What does it take to make a successful literary scene?

debating the New Wave with David Herod and Cairo Smith

get in babe we're doing <HYPERSTITION> again

Can you meme a literary scene into existence?

This is something I’ve been thinking about as I watch the debate about New Wave fiction unfolding over Substack.

To recap, the idea of ‘New Wave’ fiction is roughly this:

New Wave fiction is a category of literary fiction that is not concerned with constructing a didactic “woke/anti-woke” normative moral framing, choosing instead to bypass it altogether. By virtue of this disregard, it naturally tends to fail to land cleanly in one category or the other, organically incorporating seemingly contradictory positions because it wasn’t crafted with didactisim as its underlying purpose. It’s a post-2020 mix of self-published and traditionally group of authors who tend to be fairly active online.

To my surprise, my article on this topic has gone on to become the most successful article I’ve written in over a year of putting out posts on Substack.

In part, this article came out of grappling with my own somewhat awkward positioning in the alt-lit landscape and my general hesitancy to firmly commit to any one political project as my overriding purpose.

The attention economy of the internet rewards individuals for becoming a “certain type of guy” because clear ideological categorization allows you to tap into a pre-made audience.

The temptation for any Asian-American male writer who is skeptical of the aesthetic rigidity of secular progressive morality and its attendant cultural homogenization is to lean into existing axes of culture war dynamics.

Wesley Yang—a writer who wrote arguably the best ever non-fiction essay on the subject of Asian-American millennial males—has made a successful career out of this strategy. But my feeling about Yang is that he represents a missed opportunity. I think, at one point, that he had a potentially generationally-great novel in him, and I am disappointed that he did not produce it. When I look at his career, I have the feeling of an enormous well of creative energy that was wholly diverted into political activism when an aesthetic orientation would have been orders of magnitude more enduring (albeit less remunerative).

Notably, I’m not aware of any Asian-American literary fiction writer who (a) writes very good novels and (b) leans into this culture-war strategy.

I am increasingly confident as to why this is the case. The reason is because this type of person is going to struggle to find a non-awkward positioning in the landscape of intersecting aesthetic & political choices (and yes, in our current clime, these things are intimately correlated).

Where does such a writer go? He would be equally unwanted in the Iowa writing program and in white identitarian circles, so he has to migrate to increasingly peripheral niches and increase his volume from there.

In writing about New Wave fiction as a potentially exciting new literary niche, I was in some sense writing about the broader homelessness of the Asian-American male artist. My view is that the ones who have attained the greatest success are generally compromised in fundamental ways that I find difficult to articulate with argument. I think it’s something very deep, almost spiritual—a form of assimilation so deep that he looks in the mirror but cannot even see himself.

More generally, my thesis behind my original piece was that centering political views as a literary artist ends up constraining your flexibility as a writer and form-fitting your work into a rigid alignment with a pre-packaged set of ideologically-loaded beliefs.

In a secular age, morality and politics lose their boundary of separation and converge upon one another. In the case of liberalism, human rights (a form of utilitarianism) achieve an incredible level of transcultural metaphysical and memetic power, overriding every other moral framework under a universalist power.

Herod enters the ring

In that vein, I very much enjoyed David Herod’s piece arguing in defending the presence of a clear moral epistemology in fiction:

This phrasing came to prominence in the 20th century as the term didactic came to also be used as a criticism. The implication of this being that there is something inherently embarrassing about a clearly revealed worldview coming through in a cultural product. Points of comparison would be something like Dante’s Divine Comedy or even the later works of William Shakespeare (replete with ghosts, supernatural visions, and fairies), compared to Hemingway or anyone more modern that a professor of literature would confidently assign their class today. The former, grounded in a fearless moral certitude, the latter complex latticeworks of factual ambiguity and unstated character preferences.

To be clear, I am not saying that one form is inherently superior. Ambiguity and certitude can both be carefully crafted postures for a prose style to emphasize in order to produce a unique kind of story. What I would claim as a negative effect is being fearful of presenting moral certitude out of a false belief that doing so would be “reactionary” or a more primitive instantiation of the art form.

Herod goes on to conclude that it’s all about execution:

But very few works are literally didactic. What I am suggesting we reframe this question to is one of whether any given work has a clear moral epistemology or not.

