A Note on Ecstatic Prose
By Lucy Ives and Sarah Resnick
When we talk about “genre,” we are supposed to be talking about kinds, but what we are really talking about are occasions for reading, expectations, and the sorts of objects we tend to have such expectations about. In literature, structure, the type of information presented, style, the organization of text on the page (whether a line breaks or extends to the right margin) tell us how to read—and how to make sense of claims made by the author (true or false, invented or remembered, lyric or analytic, abstract or particular); how to make sense of who has said what and at what time and where, whether directly or indirectly.
Genre, then, is at once an occasion and a description of some thing. The novel is something. It connotes an order and a time; we read the novel from beginning to end. It is an escapist genre and yet! The novel takes us down a well-marked path. We read for plot and are absorbed, missing our subway stop. The novel tends not to have a fictionalized addressee (“You!”), as does the lyric poem, yet one does imagine a certain reader. To give an example: “I stayed up all night reading Octavia Butler and felt as if I were gazing out at the world beyond her book as over an electrified fence, so intense was the claim of the narrative; maybe, better to say, ‘as if over a fence of lightning’….” (The reader rubs her eyes and falls asleep at last.)
We know how to read a novel, because we’ve read one before—because we have, all our lives, been reading novels. But the novel was at one point an innovation, as was the category novel. As literature (the discipline) has invented itself, so, too, has it invented ways to describe itself. We must also acknowledge the momentousness of print; how, for instance, setting onto a page, in perpetuity, words previously carried around via the organizing devices of meter and rhyme (a.k.a., verse) rendered concrete orders previously less so; how certain modes of distribution and social contexts allowed the flourishing of new forms (the modern short story, for example, developed in the Enlightenment salon, where quip-like allegorical tales allowed their authors to surreptitiously critique the powerful). The genres we have come to take for granted are, in this way, if not arbitrary, then historically contingent. We cannot precisely term them necessities.
However, this cannot serve as an introduction to genre, for we no longer believe that there must be a novel or that there must be a lyric poem. Or a play. Or a work of criticism. No, we are not sure what anything written must be, if it must be anything at all. Fine for the old forms to exist, and, of course, many people read novels and histories, but just as often we are now reading something or other else.
Let us begin again and say that, at base, genre is neither structure nor kind, but rather relationship. Within literary products and experiences, there are various points of affiliation or attachment, which may be variously activated. These form between reader and text, writer and reader, writer and text, writer and author, reader and world, and so on. Genre includes time. Narrative and argumentative texts have a plan for this; more disjunctive texts, perhaps not and/or differently. Some texts imagine a putative addressee (letters, polemics). Still others (many diaries) pretend not to wish to be read. And then there is the fantastic literalness of the diary, in that it refers merely/simply to the day on which one is writing…
We may think of literary genre as a way of construing relationships. A play in which a character reads aloud a long novel may appear in the midst of a poem, and, of course, it always could, but now we go specifically in quest of such reframings, sing their praises. Or we find ourselves amid words without a frame, a memoir that is a work of criticism that is a sort of poem in prose, including historical facts as well as personal details, which may or may not have been invented by the author, which may or may not simultaneously be true. Ours is a time of interconnected systems, of few clearly bitten-off types. Passages of description languidly divert our attention from the plot and are effected by means of a boggling variety of types of sentences. Gertrude Stein, famed genre agnostic, once wrote, “A sentence is not emotional, a paragraph is.”
But a sentence is emotional, if it is a paragraph.
Such are the translations of our day. Of course, writers have always opted to break rules, to work outside established conventions and produce forms not thought of before. What concerns us, however, is whether there might be something particular about what is transpiring in the present. Are we seeing resistance to genre as an idea—resistance to naming things written? (We note that this is not necessarily the view of the literary establishment, who must label and market in order to sell—but let us not digress!) For are many traditional literary genres not bound up in social structures, conventions of love, if not Enlightenment versions of republican discourse? We do not assume that there is no significance bound up in a name, in assigning a name.
