Missing Writers

Suppose that certain literary authors are taken - simplistically, yet plausibly - as representative voices of or commentators on particular moments, periods or cultural milieux.

So Milton is "the laureate of the English Revolution", Fitzgerald "the conscience of the Jazz Age", etc.

One might then be intuitively inclined to imagine that every such moment has such a writer (or more than one).

But are there such moments, periods or milieux which do NOT have such a representative writer, and are in that respect relatively 'unvoiced' by literature?

Or to come at this differently: are there writers who logically OUGHT to have existed, but don't seem to have done?

Why I thought of this: I was thinking of Pynchon, doing his particular erudite countercultural thing in a haze of dope smoke, and thinking: that was presumably a writer who 'had to happen' - the history of the 1960s etc created a niche or need for that figure writing that thing, and he emerged. And in a sense this could be said for lots of other writers. Then I wondered if any such historical process had not thus found expression.

I posit this model conscious of its simplifying or 'mechanical' character. It is heuristic, a way of putting things, not to be taken literally.

I admit a circularity to the idea: we may only know an era or milieu as we do *because* of certain writers. Maybe the 'Pynchon slot' only appears evident because Pynchon exists. To counteract this idea, we might need to be able to posit certain milieux which are recognizable and know but *don't* have such significant literary expression - but could have done?

I think I nominate punk (rock). One can name one or two names like John Cooper Clarke but that hardly fills a large gap. One can say that punk was not a literary movement, but then whatever Pynchon came to voice might not have been one either, originally. One can posit other kinds of major writers from the punk era - like Paul Morley - but one then can still ask, why not the established literary genres?

Whether the punk idea works or not, my question remains: are there any other such eras?

Provide me with a haze of dope smoke and I will discuss this with u

Maybe the 'Pynchon slot' only appears evident because Pynchon exists

I think this is probably true. Still an interesting question to mull on, though (no ideas as of yet).

I can think of richard hell for punk, kathy acker, aaron cometbus, off the top of my head. Eagan fits too, for better or worse.

Parts of ellis are parts of punk. This is all ameri-punk i grant.

Jennifer Egan? But she's pretty much a post-2000 writer - not a voice of punk when it was happening.

I don't know B E Ellis terribly well, but I would have thought that the thing he (simplistically) 'voiced' / 'represented' was 'Reagan's America' or something. (In the UK we would see that as later than punk.)

(re Egan though, admittedly some kind of retrospective dimension is quite likely to be built into this issue - probably even the case with Milton and Fitzgerald.)

margaret drabble's 'the ice age' (haven't read, tho i like drabble) always gets mentioned in association with punk-era britain.

yes, definitely a book of that era re: 1970s UK declinism

not written from an actual punk perspective though.

i actually think WW2 might be a good example -- plenty of WW2 novels, obviously, but no single representative writer, like no one really thinks of say norman mailer as being the 'voice of the W2 generation' the way WW1 is universally associated with owen, sassoon, robert graves, 'all quiet on the western front,' et al.

Nice one J.D. !

Actually I suppose there is a generic answer to my question which is: yes, many eras are known as such because writers wrote about them (the circularity point); what is the exception? - modern YOUTH milieux, which are known by other arts and expressions (music, fashion), but which can't be relied on to generate major literary work - so you can expect all those eras / milieux defined by youth cultures to be under-represented in literature.

Examples may or may not include rock & roll, Mod, hippy, punk, casuals, acid house, Britpop etc etc.

It might possibly be harder to find the youth milieux that DO have significant literary expression: a couple of examples: Colin MacInnes and whatever he represented exactly; Hollinghurst and the gay club scene.

pynchon's best novels about the sixties weren't a voice of them as-they-happened either. and in fact weren't set in the sixties!

GR is probably the best book about WWII but of course its not actually about WWII.

writers aren't in the middle of scenes anyway, usually. they're on the side, writing.

the canonical WWII novel is probably catch-22, no? and i'd nominate yates as the voice of that generation of vets.

sterl, are your punk answers (really none of whom i feel acquainted with, so hard to judge) anywhere close to what people might answer, in a punk milieu (kidz falling hard for records new to them, say, wanting to explore), when asked about 'what we read?'. because maybe the latter might provide some context for the former.