Crude didacticism, like fanfiction, is like a flame to the moth-like brains of amateur writers. Unpracticed writers who are excited by ideas rush out to work in a frenzy and produce works that are fundamentally led astray by their attempt to convey an argument, writing craft be damned (or more often, ignored). Let us separate this branch of concern into a legitimate, but unique, category of something simply not being done well.

I broadly agree with

Tooky's Mag

here and the essay is very well argued. I think there are many works of great beauty that do in fact have a strongly articulated sense of morality. And I think his points about moral evasiveness represent a viable critique of modernity and its general inclination toward moral relativism as inherently superior.

And yet, if I were to ask him—is the problem with modern literary fiction not “wokeness qua wokeness,” but the mere crudity of its delivery?

I am not entirely sure that he would agree. I think he would say that its delivery is inherently compromised because its moral precepts are self-contradictory or incorrect, and therefore, these precepts cannot, by definition, be delivered effectively.

In which case, the argument presented regresses to a critique of secular progressive morality outright, and not the ham-handed form of its narrative delivery—negating the point he’s making outright.

Scene-drama is good for the scene

In this context,

Cairo Smith

’s piece on New Wave writing came out swinging.

Smith wrote a response to Herod, which you can read here.

Smith’s first critique is that the value of scene lies in its capacity to act as a coordinating mechanism for generative artistic output:

Notably absent in his [David’s] spiel, though, is any concrete set of values that might actually define such a movement as he might want it. There's no didactic fiction manifesto in his post, and that's because it's really hard to create one that's specific enough to represent what you believe in and broad enough to build a coalition of contrarians and disagreeable people without alienating most of them. That's the utility of the term "New Wave" as ARX-Han coined it, and that's why it has so much sticking power. It's a Rorschach test, a Schelling point. You can look at it and see yourself, pretty much no matter what you believe, as long as what you believe is not served by the literary status quo.

He goes on to argue that everyone would still agree that this is some upper bound to how overtly political literary works ought to be:

Ironically, not calling your work didactic is the only way you're going to get through to people who don't already believe what you believe. Declaring your allegiances more loudly than you declare your artistic voice is a good way to end up with a very small number of readers who only try your books because they already subscribe to your factional dogma. In the most self-defeating way, you've created a situation where you're not teaching anybody anything, which is the opposite of being didactic.

Cairo sees the idea of a literary scene as something that is fundamentally instrumental, i.e., it is emphatically not optimal when formed as a grouping of morally-aligned artists:

Ultimately, how you categorize yourself is a marketing tool. "New Wave" in that sense says what it's supposed to say. “We're fresh, we're bold, we're provocative, we're giving you things you can't get anywhere else, and it's going to be an exciting ride whether or not you agree with us.” From there, the authorial opinions—whatever they may be—come along with the thrilling experience of reading skillful work. I say ‘opinions’ instead of ‘lessons’ because the frame of the didact teacher places the author as the reader’s superior. This would be tenuous for a great master, and it is even more absurd for an anon posting screeds on Substack. We must court the ur-reader with humility.

Lastly, he warns of the dangers of formally subordinating literary works to moral instrumentalization of any order:

Now, let's say you're a didactic crusader and you're not interested in creating a space where anyone can discuss any idea. You want an intellectual environment that's just as closed off as the one we have today, if not more so, but for your own team’s advantage. The fact is, you can still participate in the New Wave and benefit from its breadth while railing against it. The paradox of tolerance isn't in play here. You're free to advocate for the social regime that would crush the New Wave within the constraints of the New Wave. We'll probably even find it funny and enjoy what you write.

What is the use of a new wave of literature if we just swap out one form of homogeneity for another?

Perhaps the meta problem here is the aesthetic dominance of any one group within an artistic field like film, literature, or music. That group can be demographically homogenous, politically homogenous, class homogenous, ideologically homogenous, or aesthetically homogenous. But the core problem is the homogeneity, not the message.

In this regard, it’s not so much that we’re optimizing for diversity of opinion or aesthetic orientation, but for chaos.

Chaos is the thing that’s missing from modern literature and its professionalization, over-credentialism, sensitivity readers, and pastel-covered pablum.

In this regard, aesthetic diversity is only useful insofar as it reproduces the turbulent chaos of a wave, a never-ending combinatorial explosion of generative aesthetic possibilities, landing with the greatest possible force imaginable.

I would invite all of you to join us along for the ride.