Loose Language, Liberated Language

87 years ago, with the publication of Ulysses, James Joyce changed not only the face of publishing but the face of the English language and the novel itself. His victory in the suit against him for obscenity was a landmark declaration for writers and artists hoping to gain some footing against the censors, a victory for freedom of expression, for freedom of art; with the publication of Ulysses, writers would no longer have to worry about a work of art being denied existence due to parochial, moral claims. He also completely obliterated the English language as it had been used up until that point and revolutionized the writing of fiction and narrative in general. After Joyce, English was looser, it was free to dance. The fruits of the book are twofold: one, it's a great multifaceted story full of many colorful characters, three of which are significantly powerful and their themes equally as large, pure and simple; and two, while it can also be read and enjoyed purely for its stories' merits, it's also the story of a man launching a crusade on an oppressor's tongue - Joyce, an Irishman, writing in the language of his nation's usurpers, English; but Joyce wanted neither to harken back to the past and use Gaelic, as the Irish Literary Revivalists wanted to do (Yeats, Lady Gregory et al), which Joyce felt was too sentimental and would render the present inauthentic, nor did he want to genuflect so submissively to the language he was forced to use, but rather he resolved to take up arms with English and wield it as a weapon against itself, whereby he could destroy the Shakespearean parlance of old and create something new, something entirely his own.  The response to Joyce was and must be: we can do so much more with words and with narrative than we ever thought before. This is a mantra and a mindset that writers, or anyone for that matter, anyone for whom words and expression is important, which is everyone, would be wise to remember. 

 For one of my final projects, we were tasked with the assignment of going back over our portfolio, over the 12 previous submissions (stories, parts of longer stories/novels, poems, whatever your field is) and culling from those pieces of work certain sentences, words, paragraphs, lines, dialogue, themes, and redeploying them into a new story or a new poem or a new work. The result was breathtaking, as each student came in with another fully realized, totally different and totally poignant piece of work, recognizable but only in part, using only the words they'd already used once before but in an brand new way. Imagine taking a wrecking ball to the Statue of Liberty and after all her crumbled Gallic glory is retrieved from the ground or the ocean into which she fell, we built a different, more relevant statue; that's what this was like.

 To add to the experimentation, we used a method Nabokov was famous for: writing on notecards. Using as much or as little of the notecards as you want, you can place emphasis on certain words or certain moments, speed up the pacing or slow it down. I went one step further and first, instead of extracting whole sentences and paragraphs, I pulled a whole slew of sentence fragments, none longer than a few words, and individual words that stuck out to me; rarely did I rely on a whole chunk of writing. I wrote all of those fragments down on small scraps of paper, hundreds of them, and spent the weekend with all of them sprawled along the floor of my apartment so that I was handcuffed into staring at them and considering them all through the weekend. Only then, after I felt I'd absorbed enough, did I begin to reconstruct those fragments, words, and parts of sentences into something new and writing them out whole on notecards, inserting the occasional preposition or connecting word to join certain fragments into sentences. 

 Even in today's modern, post-modern, post-post-post modern, sometimes wearingly unimpressive world it's easy to forget that language isn't static despite the culture's willingness to make it seem so. American publishing took a bit of a hit on the head over the past twenty or thirty years, when a bland kind of garden-variety realism reigned supreme. I've no qualms with this aesthetic approach to fiction and many of the those works published I'm terribly fond of and certainly there are exceptions, but it worries me when that type of fiction and that type of writing become the only work that's being published, marketed, discussed, and respected. In order for fiction to grow, we need diversity, a breadth of stories and types of storytelling; fortunately, in recent years we've seen some changes as more and more innovative works from American authors are being published. These tools of ours aren't so inflexible that they can only and must do the same things over and over again.  It's interesting every once in a while to approach your work like this, if only to practice versatility. By approaching the work and the words from such a different perspective, almost a bricklayer's perspective or a carpenter's, you change the way you think about those words. No longer are they merely groups of letters on a page, but moveable objects. Structure, sequencing of events, placement of details, and so much more take on a different dynamic when you escape what can often be the tyranny of the white page and look at a story this way, when moving one scene earlier is truly as simple as picking it up in your hands and placing it down somewhere else. What all of this does is, in a way, demystify the writing process and remind us that while it may at times feel magical or inexplicable, it's also a tactical, methodological, and precise art form. And fiction, like art, like any organism, is subject to the same rules of survival: grow dynamic or be overcome by stagnancy, evolve or die.