(kind of in the way that metal people read nietzsche and lovecraft but that needn't be the answer of who the 'metal writers' are.)

you could entertain the idea of e.g. the writer participants in marcus' 'secret history' in 'lipstick traces' being punk's writers. i don't know whether that would satisfy pinefox's interest in finding what i assume is a writer -produced by- some time or scene or place who is thus somehow more qualified to be its voice rather than be nominated or appropriated as its voice.

aaron cometbus and hell are both produced from a time/place very much. the former is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Cometbus and the latter i mean he's not only produced by a time/place but arguably produced it himself.

if anything they're too central as figures as compared to a fitzgerald or such.

acker is much more a writer who translated an aesthetic entirely. her novels are to me the literary equiv of like lydia lunch. there's much more abrasive violence (both literal and figurative/textual) in her gen of po-mo experimentalism than the earlier stuff.

punk novels feel ugly. i don't know if the canon is ready to accept them.

it's not a novel but i'd nominate 'lipstick traces' as being the best piece of writing-as-writing about (or from, or whatever) the punk era.

writers aren't in the middle of scenes -- yes, I quite agree / understand -- but we still do somewhat have the model I started with, re 'this writer gives voice to this period'

The Crying of Lot 49 was of course written in the 60s as it happened and is set in the 60s, I love it though evidently others don't (I don't like GR)

(but re Pynchon, my '60s' was a very shorthand term)

A cheap short cut way to finding a cultural era that wasn't captured / expressed in literature might be:

think of ANOTHER art form with a significant movement / period and see if it had any literary corollary

Pre-Raphaelites? I suppose so
Italian Neo-Realism? Not sure (though early Calvino is supposed to be close to that)
French New Wave? Maybe the Nouveau Roman and Queneau
Caravaggio? I don't know
Cave paintings? Not aware of any surviving written work

not quite a focused period, but the British rise of empire is maybe missing a writer - like it's everywhere in the background of Romanticism & Victorian lit, but there's no-one till Kipling really who's looking straight at British Imperial experience.

Glorious Revolution maybe.

Yes!
Thanks Woof great examples.

thinking about it, mark s said that thing about kipling to me in a pub once, so all credit to him

Is Ballard not the Brit punk writer? Not of the milieu obv, but his motifs are omnipresent. Wondering abt Britpop/high Blairism... Zadie Smith?

Yes, White Teeth is almost explicitly of that moment. I don't think ZS understands pop especially but she does fit the optimistic mood music or whatever it was. (Later ZS presumably a different matter.)

Happy to see Stevie T on this thread as if anyone challenged me about my idea of writers representing milieux / belong to eras I was going to say I had somewhat picked up this way of thinking from conversation with him (and always really liked it).

"He comes out of that Woody Allen Upper East Side culture / He was like the poetic voice of the downtown scene around Warhol's Factory / His early films belong to that whole LA slacker moment / She's an outrider of Transcendentalism" -- ST, passim

was also going to say: hypothesis: maybe MOST of British pop music post-1950s has been unrepresented by major literary work because most literary writers don't really get it

cf Rushdie botching it, Amis clueless about it
later generation - Coe, Dyer, Bracewell, Welsh, Nicola Barker - know more about it but not sure any of them has made a great work around pop
Hornby can presumably be written off

obviously this whole idea can be short-circuited by the idea that pop and literature are basically incompatible and we shouldn't expect to see any significant interaction between them, it's a kind of category mistake.

Irvine Welsh has to be given credit for writing for a post-rave generation, even if you don't much like him.

I don't really know him!
Yes he may be good at that thing.

Thinking some more, I realise most of my responses to the broad idea are reservations both general (relationship between history and literature) and particular (I think that's wrong about Milton), but i like that, it is making me think. Where are the two Jacobite risings in Eng Lit? Is Blake an answer if we ask about the American Revolution from an English perspective? Is Congreve the writer o the Glorious Revolution? Dunno. Going to sit on this bus and think.

