Why etiquette governs the art of writing: Lolita, Ulysses, and the arrogance of genius | Martin Amis
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- Опубліковано 17 бер 2018
- Why etiquette governs the art of writing: Lolita, Ulysses, and the arrogance of genius
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Martin Amis has made a name for himself by being an unafraid writer, having published over a dozen novels over 40 years. Here, he provides a hilarious comparison between James Joyce Vladimir Nabokov, explaining why highly experimental writing rarely (if ever) works and that even writers with genius-level talent need to better understand their role in the storytelling process. After all, he says, "the writer is like a host and the reader is like a guest." Martin Amis' latest book is a collection of essays entitled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017.
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MARTIN AMIS:
Martin Amis is regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction. Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that includes Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His latest book is "The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017".
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TRANSCRIPT:
Martin Amis: Decorum as a concept means “not offending”, “good taste”, and all that.
And decorum in writing is a completely different concept.
And all it means is that the content should suit-the style should suit the content. It has nothing to do with good taste.
No writer worth anything is bothered by good taste. What is good taste? It’s a shallow consensus of a certain kind of right thinking individual or group of individuals. It’s measuring what you’re saying to how you’re saying it and tremendously foundational principle for writing.
And the experimental writer will, of course, instinctively transgress against these rules.
But you’ve got to realize that all your guide ropes are being jettisoned, and the goodwill of the reader is not infinite.
It’s usually very high as you open a novel but if you mess around with the reader at your whim that goodwill is very quickly used up.
Stream of consciousness-even Joyce has a very low success rate with it.
You have to be a genius to write stream of consciousness, and even the supreme genius, Joyce, wrote his long novel -he spent 15 years on Finnegan’s Wake-which is flat out unreadable.
And even Ulysses, only about 25 percent of Ulysses works.
And I’ve come more and more to the conclusion that if it’s social realism, your writing, and it obeys-it means the novel is a sociable form.
And the writer is like a host and the reader is like a guest.
And if you, when you visit a Nabokov novel it’s as if he has given you his best chair nearest the fire and given you his best wine and given you his full attention in the most tactful and sensitive way.
If you went around to Joyce’s house you’d find the address didn’t exist. And you would find some sort of outbuilding where Joyce lives, and that he wouldn’t be in, apparently. And then you would shout for him and eventually, a figure would appear, and he would talk to you in a language you’d never heard of before.
And instead of giving you a delicious dinner, as Nabokov does, Joyce would give you two slabs of peat around a conger eel and some repulsive drink he’d made himself.
To leave social realism-and...
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This is exactly the incredibly elaborate, highbrow skewering of Joyce that I needed to hear today
stream-of-consciousness style is really good though when it does work. and it just shows that it's not for everybody, and that's fine.
Juch Star
you might want to watch the video entirely. amis talks about it. also, there's google search.
+Juch Star
Basically writing from a character's inner-voice, completely unfiltered.
In most writing, when covering a character's thoughts, you get some clear, concise thoughts like, "Ok, the dishes are done, now it's time to clean the bedroom."
In a stream of consciousness style, it would be more like:
"Dishes done - So beautiful! - like the moon - who was that guy who landed on the moon again? Louis Armstrong or someone? - Oh crap! - need to clean the bedroom, or was it the living room - shoot - Why am I so forgetful? Bedroom! Yes! The bedroom! Of course!"
Something like that. It's very meandering, and never leaves out the little, unimportant thoughts that slip in. When writing like this, it can take several pages just to cover a few minutes in-story, especially when covering feelings, mental images, and other things that aren't so easily captured in words.
Most writers avoid it because it's hard to write, and very laborious for the writer and the reader.
