I was interested to read Andrew McMillan’s piece in the Guardian (Beyond cliché and condescension: we need new stories about ‘The North’).
I agree that the north needs new stories, and Manchester, where we both live, in particular. I set up Manchester Review of Books (MRB) with Joe Darlington right at the start of the pandemic. We were putting it out as a broadsheet, now we tick over online.
We tried to cover a Neil Campbell novel here, a local poet that doesn’t get a look-in there. We tried to do what London Review of Books (LRB) didn’t, for instance a column on second hand bookshops, a huge part of the real reader’s life, which they don’t touch. Part of our USP was small presses from anywhere. I will use the term ‘we’ here, but it’s important to point out that this editorial is entirely my own, and much of what follows was just triggered by the MacMillan article, it isn’t always a direct response.
Let’s start with the presumed opposite: the London Review of Books (LRB) which seems blissfully unaware of its own elitism, but this idea of northern voice and community is just as full of holes, blind spots. The nativist ‘authentic’ side of ‘northern voice and community’ can be a real problem, and I come from it. In fact I probably say that because I come from it and know what it’s like (especially my bloody cousin Paul). Nativism, as though we could forget, is behind the hideous right-wing turn in Britain. McMillan isn’t arguing for nativism, to be fair to him, quite the opposite in many ways, but I wasn’t very convinced by his argument, or solution to ‘the new stories for the north’ problem. I have a fairly broad accent, but don’t ever feel patronised, and the inverted snobbery in Manchester is worse than people know. Just go round to my cousin Paul’s for ten minutes.
McMillan writes against cliché but then blurts ‘I wanted, in the words of the great north-east poet Barry MacSweeney, to stand at the coalface, like Hamlet, and strike a match.’ I found that straightforwardly funny. He will probably say it was ironic, but McMillan’s argument seems quite unstable. For instance I don’t understand how Carcanet are part of the great northern tradition, is it just because they have an office in Manchester? Don’t they largely publish those poets who wear posh Northampton brogues I could never afford? I always think of Carcanet as a London publisher, which just happens not to be there. International Anthony Burgess Centre doesn’t get a mention, where Carcanet does. Puzzling, and Burgess was surely a quality brogue man. One might argue that Burgess only started out in Manchester, but isn’t that argument moronically nativist? The ‘International’ in the Burgess Centre is very important.
See, I told you the inverted snobbery was pernicious. Of course there’s nothing more moronically nativist than suggesting Carcanet is not of the city it is actually in, because of chippy class politics. And why would we care? Would we interrogate, for instance, a firm of solicitors in Manchester like this? Would we check out their local deep-rootedness before taking them on? Maybe we should?
Or maybe what you want in a firm of solicitors is the opposite of local deep-rootedness, because they need to stand apart from the anthropological assumptions of place. Then perhaps the same goes for poetry publishers? Maybe we shouldn’t give a tuppeny toss who Carcanet put out. If the work does something for us – or others – good, if not, pass it by. I understand that this nebulous thing called literature is not a mirror for me, it is much bigger than that. Carcanet is a part of Manchester and puts out great work. Like the rest of the city, it is part of a plural international environment, in which different people have different histories and timelines of engagement with ‘the north.’ The city is globalised, although we are entering what I call – in my head – the balkanization of globalisation.
Someone angling at a political career once suggested to me that the Guardian would be better if it were still in Manchester. He thought that its perceived decline (tellingly its lack of ‘edge’) was something to do with London. That person was, and remains, an idiot. But I still struggle to see how Carcanet is strongly ‘north’ and nobody talks full-on about the class politics of literature production, which are really crummy. Or at least, nobody who wants to get ahead in the game talks about it full-on. The balkanization of globalisation is coming, and there’s nothing good about that. I’m for intersectionality and everyday hybridity: we already have it, only The Lunkheads are after it. Carcanet are not The Lunkheads. Andrew McMillan is not a Lunkhead. The question seems to be how to account for the micro specificities of culture in a place and yet stay – at the same time – open to the absolute pluralism we celebrate? But trying to occupy these two opposite positions at once is tricky, the result can look and feel like a Twister endgame. Maybe we should stop trying to ‘solve’ this at all? We could put our backs out.
I now think that exploring the inherent tensions and contradictions – as I try to here – is all you can do. If someone offers you the solution they are gaming you.
