These are my sentiments, exactly. And when I write academically I often feel engulfed by other peoples’ papers, piled on all sides and high above my head. This is a rich feeling for a beginning, if you are interested in what you are working on. It is a discouraging one if you are not.
I am crafting my current paper, however, like a ceramic bowl. You have to do these things with confidence and love, which are what give you the resources to set your shoulders into it so that it does not fly off the wheel. As I move ahead I surprise myself with what I am actually able to say. This is a good feeling.
Some people of the just do it theory of life disagree with me, but I say you need access to self in order to undertake actually creative work. That comes first. Then you apply practical strategies for getting started and moving through it. It is only access to self which is enabling me to craft the current piece. After that, but only after it, I am an adherent – no, an inventor, let’s be serious – of the start now, start with a sentence, write a little every day, l’appétit vient en mangeant, plan some writers’ hours school.
The problem I have with this particular piece, though, is that I am only marginally interested in it. When I have them, my writing problems are based on insufficient interest or on not having the time, space, or permission to pursue the aspect of the work which does interest me. This, I think, is the “dirty secret” the many books on writing elide. The standard advice has little to offer if one already has good time management skills and other excellent strategies for getting things done.
The fundamental problem for me in graduate school was always that it was “too soon” or “too late,” again by standard advice, to begin working on what I wanted. When I became an assistant professor I took control of matters and things went well for some time. Then circumstances caught up with me.
This month I am trying to clear the decks so I can write the things I want. By “procrastinating” I have found this very good article, to use as a reference in my infamous out of field article (which today is what I would rather be working on, but I am on deadline, and the deadline is going to help me move ahead).
And then, on the question of productivity (and it’s one, two, three, what are we writing for?), there is this.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The link to the second article needs a password.
Yeah, ultimately, you just need to write something that matters. I just came from this site and, well, you can kind of see the sorts of consequences when we devolve into accepting a kind of écriture automatique but without the sense that we are producing something new: We are just replicating the forms of the cultural structures that have invaded us. And seemlessly too, for let there be no jarring historical factors involved but instead a gentle elision of meaning and reality as one state of being surpasses and replaces another.
I’m not sure to what degree Marechera’s writing in The Black Insider tries to take on this view. His “postmodernism” (really just Barthesism) surely fails to be properly ethereal in the ultimate analysis, because he perceives that “attitudes”, although seemingly empty and without foundation, nonetheless have real consequences. In this view he is more premodernist and engaged with actual material reality, rather than being modernist or postmodernist. But perhaps arguably there are all three strands of ideology in his novel.
Thanks, J – I made that mistake in two places, yikes, and fortunately nice people caught it quickly both times. 🙂 It’s fixed now.
I’ll have to read the Silverman article with some attention. I’m not very far into the Black Insider, but I like it. Postmodern, I suppose it is but I believe Calinescu when he talks about the postmodern as a movement within the modern, not something coming after it. Marechera seems avant-garde like the Russians and the Spanish speakers, coinciding temporally with what is in English high modernism but having more characteristics corresponding to the “postmodern.”
These at least are my impressions so far.
Yes– I would say that the flattening of reality effect of the sort of writing in The Black Insider could be termed postmodern.
I am reluctant to term it thus, however, because I think that to do so would potentially mislead a reader into thinking that his intentions were to operate purely at a level of “play” — and whereas, I think this is certainly this element in his work, he seems ultimately drawn to the gravitational pull of realpolitik. He is not yet wholly subsumed by the modalities of theoretical projections (which is the condition I take to be the quintessential postmodern one).
So what I see are elements of a pre-modernist (sense of adventurous direct relationship with an environment, without ideological mediation) creativity, combining with various modernist and postmodernist elements. But bearing in mind that Marechera did not emerge from a modernist system of culture, I do not see a great deal of point in postulating that it was his modernism that produced postmodernist shoots, or postmodernistic recoilings of thought. He seems rather to have concocted a much more audacious (and insoluble) mix of premodernist adventurism (eg. Robert louis stevenson) and Barthian cultural determinism.
But I think I’m taking Fredrick Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as the one that rings true — the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Lyotard’s one makes sense as a very abstract paradigm, but socially and historically (in a concrete sense) appears incoherent to me. Because even in very tribal contexts there will be those who are excluded for thinking differently. It happens in every context and the sheer ubiquitousness of there being culturally excluded aspects from society renders the term of postmodernism, as describing such an effect, vague and obtuse.
