Level up your literature

LRB · John Lanchester: Is it Art?:

Northrop Frye once observed that all conventions, as conventions, are more or less insane; Stanley Cavell once pointed out that the conventions of cinema are just as arbitrary as those of opera. Both those observations are brought to mind by video games, which are full, overfull, of exactly that kind of arbitrary convention. Many of these conventions make the game more difficult. Gaming is a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all – and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)

If by “difficulty” we mean the sort of linguistic experiment usually associated with avant-garde literature, difficult literature is more unpopular than it is dead. The avant-garde is there, it’s just even harder to find, ironically enough. In a world ruled by PageRank, isn’t popularity equivalent to non-existent? There are exceptions, but I’m not sure that we’re even talking about the same definitions of “difficulty” here. Getting through a few levels of Da Blob is probably difficult in a different way from reading a Ron Silliman poem.

I’d also question the idea that there’s ever been much of a market for experimental literature. What this seems to be is a reverse variation on the canard “they don’t make movies like that anymore,” when in truth the reality is that they never did. I see what the author is getting at here, and at first read it makes some sense, but it’s more clever than right.

(Via Lorcan Dempsey.)

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