked in other places, will help fiction gain readers.

All that, it may also limit readership.  “Oh, I didn’t like x and y with that label, I probably won’t like z.”  There again, that’s probably a true statement.

Next Weird, Little Weird, Post New Weird, Crazy Shit.  It’s all the same problem.  Naming this is a double-edged sword.  But I think it’s worth us taking the risk of getting cut.

An Existential Question for Existential Fantasy

I feel I am the outsider here.

I am not published. My literary degree was focused on reading and interpreting the the “modern canon” (Faulkner, Hemingway, Shakespeare (Hamlet to the exclusion of almost every other play), etc.) I read SF and F growing up and naturally gravitated to them when I started writing, but my exposure to the “New Weird” is recent and scattershot. And yet New Weird, Next Weird, and Magical Realism seem to be everything that I write.

But functionally, I can’t tell the difference between new weird and what we’re writing now. To me, I don’t see the stories we’re writing as terribly NEW. They’re the same old stories, disguised and twisted and refocused to be rebellious and disturbing and to hit the perfect notes of weirdness that make them stick out but still be acceptable. And, to me, that’s what all fiction is about. The weirdness factor and central tropes vary greatly between genres, but the way you make a stand-out story does not.

I stumbled into the movement because I liked Paul J’s stories a lot and I thought what he was doing burned like fire in the mind and I thought I could do it too, but with my own spin. And, in a way, I’m still stumbling through because my eyes are not sharpened to the differences between New Weird and “Next” Weird, or even New Weird and just-being-edgy.

And I think that’s because when I read people like Jessup and Vandermeer and Lake, I try to see how they’re constructing images and meaning through their own eyes — because that’s what I want to know:

Why and how they’re deriving things, so I can gnaw on it and suck the marrow from it and swallow what tastes good and spit the rest out.

I guess this is a really long-winded spiel to ask the Central Question Of Literary Analysis: What does analysis get us if it doesn’t tell us how to be better writers?