Italian Neo-Realism: Moravia and Morante, also Pavese.

The French New Wave adopted a lot of more 'catholic' writers (Bernanos). It was the Left Bank who worked with Noveau Roman writers for the most part.

Indie pop. Really, has there EVER been a significant literary work from the indie pop world?

The nostalgic prose of Alistair Fitchett might be as good as it gets.

I would say no, but then I'd also question whether indiepop ever really had a "moment", even circa c86 or the heady days of B&S, rather than just chugging on over the years.

I think there was C86 and then the recent revival - but I agree that it never entirely went away, just chugged along, and that B&S are the key historical bridge.

Woof, I agree that the idea is too broad etc to be taken literally, the way I've put it (notwithstanding my appreciation of Stevie's contextual method). I don't mean to stand up for it as a big theory.

I do think it makes me think, in one way or another.

For instance it makes me think, if there AREN'T missing writers, does that tell us about how we have constructed history or cultural history around the writers we DO have?

And it makes me think: if I THINK writers are missing, isn't that likely to be my own ignorance, and hence research could show that they DID exist for this phenomenon? ('Where are the native responses to C19 colonialism?' 'Where are the female poets of the Irish Free State?') So this at least then gives one an idea of something one COULD research.

But there is also something about the sense that there SHOULD be or IS a writer or text for everything. A kind of ... historical positivism, in which only the actual counts? A 'Hegelian' type of sense that the real always finds its proper expression and what has to happen always happens? (ps I have always found Hegel unreadable).

I mean - how far can we / do we cope with the idea that there COULD be anything missing in cultural history? Is it just a logical error to think that anything could be missing?

ballard was v. much embraced by punk too -- excellent call.

i actually think WW2 might be a good example -- plenty of WW2 novels, obviously, but no single representative writer, like no one really thinks of say norman mailer as being the 'voice of the W2 generation' the way WW1 is universally associated with owen, sassoon, robert graves, 'all quiet on the western front,' et al.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, March 28, 2013 9:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought about this time too, especially because the American literary establishment was very gung ho to find someone to be the Hemingway of WWII, and a lot of novels were perhaps overly praised (The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, the Caine Mutiny, The Young Lions, Guard of Honor) and the older, established novelists largely ignored the war in their work.

There was a crop of writers that appeared right after the war ended (Capote, Salinger, Bellow, Cheever, Vidal, Bowles) but they don't really represent the war era.

But in a way the war was too big for any one novelist, and it makes sense that there are many, many novels about it and no one that you can easily point at as the best.

new wave brit sci-fi in general...

i thought catch-22 and slaughterhouse 5 were the wwii books to beat.

man in a grey flannel suit is a pretty crummy book, but has very interesting things to say about the aftermath of the war, in a way.

and richard allen was the bard of 70's brit-punk. thought everyone knew that.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ruf9JBv9V4U/Sd8t_BqduXI/AAAAAAAABlw/csSZfepRoP8/s400/skinhead.gif

Ballard makes sense for various reasons such as drawing on visual arts and found objects rather than writing novels of manners, explicit reference to his work as mentioned in this article, What pop music tells us about J G Ballard : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8008277.stm

Some obvious omissions corrected in the comments.

but he wasn't the bard for art school/college punks. just street punk culture.

john brunner pretty punk rock too. i always want to say that sci-fi in general a better representative for an era than standard literary fiction. sci-fi writers OWNED the 50's. every aspect of the 50's and what the 50's represents today. same with the 60's and 70's.

i thought catch-22 and slaughterhouse 5 were the wwii books to beat.

― scott seward, Friday, March 29, 2013 9:50 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Those were published in the 1960s though

the war was so big it took a few decades to digest literature-wise

Simon Reynolds on JGB http://www.salon.com/2009/04/23/ballard/

Is there one great novel about the age of FDR and the New Deal?

(nb William Carlos Williams was into this a bit?)

Orwell spans the WWII era rather nicely.

What about Dos Passos, does anyone read him anymore? Although I guess that's earlier, more WWI.