I wanted MRB to curate the opposite of posture, and in a way the opposite of posh brogue poet, unless the work was truly something else. But on the other side of this kind of casual inherited class prejudice of mine there is an equally fetishised world: McMillan then writes enthusiastically about Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, which is almost entirely made of wood. The extent to which novels such as Love on the Dole filter, and are retrospectively constructed, should be the thing to explore. I did some research on a photo archive from Todmorden. A picture of a home-weaver working outside, in knee breaches and clogs, turned out to be posed, the family were renting the cottage and were turned out shortly after as they couldn’t afford the rent. The real story was hidden under the surface signifiers and the family colluded in its production. Love on the Dole tackles these issues head-on, yet is still the same, aesthetically, as that old photograph. New pieces of work are being produced which do the same thing as that photo, but we can’t see it doing that yet, as we are too close to it.
There are also people ‘of this region’ on Twitter who troll others for not being rooted in old-timey socialism enough and raise up a fairly hallucinated image of a working class who can never be wrong. I live close enough to the post-industrial working class to know this is horseshit. Just like the Guardian-would-be-better-in-Manchester is horseshit.
And let’s face it, the Manchester and Salford literary traditions swing between transgressive and straight, great and average: De Quincey, a bad eugenicist, the deeply conservative Mrs Gaskell, Mary Barton, North & South, then the great Shelagh Delaney. But Walter Greenwood’s iron cogs of socialist rhetoric drop straight out of the mouths of dummy characters, roll over the mantlepiece, on to the floor, clanking, in contrast with the great Classic Slum by Robert Roberts. Then there’s Savoy Books with David Britton and Michael Butterworth, Jeff Noon, Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation, Alice in Wonderland, via Manchester in the late 1980s, stuff that will tear the lid of your skull off. But is it not possible to argue that all of this is now cliché too? Via trashy CGI sci-fi TV. It has been troped to death. It has been Netflixed.
Psychogeography is part of the university curriculum now, like Defoe or Dickens. Every other gallery show I see or piece of ‘writing on place’ I read is struggling to escape from under the flabby white buttocks of Sinclair and Keiller. Their work is great, the copyists are the problem – like Hendrix the first wave scarlet roar is incredible, then all we get are mediocre wannabes with no ideas of their own. In any case, all writing emerges from ‘place’. ‘How must it be recalibrated now?’ (and why) is the burning question.
Folk-horror, the dark north, the supposedly uncanny and sublime northwest, they have all also been Netflixed. There are no more ghosts since CERN proved their existence impossible, our real world of horror is a world with no ghosts left. The overproduction of literary ghosts is not a surprising oversight by all those writers in the context of the CERN experiments, the overproduction of literary ghosts is directly connected to a hard, objective End of Ghosts which they all weakly feel in their waters.
The uncanny and sublime are the fake orgasms both writer and reader must constantly pretend to have in order to conceal the complete absence of the uncanny and sublime. You can’t currently move in the northwest for the film company catering vans, for tripping over the fat power cables as they produce some more useless uncanny and sublime. Its only purpose seems to be to bore us into a coma. Out in the real world the early symptoms of uncanny and sublime gave way to full terror some time ago. Perhaps the induced coma is meant to soften the impact of what is coming.
There’s a nostalgia here, for both earlier forms of these fictions, Day of the Triffids etc, and for the times when one felt safe enough to enjoy the uncanny and sublime. Now, nobody is safe and so this form is dead, but it still circulates as a cliché in the present: mist, northern graveyards, weird occurrences, people with antlers on their heads. Is it extreme to suggest that this is now a cliché, due to its degraded circulation on TV? Perhaps it’s just me, but it all arrives with zero power. It takes so long to produce these things, from novel to treatment to expensive film production, that by the time it arrives it seems quite arbitrary and quaint.
In a world made of concentrated horror the uncanny and sublime are the new cosy and bliss. Tommy Lee Royce of Happy Valley. The neo-Heathcliffism. There’s a market for a peephole into a world of ‘get the kettle on and make a brew’, a leering into a social world perceived of as warmer, grittier, more direct and more edgy and exciting, but actually the realities are often unremittingly grim and sometimes brutal.
