Pond Scum: Idiot Empire
By Steve Finbow
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How do you read? I strip down to nothing (steady, now), zip into my swimming trunks (Speedos, naturally), feel the cold of the pale blue ceramic wall against my back, take a deep breath, and hurtle full pelt across the grainy verruca-ridden tiles, then, hands wrapped around my knees, in bomb position, I'm in – splash! – words up my nose, in my ears and in my eyes; after the first paragraph, I rush to the surface, lungs exploding, heart pounding, then leisurely stroke to the side, where I spend the rest of the session waiting for the heavy petting to commence. But, recently, I've chipped my tooth on the bottom, pinged my coccyx, scarfed my elbow.
“Why’s that?” I hear you say. Well, lately the reading waters have been – how shall I put it? – shallow, man, SHAL-LOW. Do we no longer tread water in the fathomless depths of the novel? No longer scuba dive among the intricate coral of the novella? Have we lost our desire to wade in the warm lagoon of the well-crafted short story? Or frolic with the papilloma virus in the pre-pool footbaths of the prose poem? Nuh-uh. It’s all autobiography – Me. Me. Me. I. I. I.
Whom do I blame? I could blame Dave Eggers. He started it, miss. I could blame A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in all its po-mo memoir glory. But it was intelligent and fresh. I could blame Lowell, Berryman, and Sexton for their confessions, but that poetry had heft, man, it had insight, it had balls. Whadda we got these days? We got James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. A million? Hey, Jimmy, a million little pieces works out at a piece every 12 minutes of your 23-year-old life. It couldn’t have been that interesting.
The instant autobiography used to be the domain of the pop singer, the sports star, the actor. Not anymore. Anyone who has lived long enough to tie a shoelace, have an orgasm, smoke crack – in no particular order – is writing a memoir. Charlotte Bronte wrote something about each person having a different story to tell, but she was talking about a story of family, history, passion, not Cabbage Patch doll collecting. Heidegger’s theory of bestand comes to mind – a transformation of a person’s raw material into something they believe to be more valuable. Nothing is left unrevealed; experience, such as it is, is auto-cannibalised. Nothing is ironised, nothing is revised, nothing is understated. Your date stood you up on prom night, you have a psychological problem (Doctor, I think I’m interesting), and six fingers, but I don’t want to read 300 pages about it. It’s an I-did-this-and-I-did-that world. Is one experience enough for an autobiography? Is life no longer experiential? Do we live in an Idiot Empire? Idiot – private person – one who lacks professional knowledge.
On Amazon, I typed in “autobiography”. I got a man’s life with chin, man’s life in care, woman’s life with big tits, man’s life with bike, man’s life with snow, man’s life with food, man’s life with brother, man’s life with faith, man’s life with gangs, woman’s life in TV. I want to read a book in which all of these things occur. Imagine a novel in which spies with silicon enhanced breasts eat bouillabaisse while chasing the mysterious and shape-shifting Chin (Thomas Pynchon methinks). Put them together, you have a story. Apart, you have a self-obsessed view of a life not yet lived, a history not yet written. Is that it? Is it because there is no history, nothing to anchor us in linear time – I’m thinking Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians or Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
Reading should transform life. There is no longer a “passionate will to know everything about the life of another human being” (Bellow). I want the world remade in its own image through imagination. I want history, culture, politics, even dogs, made new. Memoirs of stamp collecting, judo, and giraffe wrestling now measure out a life. I do not want to read a recollection of a life less lived. I don’t want to read about how you found God, a plastic surgeon, a rare disease, a Rohypnol-laced daiquiri, how you spent a month on your knees performing oral sex on the Boston Philharmonic. If poetry, and I think this can be extended to fiction, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” these McMemoirs are merely emoticons remembered in banality.
An
obsession with the ordinary – the self as a Don Quixote of the quotidian
– is responsible for the growth in this genre. A singular worldview
of an irrelevant life that “cuts (it)self off from seeing and from
understanding what (it) sees” (Bellow).
I hoped to argue that this was an American phenomenon. Is it? I believe
British writing can be insular, but, even though it sometimes misses the
big picture, it does provide depth. If British writers drop a pebble into
the well of autobiography, they wait to hear it hit the bottom, look into
the darkness, and speculate. American writers stare at their own reflection
in the water’s surface. I give you Martin Amis’s Experience
rather than Rick Moody’s The Black Veil. But I believe
it is a contemporary reaction to the human horde. It is the city and the
mob that have created the imaginary lives of giants out of the experience
of dwarves. Is the individual dead in novelistic terms?
Autobiography – self life writing. Self-penning. I see the novelist as Argus, the many-eyed giant, commanded to watch over Io (the world, civilization), but Argus is put to sleep by that tricky Hermes and becomes the memoirist – the peacock – the self-preening bird with the tail (tale) of I’s. The novelist is “armoured in scepticism” (Hitchens), whereas the memoirist is armoured in solipsism.
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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel. (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
©
2004 Me Three