The first post reminded me of this stanza from "Límites" by Jorge Luis Borges:

"Tras el cristal ya gris la noche cesa,
y del alto de libros que nos trunca
sombra dilata por la vaga mesa,
alguno habrá que no leeremos nunca."

The English:

"Through the dawning window night withdraws
and among the stacked books which throw
irregular shadows on the dim table,
there must be one which I will never read."

The entire poem in its original Spanish:http://palabravirtual.com/index.php?ir=ver_voz1.php&wid=23&p=Jorge%20Luis%20Borges&t=L%EDmites&o=Jorge%20Luis%20Borges

And in English: http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/jorge-luis-borges/limits/

I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but when I was a child I used to think about what I didn't read, because that meant that those writers would never exist and it saddened me. And now that I'm older, as a self-proclaimed 'minor writer', it still bothers me that there are great writers who, having written perhaps some of the best pieces of literature, will never exist, because they have not been read.

I think this is especially true in Latin American literature and I surmise it is true for Eastern European literature. I think what makes it into the English language (via translation) many times worsens this as it promotes a mythologising that is disconnected with many of these authors' reality.

Some books are better off for not being read by me: I thought so much more of them before. Also, sometimes I enjoy giving up, finally taking them from the stack of unreads, selling or giving them away--put 'em back out there, for somebody else.

c21m, how did you get to be a minor writer?

Not old enough to vote yet

c21m, how did you get to be a minor writer?

― the pinefox, Wednesday, April 3, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The 'minor' part is the most interesting and one which can be defined in various ways. I'm certainly not one to strictly define a word, but minor writers are usually people who write for newspapers, magazines, or have published things on a small scale. Many are also ghostwriters.

As I've made obvious my fascination with Borges on this board already, he actually has a few things to say regarding minor writers. Look up his poems on minor poets and writers. Also, thanks to the great work of the late Aaron Swartz, you can read TS Eliot's What Is Minor Poetry on JSTOR by signing up for free: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27537650?uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101842797913

The LA Times published an article a really long time ago about this, as well: http://articles.latimes.com/1991-06-09/books/bk-729_1_professional-writer

It explains the gist of it, but there is no elaborate definition everyone adheres to.

I would have imagined that a minor writer was someone generally considered less good or important than a major writer.

It being understood that this judgement might be unfair or revisable.

I don't think 'minor writer' is the sort of thing that you get to self-proclaim.

woof, that's only if you mean it in a positive way, which I didn't. I meant it in a more 'failed writer' way. In that sense, most of my writer friends are minor writers. It almost embarrasses us the type of writing we must do, as the LA Times writer mentions, just to pay the bills.

While it is admirable to think that being a minor writer is something one should strive for first, the reality is most writers do not strive for that, they fall into it.

the pinefox has the right idea, generally. But writers romanticise and idealise the situation. We're all prostitutes who let our craft get belittled by those who sign our paycheques.

Oh I see. Yes, I do mean minor writer positively & the bar is pretty high. Most of the poets I think of as minor poets are prob top 20 at least for their era. Often stupidly famous in their day.

More generally, Edwardian or post-wilde vibe to the idea of the minor writer for me. Firbank. David Garnett.

Maybe 'minor content producer' would be less loaded.

That more generally was in fact less generally.

Does publication on ILX qualify? (am updating cv)

Agree with Woof re eg: Firbank as a minor writer (though almost suspect he's famous enough not to be minor).

Actually most of the writers I know of might be too well known to be minor. Take Thom Gunnn, John Wain, Donald Davie, William Cooper, they're not minor, or are they? Maybe they are. I suppose this is 'minor' from the POV of a canon focused on 'major' - which in that era would probably only include Larkin and Hughes.

I think if what you're doing is writing for a magazine then 'minor writer' is a misleading tag. Why not 'journalist [who is also writing a novel in his / her spare time]' or, if you want to be boozily self-deprecating, 'hack'?

Of course some great writing has been done for magazines.

btw I don't think doing your job makes you a prostitute.