I suppose some things have moved on. AJP Taylor once stated that if ‘anyone wrote Blackpool Rock, it would not be a murder-story; it would be a sentimental, and inconclusive, romance.’ Now Blackpool Rock would be a pointless murder story stuffed with a confection of suburban idiocies and recently-cooled hipster fetish. You see clichés are not all things that have become outdated through over-exposure, there’s an expensive cultural cliché factory in the north minting brand new tropes in the present, for the future. Similarly, provincialism is no longer of the provinces, provincialism is quantum, it winks into being – out of nothing at all – before vanishing.
The real stories in Manchester are still hidden under the clichés – and the nostalgia – but not the cloth cap clichés. There is still a strong nativism present in a Manchester where everyone repeats the same three sentences over and over again like drunks at closing time: industrial revolution, The Hacienda, Joy Division, New Order. Manchester becomes White Town through those stories, the 90s black music in Manchester, the samba schools and hip hop club nights, all vanish under it, or re-appear in a white mask. This new nativism is also available to the recently-arrived, and so spreads fast. It is a postmodern nativism, but it is nativist nonetheless. To be fair, McMillan is asking for the multiplicity to step forward, but he is asking for it to step forward to the panel of judges he is on, or has set up.
One high peak-scale northern cliché is the wax cotton whisky fisherman nonsense of Ted Hughes and its more recent iteration, Simon Armitage standing on a Pennine looking damp while using ‘the earnest voice’ like a Bene Gesserit Witch. It clearly worked for him. Meanwhile, in the city you can see from that moor, revanchist speculation that will disinherit the young and poor continues. To be fair to the Marxist geography bros at least they are talking about it.
I have also learned to look out for and be suspicious of those who seem to suggest they are working class, but turn out to be middle class people singing a particular song, in order to occupy their place of privilege on the cultural landscape. There are a lot of them about. There’s something about the way they clothe themselves in certain signs, but this always gives them away as well. I am the most suspicious when they start to mourn the end of industry. I worked in two factories when I was young – when there were still some factories – one was highly organised textbook Fordist, and hell because of it, the other was an undisciplined madhouse, and it was hell because of it. I was there long enough to know I never wanted to be there ever again.
The real cultural clichés and condescensions are here, in the little songs the fake working class people sing about how sad it is that there are no more factories, not in someone mocking an accent. Hipster Manchester is the cliché elephant in the room and the place where these myths and fetishes are produced and then re-dressed in aesthetics which disguise their nature. They pick up the already constructed stories then amplify them further, distorting them more, then they present them as a new kind of vibrant, slightly psychedelic truth to be consumed.
Love on the Dole has become a cultural cliché on a mass scale, it is an article of belief that nobody is allowed to disavow or criticise, like a first run pressing of Unknown Pleasures, with its textured cover: it’s a fetish. It’s a religion. It all needs mothballing for a century until we can see it clearly again. I wanted MRB to avoid fetish. How well did we do? I’m not sure, but I’m certainly surer now about what the real pitfalls are.
McMillan vows to tackle Bad Storyism, but a lot of the McMillan article content is obvious and has been for decades. What he asks for – trousers flapping in the wind like the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog – has been happening all along without his great missionary zeal to save us all. The ‘other’ stories are all there. The writers are there, it’s just that Manchester Literature Festival won’t touch them and they can’t break through to another level. They need funding. They need publishers who aren’t highwaymen.
We wanted to write about good Manchester authors, at MRB, but not people just hustling stories. The city is full of people hustling stories to pedal their own home economy to getting-by level. I can’t blame them for that, but let’s at least be honest about what’s happening. And of course this works at one scale up from the personal economy of the story-hustler as well. I noticed some poetry in Victoria Station, Manchester, on my way to visit relatives up the Calder Valley. It was placed there in a collaboration with Manchester Literature Festival. Here is the poem about Todmorden, where I was going. It says that one can’t simply assume writing about northern places chosen for (and by) the Great Programme is without problems:
Everything is painted sage
or landrover, or brand new wellingtons –
a deeper colour than the lichén
of the church. The hillside
turns away, shaded with jealousy.
A weathervane. The cool, black tracks.
The unsmudged lipstick of the station doors.
The breath of passengers
outside the waiting room
transluscent, rising, mingling.