@@sageoftruthstream of consciousness should be practiced as a stream of subconsciousness, it’s not merely an inner dialogue of inane chatter, it’s a revelation upon a character who may not be entirely coherent or woke to what is actually being impressed. For example:
“There goes the neighbor again, helen, or was it ellen? maggie said her name the other day when that HOA lady.. jill? jane!. when jane called. lord, she said it enough times that you’d think it would have been burned in, {mocking} and that ellen.. (or was it elaine?. yes thats what it was!) that elaine had a car parked in her driveway overnight, i’ve never seen it there before jane, she brought a cake over last month, german chocolate, i tried it, dry i nearly choked i should’ve sued her for trying to kill me haha!, i heard she’s a widow, i threw it out, have you seen elaine when she washes her car, no shame, with kids riding up and down the street we have standards in this neighborhood, i had a mind to go tell that ellen.. -nope, it was ellen, not elaine, I wish.. i could stop dropping names as soon as they’re said. -no wonder the women hate her, i mean, who mows their yard in a bikini? -i wonder how long maggie will be at the gym -wonder, wonder, wonder, who, who wrote the book of love -what did she ask me to do again, cut the lawn, no, trim the bush growing out front it’s starting to block the view of the street -i dunno, i can see just fine haha”
As a reader, you gather the implications made by the author. I don’t feel that SoC should be entirely arbitrary (or merely, inane jabbering), it should tie back to the character and the motivations. In the above example, should the character go on to be intimate with his wife later that evening, one might derive that seeing his neighbor in a bikini excited him; or, possibly the character suspects his wife has been out having an affair, which is a thought slipped into his mind by purveying his neighbor in her bikini and wondering about his wife’s absence.
It should be a literary device
Nabokov writes with a wizard-like genius that demonstrates the limitless potential that literature can provide, pg Wodehouse, dickens and Oscar Wilde as well
Big think, bring thia guy back. I love this stuff
This is the most important video I find on the internet today. What a fantastic and educated elaboration of how us writers grapple with social realism. I am greatful, thanks from straya
Brilliant 👏 how I wish Martin Amis had been my English tutor.!
This was fascinating.
What a nice surprise this morning.
That means use decent punctuation and grammar when you write, people! Haha
Stream of consciousness requires too much work from the readers who don't think Exactly like you.
Communicating well is hard enough. Structure and pacing, y'all! :-)
That may have come off more aggressively than I intended. Lol
ua-cam.com/video/0JR2O-cMG4o/v-deo.html
Did you ever consider a story written by a child that learned to write but cannot spell properly? Ever thought of stories revolving around children making a diary and lacking etiquette? You must allow the story to flow naturally. Grammar mistakes should be allowed if it is by a child. It allows us to glimpse into the conscious mind of said child.
“....demands for communication in art are..b.s” -M.McClure:attrib
As a Chilean I’d say don’t knock Conger eel
The art of writing can only be pursued by those who are endlessly imaginative, descriptively creative and have a strong sense of immersive storytelling. Nice one!
The writer's journey back to the reader;
A return to observing decorum.
When Martin Amis says that he has left social realism before in his career, which book or books of his do you think he means? Money?
Ulysses is an unsolvable crossword puzzle in literary form. That might either sound like the best thing in the world or the worst. People who claim to love Joyce are smarter than the average bear but, boy, do they let you know it. Crossword puzzles are the most boring form of torture until you learn how formulaic they are.
Reading Joyce made me realise how narrow my education was.
It's solvable, and that's one of the great joys in Joyce. Finding a third or fourth layer of solution in the same passage on a thirtieth or three hundredth reading.
Ulysses is much more than a puzzle and its not even close to Finnegans Wake. You have no idea what you are talking about
@@ToxicTurtleIsMad So your defence of Ulysses is that Finnegan's Wake is worse, and I am an idiot for not saying so?
They are more pretentious than the average reader, but I doubt very much that they're smarter. In fact, I suspect one who's ready to admit most of it doesn't work and is no good is smarter than the one who appropriates the approved, poserish opinion.
Rather than get a Google definition--can someone tell me what he means by social realism? Also, please define the "stream-of-consciousness style" (maybe with a sentence example). Characterized by unusual/sparse punctuation?
