Phenomenonolology
Phenomenology is a bit of a highfalutin concept, or at least is sounds so. But it’s really quite simple.
Phenomenology: Describe what you are experiencing as accurately as you can, setting aside as many of your biases and preconceptions as you can, accepting the fact that they will inevitably sneak through. In fact, include your subjectivity as part of the description, because the feelings a phenomenon generates, is a part of what makes it what it is.
Psychologically, this means dropping all jargon and terminology and simply describing what a person sees, hears, feels, and thinks. Sounds familiar.
This idea came about because Edmund Husserl felt that the rising intellectual trend of logical positivism was smothering the life and humanity out of the scientific endeavour.
Logical Positivism: The only valid statement is the objective one; excluding all subjectivity and reducing all expression to pure biological and mechanical description.
Sanity, Madness and the Family1 is a part of Laing’s project of treating psychosis and schizophrenia phenomenologically, that is, understanding it from the inside, instead of from the outside of positivism. Phenomenology sounds familiar, because if you think about it, Husserl and Heidegger were basically just emulating scientifically what Cervantes and Philip K. Dick were doing with literature2. The difference being, of course, that Cervantes and Dick were doing it with made up characters and imagining what might be going on inside of them that makes them do all of the crazy things they do.
Data Makes Books Boring
But this, I think, is my beef with how a lot of novels are written, especially in the last 50 years: In spite of Husserl and Laing’s efforts, the rise of the Church of Science has spread the positivistic virus through the collective consciousness. Data, data, data, data. Big data, little data, AI data analysis, algorithms and statistics, market analysis, consumer preferences, email list click-through rates, blah blah blah.
Our understanding of human experience and existence itself is now deeply and maniacally obsessed with facts, measurable datapoints, quantifiable and categorisable. And you see this in modern writing: genre ghettos full of the same novel written over and over again by a thousand different writers; catalogues of tropes and stereotypes which writing teachers encourage their students to lean on; language composed of short, mechanical descriptions of scenes and actions that exclude any sense of the emotional and cognitive maelstrom that is human subjectivity; the relentless push in the indie writing world for quantity of writing production over a high-quality, complex, nuanced architecture of language, cadence, story, and symbolism.
Waaaah
What I’m really bemoaning here is that the positivistic, “realistic” approach to writing (terse sentences and simple diction framed by baby-level grammatical structures) has the unfortunate side-effect of sand-blasting away the author’s/narrator’s personality. If the medium is the message, then the message of positivistic creative writing (realism and hyper-realism) is that the novel is no longer the author telling her/his/their audience a story, with all of the messy idiosyncrasies of grammar and language that come along with spontaneous human communication3. The modern novel feels (to me, anyway) like a scientific document of imaginary events. Which is just silly.
A Glorious Mess
William S. Burroughs’ Lee, detoxing from heroin in Naked Lunch:
Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown gelatinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh… Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones. Mold odors of atrophied testicles quilted his body in a fuzzy grey fog…4
Nom, nom, nom, nom. Or Italo Cavino’s mysterious narrator “I” working out what story it is he wants to be in:
Getting rid of the suitcase was to be the first condition for re-establishing the previous situation: previous to everything that happened afterward. This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition.5
Hiding From Insecurity
Of course, you could never get away with this kind of self-indulgence in science (even though it would potentially be more accurate). But here’s my point: the novel is not science, nor should it be approached scientifically. All concerns of keywords, cleaving to recognisable tropes, writing to a specific maximum reading-level (grade 5-6 is typically recommended, because the average person is only semi-literate), all of these concessions to marketability (as opposed to intelligibility, important distinction) are antithetical to the creative process. If the purpose of writing a novel is creative expression, then the only relevant fact is the reality of the feeling that demands expression. And besides, the novel, being a made up story, is unreal by definition—including factually accurate historical novels (if it was literally “realistic” you would call it history).
A rarely acknowledged motivation for this is that writing clean copy, with “good” grammar, makes the author feel more confident and less personally exposed. By hiding behind consensus- and/or authority-determined good writing6 you never have to take any risks. You’re just mechanically reporting facts and have no skin in the game. And so you are safe from Editors and grammar nazis, as well as the terrifying phastasy that you are back in creative writing class, being given a C because your story was derivative. Most importantly, you are safe from feelings, namely exposing your own feelings about your characters and the choices they make (maybe, for example, you are secretly titillated by the idea of murdering someone…). By utterly kiboshing any possibility of your own self sneaking into the text, well, most of it, anyway.
Mirror, Mirror
And just to be clear, the you to whom I’m speaking here is me. I have very deep anxieties about being a “good writer” and this often leads me to a disastrous conservatism of language. I spend endless hours revising and shifting commas around, reading and re-reading, stripping away all of the messy, confusing, interesting stuff because it doesn’t sound literary enough. A process, of which the natural result can only be the very thing I am afraid of: the Gerber’s Baby Formula of writing.
And so, as with most impulses to conservative decision making, the conservative move ends up being antithetical to its purpose. Protecting me from one criticism simply opens me up to another, far worse one. Instead of writing with bad grammar, I become a bad writer. But the fact is, that I’m going to get feedback no matter what I do, and some of it is going to be bad. Personally, I would much rather be criticised and hated for being too expressive than to have the reader give up halfway through with a resounding Meh.
Sanity, Madness and the Family, R.D. Laing & A. Esterson, Pelican Books, 1977/1964. ↩︎↩︎
The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera, 1993/1988, pp. 4-5↩︎
Have a conversation with a friend some time and record it with your phone. Tell me that humanimals speak with anything even approaching “good” grammar, I dare you.↩︎
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs, 2001/1959, Grove Press, p. 60.↩︎
If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino, 1981, Harcourt, p. 15↩︎
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