That’s by award-winning poet, Helen Mort. I haven’t had as intense a desire to suddenly destroy something since I last saw my cousin Paul. It could have been written by an estate agent, for an estate agent TV ad. It is an estate agent’s aesthetic all the way through. In small towns such as these, property markets and gentrification price whole generations out of a home. This isn’t to say that Mort is in league with estate agents, but it is to say that this poem has the kind of retro-vintage middle class imaginary they deploy all the time. Manchester Literature Festival presents the Estate Agent Imaginary. How can it be otherwise inside a massive property monoculture? Don’t get swayed by arms full of tattoos, focus on what the work is doing. I have a completely inverted relationship with prize-winners: when I see the notification of a prize win on a cover it means I swerve it; for others it is an enticement, for people who don’t really understand writing, or themselves. There are exceptions to this rule, but they prove it.
I tackled these questions for MRB back in 2016, in an editorial called New Stories for the Old City. Manchester has its own Literature Festival, I argued, and it should have its own Review of Books, but it needs new, fecund myths, as the old ones are dried-out husks. So far so obvious. The whole reverence for ‘Madchester’ bored me to tears back then and eight years later it is still in place. Walking the city, the little glyph under the ‘Haçienda’ occasionally flashes up in the periphery of your vision, an accent, but an accent as a hook that the city’s mythmakers have hung themselves upon until they are creatively dead. The old, bloated corpses still weigh heavily on the city: ‘Manchester, So Much To Answer For’ was a line that originally referred to the Brady and Hindley murders, but has since swollen to designate anything and everything that originated in the city region, brilliant, bad or plain evil. We cannot allow a whole city to pivot on six words that once fell out of Morrissey’s mouth, that would clearly be foolish. And we certainly can’t claim him as a literary great either.
‘The Haçienda must be built’ was coined by Ivan Chtcheglov the poor, half-mad Situationist, who was arrested en route to the Eiffel Tower with armloads of dynamite, intent on blowing it up because its lights kept him awake at night. Engels urgently needs to return to Manchester to observe the homeless situation, but maybe Chtcheglov needs to return to Manchester to detonate its myths. Blast them into atoms so tiny that the original stories can no longer be read. In 2016, I said that perhaps the Haçienda must be finally demolished. Because these stories, now flattened a millimetre thin by their endless circulation, conceal richer ones. This is in a way what McMillan is arguing – and so we agree on some level – but I see the entire meritocratic game as worthy of demolition, I don’t think he does. He seems to be back at the place where northerners are seen as daft manual workers. Hasn’t the opposite occurred? We have a load of northerners and Mancunians on film and TV now, but they are often cast as cool and edgy ‘characters’, rather than cavemen from the industrial period. But isn’t exactly this one of the clichés we need to destroy too? I think yes. Mancs are Marc Riley on Radio 6 Music times One Thousand, or the Ladette version. From shit-shovellers to entertainers, performers, there’s nothing more condescending. The real power is always elsewhere, the northerners are always given the spare keys to play with (plus rule-proving exceptions). Let’s have an end to it.
But since writing that editorial in 2016 I feel that the problem is one of infrastructure, funding and organisation: the new stories for the old city riff is, once you have arrived there, just a fog to get lost in.
Here is a wealth of original talent, doing a wide range of things, yet Manchester still can’t seem to produce a single decent radical independent bookshop at its centre. This hasn’t changed since 2016. This tells me more about the cultural health of the place than the constant rhetoric about cultural cliché (including my own). A recent artist book fair at the Whitworth was full of aestheticised individualism, with one exception, Stat ‘zine with its great Abolish Manchester t-shirts and publications. The things that spring up in the cracks of the pavement are always what is important here: Peter Barlow’s Cigarette, for instance, amazing particle colliders for new experiments with words and sounds, which have their parallel in nights such as The Noise Upstairs at Fuel in Withington. But these things do not need Lord Protectors. They probably need funding though, as the city is not that of the 80s: ‘rooms are empty, I’ve got plenty, so move in right away’ Ian Brown once sang. No more.
This piece of writing is not meant to be an exhaustive account of textual production in Manchester, or its many literary scenes, and related events, that would be foolish. The proposal that we drop the old stories and make new ones is all very worthy – and also very easy for anyone to do – much harder is supporting the wealth of talent right across the board and doing it properly. And I mean all of it. A new literary movement in Manchester might make very particular, politicised new myths, directly related to this problem. ‘The individual’ must go precisely because they sit upon the highest curve of the Neoconservative rollercoaster: it all just slots straight into to consumer capital. And that slots into the great big property machine currently enabling dodgy regimes and players to put down their cash and make even more, with no kickback to the struggling citizens (and this is one way in which ‘north’ does matter, although that’s going on all over, too).