Social realism I believe is the attempt to replicate human society and interaction as realistically as possible in writing. Stream of consciousness is a sort of realism of the mind, an attempt to replicate the thought processes of a first person narrator on a moment to moment basis. No clue if my understanding of social realism is accurate, I'd look it up but I'm not at home.
Your whole comment IS stream of consciousness, as is mine.
Step one, bottle of Port. Step two, Faulkner. Step three, Faulkner. Repeat.
Also more writers please 🙏
"The novel is a social form." Thank you. So much time and effort is pored over what it means to be a writer or what the writer ought to be and not enough time is spent figuring out what the reader is, even though the latter is just as important as the former. If you're going to be a rebel, you have to be aware of what social norms you're breaking and more importantly why you're breaking those norms, otherwise you just come off as a blithe idiot. Stream of consciousness writing fails because it either comes off as too artificial (no one thinks like this) or it's too boring (most thoughts are actually boring). I'd rather read a highly polished work by a competent craftsman than the unedited ramblings of a genius.
Have you ever read To The Lighthouse?
@@DarkAngelEU No one will ever see this but this is the exact book I was going to ask about. To the Lighthouse is a massively successful counterargument to this sentiment.
@@JagIsOnline Well, it's an argument made by someone who has obviously never tried to actually read great respected novels.
This was good. Not always an Amis fan.
Agreed! Sucha revealing view. Those are good examples of the importance of style, even over content.
I think this market for social realism is why magical realism like Murakami has been so successful as of recent, it gives readers a blend of the fantastic with real life settings. Italo Calvino is a better example but he played more severely with conceptual novels and thus is not in the headlines so much as the more "hospitable" work of Murakami.
But straight realism is often such a drag, it's been done to overkill. It's the equivalent of if art never progressed passed realistic portraits of people and landscapes. *yawn* Great writing should move past this and embrace imagination past plausible reality.
Art declined since neoclassicism, what's your point?
I really like Calvino exactly because he considers the medium into his writing. On a winter's night a traveler was really fun, I started imagining what would happen if books started getting mixed up in real life! I actually collect funny prints because of that novel. I have a blank Marquez, an upside-down printed Alma Mathijsen, but I'm still looking to find that novel that actually has that bizarre cut-up of different novels into one.
I agree straight realism (telling the facts) can be dreadful, but realism is a style. Realism can be fiction too. Houellebecq is a good example of realist fiction (something we like to call 'the roman') and I find him very entertaining. I prefer plain realism because contemporary magical realism (so excluding Borges) easily falls back into the same kind of mechanics to explain everything: magic or fantasy (which is often the worst, because it often means reading pages of LORE as if it's a history class. Looking at you, Tolkien!), science fiction (which might be interesting but can be equally dreadful if there is too much explaining involved), or simply not explaining anything because the writer is too stupid to come up with anything original. Alot of Murakami's novels are extremely boring because it reads like "Oh, this is Japanese, so I guess it's supposed to be weird?" and I don't buy that considering I used to be obsessed with Japan in my teenage years. I really liked Hard-Boiled Wonderland because the protagonist doesn't believe what's going on either (similar to On a winter's night) and the interplay of realism and fantasy actually contributes to the story. Again, great consideration of the medium to make styles work for you instead of against you.
There is no one style that is the best route to go, it all boils down on knowing which style to use to make your story interesting to an audience. Even great authors like Murakami obviously struggle because they're fond of a certain style that doesn't necessarily fit their story. It took Sally Rooney two novels to finally find her balance with Beautiful world, where are you? and that's still a mediocre novel because she's so fond of romantic literature like Jane Austen. A Ghost in The Throat is dry realism, yet it perfectly suits the story. It's hard to swallow, yes it even beats you over the head, but that's the whole point of the novel. It seems to me like you're complaining about some books simply being too hard, and you prefer things that are easy to consume. Good luck writing novels that matter with that attitude.
I like his idea of the 'arrogant introvert'!