I mean Shaka Zulu was victimised by his tribe from an early age, because his father was dead and he was considered to have been in effect a bastard child. So was Shaka Zulu and his situation therefore postmodernist at this point?
And Shaka turned the situation around an became a sadistic abuser himself. And so we lose a sense of the cultural logic of late capitalism here, because the outsider does not remain solidified in his outsider position. But if he did (remain the masochist rather than becoming the sadist) wouldn’t he have been quintessentially postmodern?
Yes, he would have been, and I agree on Lyotard and Jameson.
The problem I have with the categories “modern” and “modernist” is that they are so broad. Lyotard’s postmodernism makes assumptions about the modern which, in the literary realm, may correspond to certain high modernist works, maybe to T.S. Eliot, but that’s a very narrow paradigm for modernism.
For people living at the margins of the modern world, i.e. in Zimbabwe, it’s a whole other story. But I’d say that the colonial world *is* modern, it is the sine qua non of modernity, so that it isn’t that people in it are not in modernity or modern, it’s just that their place in it and relationship to it is not the same as that of those inhabiting the “central” countries, the “global north,” etc.
yeah, in an industrial sense the colonial world is indeed the quintessential modern. Yet it is a modernism with an innocence about it, still wet behind the ears, Defoe-esque.
But now I am coming to see that the anti-colonial literature which came from the dominant first world itself, and not from revolutionary quarters, castigated European colonialism for not being “real” enough in the precise sense of not being bourgeois enough!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I see this is the bourgeois ethno-psychiatriast Mannoni, I see the same critique (although perhaps more complicated) in Fanon, and I have certainly experienced the extreme disdain of those who have internalised a bourgeois socio-economic hierarchy of values against me, the “white colonial”, in spades. (My reaction was that I had encountered a surprisingly debased version of humanity that put so much stake on money as a measure of human value. They were certainly by no means superior to me, but astonishingly vulgar and dehumanised.)
Yes, there is that sense, although I haven’t figured it out yet; there’s a current like that in Latin America from the late 18th century onward and I haven’t figured it out yet, either. But it is key because it makes everything so circular and specular.
It is … liberalism … ?
Um..which side are you asking about if it is liberalism? The bourgeois aspect? Or the reaction to it, as surprisingly anti-humanistic?
I don’t know. I believe that encountering real bourgeois culture for the first time incited a very rebellious feeling in Marechera, as if the proper value of cultural currency (education) had been betrayed.
I was thinking: the idea that the alternative to colonialism would be formal independence, a liberal economy, and representative democracy. Two options, no third.
Oh i see what you mean.
I am drinking many various wine right now, because I had been working the whole weekend and am trying to find a little quarter of my mind in which to relax. 🙂
I was thinking: the idea that the alternative to colonialism would be formal independence, a liberal economy, and representative democracy. Two options, no third.
Ah, I see!
Yes it seems to have been pushed as the next step up the ladder of propriety and civilisation, represented in almost entirely moral terms.
Now, of course, Marechera sought the third option and was considered mad because of it.
But I think a lot of it has to do with the confluence of actual revolutionary anti-colonial forces, whose first thing in mind was to get rid of colonial domination AND the attitudes of the first world bourgeois, who felt that the over nature of colonialism was a slight on their aspirations to affect an attitude of aloof an independent superiority over the cultures that they wished to dominate imperialistically through a more subtle neo-colonial means. The relations of dominance and submission of actual colonialism seemed too rude and crude to the point of actually giving the neo-colonialist game away.
So, there was an attempt to draw attention to the blustering nature of colonialism, in order to precisely draw attention AWAY from neo-colonialism and its effects.
I mean, if I was to speak openly and absolutely about my contempt for colonialism, then you would surely trust me in the future if I “merely” wanted to do business with you?
Also a confluence with the fundamental workings of superego, too: “Colonialism isn’t Real power, because there is a more dominant father (ie. system of power) in the world.” Bourgeois ideology is therefore the Real father of us all.
I just read the article by Crosby you posted. She advocates an antimodernist approach to pedagogy.
Actually, I would say that such an antimodernist approach is very colonial. But we have spoiled its reception by labelling it ‘the white man’s burden”.
Once again, a bourgeois ideological attack upon more natural and feudalistic relations, by terming them backwards and colonial!
“access to self”–maybe not just necessary for writing, but for life…or else you have to deal with the return of the repressed.
this is good stuff. thanks for sharing it. i’m glad i read it just now, as i start writing my first chapter. and i’m sure i’ll return for a reminder!