Demolition Polka was a popular Strauss waltz, as cities exploded in the nineteenth century. We see again how the risk and hedging of capital have turned our public spaces into demolition poker, with Pomona seceded to banality and skyscrapers going up like knotweed. The city is being ripped up and re-laid under our feet again, and so perhaps we need to re-enter this game with new strategies. McMillan’s advocacy seems to stop at individual identity. I think we need a writing collective which blows the little competitions and personalities skyscraper high. Whether we get one or not is another question, but it is what is needed. Academics Against Networking began this conversation in Manchester a few years ago. But nobody wants to hear the anti-hustle anti-meritocratic rant, they want to self-aggrandise and blesh.
I got invited to the Manchester City of Literature consultation event. They probably wished they hadn’t. I can’t even remember who invited me or why. The Literature Festival in Manchester is stone dead I said. Everyone pretended they hadn’t heard it. They asked questions that didn’t really make sense, so I said they didn’t really make sense. Everyone pretended they hadn’t heard it. We were invited to write on big pieces of paper. I wrote RICHARD BARRETT FOR POET LAUREATE. A bigwig asked ‘is he as good as Carol Ann Duffy?’ I said ‘in another league.’
More recently a friend wanted to do a Lit Fest fringe, but he’s gone quiet on it. I don’t blame him. He probably knows he’d end up doing all the work for hardly any reward. I wouldn’t invite me to the Manchester City of Literature consultation either, but I do think the problem needs someone as mouthy as me. Because all I’m doing here is saying what other writers are already discussing, but daren’t put out in public. The small-c permaconservative politeness only serves to keep the tepid status quo. Everyone unconsciously tugs forelock to ‘get on’ but I still share the disdain Raymond Williams had for the ‘getter on.’ It effectively builds castes through deference. An end to that as well.
Cliché is a problem, I agree, but at the same time Manchester is a prism and always has been. Then I get to the point where I think ‘well if it’s so genuinely heterogenous in reality then how does “north” matter?’ And of course, there are ways in which ‘north’ does matter – and not just because of the poverty and the patronising – but then my radar is always trying to detect someone selling me nativism by other means. And they do. When they do that they are often also selling themselves and their own place in that essentially nativist discourse. I know because I’ve caught myself trying to do it in the past. Just like I catch myself being an inverted snob here. Let’s explore these tensions rather than gaming ourselves as the bringer of the answer.
Manchester Review of Books aimed to cover good Manchester writers from anywhere, but definitely not people just hustling stories. Good Manchester stories, please, but not Manchester tropes. In that I agree with McMillan. The problem is I’m not sure that anyone ever makes honest, unfiltered stories, from any cultural background. But they threw out the psychoanalytical literature because it isn’t right-on any more and that central idea went in the skip with it: they filtered out the thing that tells you all your stories are filtered, of course. The problem is also that the default game if you want to make money is to plug yourself into the Big Story Machine, crank the hyperbole handle and see the little monkeys dance, with their clashing cymbals. And they do. And so his solution I’m not keen on.
I was about to say I don’t think we ever covered Dave Haslam at MRB, but I think we might have. I found it hilarious that a book finally arrived, all set to slice through some of the clichés and to deliver a realer picture of the city – Rentier City by Isaac Rose – and it STILL HAS TO HAVE A QUOTE BY DAVE HASLAM ON IT. Oddly, I like Dave Haslam, but Haslamism is also part of the problem. Haslamism is city as confection. This is all little different in my eyes to the ‘Golden Memories of Manchester’ nostalgia market. Books on the the old cinemas (‘Magic in the Dark, the Cinemas of Central Manchester and Ardwick Green’) books on the old nightclubs (‘Life After Dark’): there’s something indistinguishable, at core, in these two products. Always remember these are marketplaces, selling for users. In this case sentimental old duffers, and I say this because I am one. The people who track down old cinemas that have become timber merchants or supermarkets and the people who pose for pictures on the footbridge over Princess Parkway in the snow are really the same people, at a fundamental level. There is nothing wrong with all this – my insouciant tone throughout is just a strategy to get your ear – but we need to be suspicious when people try to tell you that there is something lifted-out and special about their corner of the game, that there is ‘essence’: here be monsters. Dave’s OK.