..introvert..extrovert subvert the queen’s English with her imperious empire of arrogance and gilded writ..an I... for an I...retire then and dream the seem of mouth to mouth...cheek to cheek
@@cosmicman621 Oh no, Cosmic Man got into the salvia again!
Joyce's departures from familiar language were never "at his whim" as is claimed here. He was out to represent "the complete human being" and standard, ever-decorous language wasn't up to that. Get R. Ellmann's seminal little book "Ulysses on the Liffey" to see Joyce's stylistic outlines and moral intentions. Chapter by chapter Joyce was combing out a language almost dead into something freshly sensuous and vivacious again, culminating in the glories of Molly Bloom in the final pages. A "25% success"? I'll take this early French review of "Ulysses": "I doubt that I've ever read anything to equal it, and I know I've never read anything to surpass it."
It sometimes seems that the best writers are doing so in a language other than their native one. Nabokov, Conrad, Brodsky and Kundera are some of my favorites. Also, as with authors such as Henry James, the writing is so beautiful, yet reading his work sometimes feels like 'work'; whereas authors such as Charles Dickens, are most wonderful for their stories.
Yes, I absolutely love Dickens, as well. "Our Mutual Friend" is my favorite. He totally took on 'society' with that one.
A cheap generalization, honestly. Worth nothing at all. Oppose that by those who were giants in their own right (and did write in their native tongue) and your odd statement falls flat.
Oscar WIlde certainly shares your sentiment towards Henry James. He once remarked "Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
You could actually argue that Nabokov's native tongue was actually English, not Russian. His father was disappointed when Vladimir learned to read and write in English before he did in Russian.
@@Pun116 he was trilingual
If reading upsets you, stop reading.
What about Faulkner, I wonder.
a strong mint julep with a drop of n-word.
Joyce didn't write it for a reader other than himself. The arrogance of demanding wine and the best wine when entering someone else's house uninvited.
That's a great point.
His publishing the book I took as an invitation.
Nobody demanded nor even expected anything. The proverbial fine wine is provided.
When it’s time to host, you host. Inconvenience isn’t an excuse if you put a “Welcome” sign on your door.
"Two slabs of peat and a conger eel." There are readers who appreciate dinner on the fringes of consciousness, after pigging on Netflix narrative and box sets. Also, an AI-straighted world might make transgression and mistakes the only 'human' traits left, along with the ability to tell lies from fiction, recognise the scent of recycling, sense a motivation with subtlety. Such writing often 'doesn't work' but that may be missing the point.
Who is this man? A mystery for the ages, no do... 0:19 Oh, wait; Nirvana
His words apply to visual art as well. “Good taste” is shallow and elitist, but you can use the general acceptance of etiquette to arrive at an unexpected place for the viewer. It’s not much more that another formalistic tool if wielded correctly.
To say 25% of Ulysses is readable is simply flat out unfair. Only 2 or 3 episodes are very challenging.
1:54 Amis: “... Finnegan’s Wake is flat-out unreadable - and even Ulysses - only about twenty-five percent of Ulysses works.”
NAME THE FUCKING SPEAKER IN THE TITLE.
yes this is right its just arrogance and self indulgence. been able to communicate something to an audience is what controls clear understanding...if people understand ..people will like and purchase ur work maybe ...if your fucking with the audience ..for example making things that only make sense to you ...the chances of you becoming a success r so silm ...when u think about it ..its so obvious ...
Social realism
Pretty accurate, on the whole. Thanks. I would leave out the term 'social realism', though; it has little to do with the subject -
Also, regarding Nabokov: he might serve you a delicious dinner in his lovely apartment; but I'd rather go to Dostoyevsky's dirty cell and come out of there a different person.
...a voice sighing in the wilderness amiss...
2:26 Oh god, that was funny as fuck
third
Why is this guys nose blue?
Samrat Sengupta Alchoholism
Roman, yep
Gin blossom nose.