If literary writing shall now become less reactive, less rearguard; if it shall function as a prompt, a preliminary, an attempt: We have become so good, after all, at writing sentences (on our phones, in emails to one another, on various platforms and message boards) with little other concern or care than for these very sentences, that we may no longer need to begin with a paragraph. We may no longer need to begin with genre. Thus, we elect to start from every place at once. We leap up from our chair(s), ecstatically….
On Criticism
By Sukhdev Sandhu, Christine Smallwood & Lynne Tillman
On May 21, 2016, Triple Canopy organized a day-long series of conversations on the state of literary genre and contemporary prose. As people exchange text more quickly and in greater quantities than ever before, prose has taken on a curious new literary life, a life seemingly betwixt, beyond, or out of bounds of genre. Participants spoke about reflective essays using techniques from fiction; fiction borrowing from poetry; poetry borrowing from philosophy; journalism encountering reflection; and on and on. They also discussed how, with the entry of the print book into a swarm of other media and temporalities for reading, traditional genres and ways of reading are metamorphosing, and prose is becoming the contemporary literary form par excellence. The following is an audio recording of the first session, On Criticism, during which participants Sukhdev Sandhu, Christine Smallwood, and Lynne Tillman were asked: Where and how does criticism find its place? If criticism has traditionally circulated via the magazine and within the academy, what new occasions and pursuant forms present themselves today?
On Style
By Hilton Als & Rivka Galchen
On May 21, 2016, Triple Canopy organized a day-long series of conversations on the state of literary genre and contemporary prose. As people exchange text more quickly and in greater quantities than ever before, prose has taken on a curious new literary life, a life seemingly betwixt, beyond, or out of bounds of genre. Participants spoke about reflective essays using techniques from fiction; fiction borrowing from poetry; poetry borrowing from philosophy; journalism encountering reflection; and on and on. They also discussed how, with the entry of the print book into a swarm of other media and temporalities for reading, traditional genres and ways of reading are metamorphosing, and prose is becoming the contemporary literary form par excellence. The following is an audio recording of the first session, On Style, during which participants Hilton Als and Rivka Galchen were asked: Can one make an argument—or a fiction—by style alone?
On Autofiction
By Andrew Durbin, Tan Lin & Jonathon Sturgeon
On May 21, 2016, Triple Canopy organized a day-long series of conversations on the state of literary genre and contemporary prose. As people exchange text more quickly and in greater quantities than ever before, prose has taken on a curious new literary life, a life seemingly betwixt, beyond, or out of bounds of genre. Participants spoke about reflective essays using techniques from fiction; fiction borrowing from poetry; poetry borrowing from philosophy; journalism encountering reflection; and on and on. They also discussed how, with the entry of the print book into a swarm of other media and temporalities for reading, traditional genres and ways of reading are metamorphosing, and prose is becoming the contemporary literary form par excellence. The following is an audio recording of the first session, On Autofiction, during which participants Andrew Durbin, Tan Lin, and Jonathon Sturgeon were asked to reflect on autofiction’s ambiguous vérité: The narrator may or may not be the writer, the writer may or may not be the author, and the author may or may not be “I.”
Please join Triple Canopy for a day-long series of conversations on the state of literary genre and contemporary prose. Writers Hilton Als, Andrew Durbin, Rivka Galchen, Tan Lin, Sukhdev Sandhu, Christine Smallwood, Jonathan Sturgeon, and Lynne Tillman will participate in a trio of discussions on criticism, style, and autofiction, convened by Triple Canopy editors Lucy Ives and Sarah Resnick.