Their job is quite specific.

most of those names would pass as minor writers to my eyes (Gunn excepted, maybe) - but there's an implicit context or field of reference for most uses of 'minor writer' - it suggests a major writer hanging over them or somewhere nearby & then a location for both the major&minor. So Larkin + Hughes may not even be Major Writers if we talk about international literature, but def are if we talk about British poetry.

I guess there are messy questions of 'influence' & 'importance' implicit.

Yeah, I agree with you guys: I would read 'minor writer' as 'non-canonical literary author' rather than someone who's doing journalism or copywriting.

But are there such moments, periods or milieux which do NOT have such a representative writer, and are in that respect relatively 'unvoiced' by literature?

Do you know of a Silicon Valley tech boom / startup novel? I don't.

The housing bubble / mortgage meltdown hasn't found its Updike, either, though in Southern California it's the very stuff of life.

Did the dissolution of Yugoslavia have a writer? It produced lots of journalism, but no famous novel, I don't think.

Do you know of a Silicon Valley tech boom / startup novel? I don't.

Microserfs.

mixing things from thread; housing bubble + novel of the eu = there's an irish novel of the 07/08 collapse (empty houses, shit banks) that I think I'd like to read. But I don't know if it's been written.

Oh, dear. Yes, woof, extremely messy questions with context playing an important role. I'll add my perspective.

Most writers start at the bottom. My personal definition of this is to equate this bottom to 'minor'. The truth is that when we talk about Larkin and Hughes, we talk about established writers in a canon. Whether we are focusing only on the country or the world, it doesn't matter. No minor writer ever died a country's Poet Laureate or with titles such as CBE or FRSL. Why complicate things? Following that logic, Larkin and Hughes are major writers. Minor writers are also those who write about things which remain unpopular among the masses or a large group's interests (i.e., professors, learning institutions, etc.). This is why context matters. A given group's interests may change from generation to generation.

emil.y, the problem is that, currently, many writers survive by doing a 9-to-5. Sometimes it's journalism and/or copywriting, while working on the writing they wish to be known for on the side. As woof has suggested, it is a long and complicated discussion. My friends and I have been published in either books and/or literary magazines, but there is no longer a sense of importance by doing this, because most of them are small publications. Anyone can get published and anyone can put out a book.

Many of my writer friends don't even work at jobs related to writing, yet they're brilliant writers. And then there is the whole evil world of freelance.... I shudder!

Why on earth would anything I wrote give you the impression that I need to be told that many writers survive by doing a 9-to-5? Like, does ANYONE not know that?

Sorry, I misinterpreted this: "...rather than someone who's doing journalism or copywriting."

Thinking about it more, though, I feel good journalists and copywriters can be minor writers.

that's nice for you but 'minor writer' has an umabiguous meaning in a literary context and it doesn't mean 'someone who writes but is not tolstoy'

umabiguous

If by 'literary context' you mean 'Academic context', then I'm glad universities and professors do not hold the rights to explicitly defining everything across all contexts. Read the links I've posted above (the LA Times article and even TS Eliot's as well as Borges's opinions on the matter).

yeah let anything mean whatever you want it to mean

smoke weed everyday

I think you mean 'aspiring writer'.

umabiguous
ethan_uma_quentin_paparazzi_watermark.jpg

Back to the original point of the thread: seems like we're also missing a good novel (could use nonfiction recommendations too) on the Iran/Contra era. A Flag For Sunrise was so frustrating: Stone seemed to be badly imitating himself, and maybe Graham Greene too (could imagine auto-casting: Jason Robards as the whiskey priest, blah-blah).

would love it if we could table the discussion of this guys life in favor of the original topic

seconded.

ken layne wrote a sort of speculative fiction book "about" the SoCal subprime crisis & its after effects, though I haven't read it (but would like to)

But there is also something about the sense that there SHOULD be or IS a writer or text for everything. A kind of ... historical positivism, in which only the actual counts? A 'Hegelian' type of sense that the real always finds its proper expression and what has to happen always happens? (ps I have always found Hegel unreadable).

― the pinefox, Friday, 29 March 2013 13:18 (6 days ago)

this already answered it

Last thing about it and will leave everyone alone.