I suspect it has to do with cardiac circulation and blood pressure....or lack of blood pressure.
asking the right questions
To colour match his clothes
..that’s why we have poetry...and it’s arrogant genius
he's unrecognisable from his younger self
I’m distracted by the color of his nose.
The vulgar crowd is usually taken by appearances.
@@roughhabit9085 ...A’s Mr Amisss is properly indicating...when the knows nose fishyness under the great NO
I don't want, and surely nobody, to read sentences which include so many hyphenated clauses.
...like Christmas and Santa..rising with a full moon
I do...
You should read German philosophy, you'll lose your mind
This is the argument lazy readers make when the book is demanding. Based on this argument, books like The waves of Virginia Woolf and the early short stories of Jorge Luis Borges are worthless when it's the opposite.
Doesn't matter. Like most successful media, books are written for a particular audience. When you try to reach ALL of the audience, you often fail to catch ANY of the audience; example, Ghostbusters, SW the last jedi. There will be bastards who will criticize your work regardless, because they are miserable.
For instance, I'm writing a set of books this guy will likely criticize heavily, and not without warrant. It spends a lot of time exploring the thought processes of the characters, often has colorful language, and a general disregard for etiquette; likewise it explores sexism racism eroticism theism communism capitalism colonialism and xenophobia (not an ism? xenoism? The idea that one's homeland must be succured from outside influences before any and/or all other ventures are taken). In short, it will be like reading ideological warfare, fought over an idealistic world.
The point is, it doesn't matter if lazy readers exist. Your story will reach a demographic; maybe not the one you were after, but the one you got. You can choose to keep writing for that demographic, or learn from it, and alter your writing to reach a different demographic. If your sole goal is to achieve writer's prizes, you will fail. Just fucking write, enjoy, and fuck'm all if they can't take a joke!
Martin Amis, a lazy reader? Wow.
There is being hard to understand because of the language used (often a complaint regarded at older books which were written decades if not hundreds of years ago) and being deliberately obtuse. There is no problem with elaborate language such as with Nietzsche, as language is supposed to be the thing that sets books apart from other mediums. The expression of ideas through them is what Nietzsche, Conrad, Albert Camus and Emily Bronte succeeded at.
This isn’t the case with many other writers such as James Joyce, who is the latter.
1st_3rd_2nd_4th..
A as 1 first..
B as 2 is third..
C as 3 is second..
D as 4 is fourth..
..
Decorum is first a mater of concept and its plottary.. and that plottary must be in the author and the work..
Second it is a matter of awareness or being witty, clever.. these have to be with the author, the work, the reader/viewer/aidience..
..
Decorum is only wit and the conctete (+nesses and things) of the physical and/or the virtual. Decorum in sociology of artistry is sometimes as that you should not attemp to publis a work of yours into an inadequate perceptional environment.. be it an individual.
..
Today no-one could plus can dare to hire Mozart if he was well back.. lest Brahms is "The best (is) yet to come".. Mozart he in his era and environment was well praised and appreciated.. Brahms.. almost nobody knew or loved him of his grandeur in his era or environment.. sobthe decorum is nothing but the items and their specifications coming up within a good intetactive set set..
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Brahms Remembering Beethoven could be the Napoleon of India today..
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A decorative issue of global strategy.. and the best is yet to come for modesty of all sides..
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To a dead hero..
..
A good nightmare music serenade theme..
..
Moderately unmodest enough to kick a best of it!
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GNR flyn on an aeroplane..
Here, we're riding on a Dec'o'ville!
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Happy Decembers big think!
..
1st_3rd_2nd_4th.. round and round and round..
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8..: _Axl of GNR Counting_
Why the heck is Martin Amis' nose grey
WTF.
wtf....
This comes from the dead who wrote a novel called ‘Dead Babies’ why in the fuck is he speaking like this all the sudden ;-;
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have long despised Joyce, aside from Dubliners, for his obscurantism and absolute contempt for the reader.
first