As people exchange text more quickly and in greater quantities than ever before, prose has taken on a curious new literary life, a life seemingly betwixt, beyond, or out of bounds of genre. Reflective essays use techniques from fiction; fiction borrows from poetry; poetry borrows from philosophy; journalism encounters reflection; and on and on. This instability of genre and the ascendency of stylish prose seems at once part and parcel of the variously mediated modes via which we compose, convey, and consume texts. With the entry of the print book into a swarm of other media and temporalities for reading, it makes sense that traditional genres as well as ways of reading would metamorphose. Yet, genre is now also bent by a new emphasis on the writer, whether fictionalized or not, who is frequently at the center of a given text. Prose is the contemporary literary form par excellence and seems no longer to require the distinctions of genre to be functional, legible, or pleasurable. Indeed, it may no longer make sense to speak of “essayists,” “novelists,” or “poets,” but rather to simply praise and discuss the work of writers.
The day’s conversations will address three familiar aspects of prose as well as their ongoing transformation:
1:00—2:00 p.m., On Criticism
Where and how does criticism find its place? If criticism has traditionally circulated via the magazine and within the academy, what new occasions and pursuant forms present themselves today? Sukhdev Sandhu, Christine Smallwood, and Lynne Tillman in conversation.
2:30—3:30 p.m., On Style
Can one make an argument—or a fiction—by style alone? Hilton Als and Rivka Galchen in conversation.
4:00—5:00 p.m., On Autofiction
The narrator may or may not be the writer, and the writer may or may not be the author, and the author may or may not be “I.” On autofiction’s ambiguous vérité. Andrew Durbin, Tan Lin, and Jonathon Sturgeon in conversation.
- Hilton Als is a writer and theater critic at the New Yorker. He was formerly a writer and picture editor at the Village Voice and editor-at-large at Vibe. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000. His latest book, White Girls, was published by McSweeney’s in 2013.
- Andrew Durbin is the author of Mature Themes (Nightboat 2014) and the chapbook MacArthur Park (Kenning Editions 2015). His work has appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, Flash Art, Poetry London, Text Zur Kunst, and elsewhere. A contributing editor of Mousse, he co-edits the press Wonder and lives in New York. His first novel, Blonde Summer, is forthcoming from Nightboat in 2017.
- Tan Lin is the author, most recently, of 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: and Insomnia and the Aunt. The recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book on the writings of Andy Warhol, he is also working on a novel called Our Feelings Were Made by Hand.
- Rivka Galchen ’s most recent book is Little Labors, a miscellany about babies and literature. She is also the author of the short story collection American Innovations and the novel Atmospheric Disturbances, winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
- Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University and is the author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night. He also writes for Bidoun, the Wire, the Guardian, and many other publications.
- Christine Smallwood writes the “New Books” column for Harper’s Magazine. Her reviews, essays, and cultural journalism have been published in the New Yorker, Bookforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and many other publications. Her fiction has been published in the Paris Review and n+1. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University and is a core faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is also a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is currently writing a collection of short stories.
- Jonathon Sturgeon is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Formerly an editor at n+1, e-flux, and the American Reader, he is now the literary editor at Flavorwire.
- Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short-story writer, and critic. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, two collections of essays, and two books of nonfiction. Her most recent novel, American Genius, a Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2006 and her second essay collection, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, was published by Red Lemonade Press in 2014. Tillman’s writing has been widely anthologized and appeared in journals and magazines such as Tin House, Gigantic, Electric Literature, Black Clock, Bomb, and Conjunctions; her criticism has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, Nest, the Guardian, Art in America, and the Times Book Review. She writes a bimonthly column for Frieze magazine. Tillman was the fiction editor of Fence from 2004–2012. Currently, she is a contributing editor of Bomb and serves on the boards of Fence and Housing Works. She teaches in the Riggio Honors Program at the New School and in the School of Visual Art’s MFA program in Art Criticism and Writing.
- Lucy Ives is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including The Hermit (2016), the novella nineties (2013), and, most recently, the novel Impossible Views of the World (2017, published by Penguin Press. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, Bomb, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, and Triple Canopy, where she was an editor for several years.
- Sarah Resnick has published in n+1, Bookforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Triple Canopy, where she was previously an editor. Her writing was selected for 2017’s Best American Essays and for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York.