Nilmar, it is not a deluded idea to hold, my friend. Have a look at what Deleuze and Guattari have to say. Here is a link that may be of interest: http://istmo.denison.edu/n10/articulos/walk.html

http://istmo.denison.edu/n10/articulos/walk.html

And just so you know, minor literature and art have a very important role in the development of Latin American literature and culture, as their subversiveness became very useful during political and religious turmoil. Literature that is still not part of a canon nor is it identified as 'literature', interestingly enough.

financial lives of poets was not a bad recent wall st. novel, though not one that felt vital to me in any way.

one element of silicon valley stuff, esp. w/r/t techno-utopinism and startup-culture is probably v. much Richard Powers? I sort of fell off him after Plowing The Dark, but...

I can try & merge the paths by suggesting a minor writer is more likely to be representative than a major one - Day Lewis more the poet of the Thirties ('Thirties') than Auden (or Macneice), Thomas May the actual poet laureate of the English commonwealth (rather than Milton or Marvell), etc. Don't quite buy it - still not really comfortable with major/minor tags - & c'mon really Auden is the poet of the thirties in England - & I'm now bringing in 'representative' to muddy the already murky 'about' vs 'shared concerns/sources' field.

Well said. To me 'minor writer,' like 'guilty pleasure,' is a phrase that has one of two senses depending on who's using it, one negative the other positive. Either it means 'not as good as Tolstoy, sorry chaps, only the happy few can number among the greats' or it can mean 'this is a really interesting writer who is not in the canon, and since I am not in the canon-building line of business I am begrudging willing to accept this term."

In order not to appear to be protesting too much.

Not that every era etc should have its own go-to guy, but would help to have what seem like insights in what seems like literature, beyond, you know, the usual eras etc.

Re: Iran/Contra: Those SF stories by Lucius Shepard about Central America strike me as very of that era.

william gibsons recent stuff sort of skirts around tech culture, though the books are definitely not "silicon valley" books the way silicon valley deserves

Haven't seen any Lucius Shephard stories in a long time, and didn't know he written re Iran/Contra; will check, thanks. Seems like Pynchon could write a good 'un about Silicon Valley (maybe he has, at least in part? Haven't kept up).

heh, his next novel is going to be about the early 00s bubble

i think dow was in on the thread where we were talking about that new one + neal stephenson

Xpost Shepard's stuff like "Salvador" and "Life During Wartime" was about a near future seemingly endless war against Communism waged by drug enhanced US troops. Not about Iran/Contra exactly, but of that era and influenced by the Contra/Sandanista conflict. This stuff is mostly from 84-88.

I don't even think 'minor writer' means 'non-canonical', it means 'footsoldiers of the canon' or something.

c21m (who is being amiable here) does sound more like an 'aspiring writer' to me.

Yes Pynchon's now written about the early 2000s etc they say.

Woof, nice post uniting the minor / representative threads! I don't make any genuine assertion about Milton of course, was just repeating a general perception (at the start of the thread).

yep, good post woof.

a coterie writer of minimum distinction

Going back to the pinefox's OP, it seems to me that there would be hundreds, if not thousands, of "moments, periods or milieux which do NOT have such a representative writer", with special emphasis on milieux, although I cannot easily identify them largely because of their relative obscurity.

Taking just the modern world, there are innumerable subcultures, but in order for there to be a representative writer for each of these there must be someone within each subculture who is not only a part of it, but also can achieve enough distance from it to examine it, understand it intimately, and yet be able to describe it and explain it in terms that are accessible to those who have no contact with that subculture. They need to do all this in such a way that sustains interest, so they need to be good storytellers and masters of the craft of writing.

Contrast this exacting set of requirements to the fact that, while people everywhere value storytelling and make stories about themselves and the world around them, writing literature only becomes integral to very sophisticated cultures with quite a bit of specialization. Few "moments, periods or milieux" in the past have generated that level of sophistication and relatively few subcultures in the present do either. Our glimpses into these moments, periods or milieux are obscure or fragmentary. We are not guided by the sure hand of a "representative writer".

tl;dr i am sure