The new stories for the old city are just the stories that manage to get written, this is the loamy substrate under the stories which then happen to get published, the things that poke through the surface. Most of this material will be generic and its form and content strongly affected by the current ‘geist’, again, with rule-proving exceptions.
‘We are certain that the story a place tells of itself should be more important than the story which is told about it’ MacMillan says, quoting his own novel. Raymond Williams did all of that so well, the anthropology of locality. But the stories place tells of itself are not always reliable or good. Think of the women shamed in northern small towns through no fault of their own because their husbands walked out and never came back, these things are not that long ago. I remember one of those people. The whole village seemed to present a fluctuating but stable and quite evil story about itself which contained her, literally, in a particular way. The stories about those ladies are ‘stories place tells of itself’, those stories contain all the bans and taboos of communities which are always, at base, ‘primitive.’ Yes, including ours. There seems to be some confusion here, as MacMillan appears to also want the resistant individual stories – the marginalised account – as well as the whole aura of place, which in my experience is always polluted by the bad spirits of community telling. Always. Richard Sennett calls it ‘destructive gemeinschaft’ or negative community, the surfaces of stories always cover it over.
Moving across a locale into another and experiencing the magical isogloss shift is one thing, I also remember getting off the bus to go to the cinema at Hebden Bridge at 14 or 15 with friends to be threatened with violence because I was from Todmorden. ‘County lines’ of an older type. I’ll never forget it. Isogloss? Most places I go you have to hone in on layers of hybrid international speech, slang and patois and there is magic in this.
But there is a dialectical flipside to all this too: it is true that individual accounts or poems can never contain or drain all the narratives of place, ever. In this there is a lot of light. I am interested in this essentially poststructuralist idea – that the subject of the announced is never exhausted by the annunciation. So maybe lifting out certain things is just fine. But what is happening when that takes place? What happens when you lift out a drag queen, a former miner, a security guard at the Alhambra shopping centre, a sex worker and a call centre employee? These examples are not free-floating atoms, they are already contained in a geist-bubble. What interests me more than the inevitably filtered and embroidered stories of those people is the question ‘who is lifting those people out and what is their stake in that act of lifting?’ I wonder if MacMillan might be bracketing himself off from the suburban, but what else is going on? I can’t claim to know, but suggest that other things are always going on – unconsciously most likely – in me as in everyone else. Do we ever bring the marginalised to light to show unfiltered truth: ‘do the subaltern speak?’ an old question, which Spivak asked. There isn’t a simple yes or no answer to that.
I have already described, in the second volume of Provocations (I say, quoting my own book) how I want what I call ‘an ontology of disconnection.’ Literature joins the dots automatically, for instance between the end of industry and contemporary life in Manchester. But ‘literature’ rarely accounts for the complete lack of connection between (for instance) the former industrial landscape and someone currently living oblivious to it on its surface. What more often happens – as per Andy Spinoza’s recent book – is that someone goes ‘OK, Manchester starts with the steam loom, then industrialism, then its decline, then, fast forward, the Sex Pistols, then there’s Buzzcocks and Joy Division…the IRA bomb’ and once this switch is thrown the whole tedious lot falls out of the silo on our heads automatically, like the wooden alphabet blocks of Walter Greenwood. People need to recalibrate the underlying philosophical approach first and ‘an ontology of disconnection’ is just one possibility. How might we describe Manchester outside of this dead timeline? How might we describe the fundamentally disconnected nature of our smashed communities and places? Is this not more politically urgent and real than the cosy lineages that are usually described, or rather, generated? Text always makes generative narratives, even if the researched timeline of that narrative is scrupulously accurate. The balkanization of globalisation is going to mean that an ontology of disconnection becomes essential. The left make neat timelines of historical solidarity, covering over that their own lineage has been smashed many times, and is completely broken now.
Iain Sinclair, actually, is the opposite of the ontology of disconnection, he is the High Priest of Generative Connection. He draws everything together in his crescendo epiphanies, personal history, place, politics. I am not saying this is useless or bad, but I am saying that history has moved on it. An essential contemporary literature must do something opposite to his undoubtedly impressive mandala medicine show. It’s time. Hurry.
Macmillan then – I think tellingly – describes ‘academics bringing an outsider perspective as they work on a community ethnography and history project’, and ‘a young poet with armfuls of tattoos who may or may not be me.’ It seems to me the exotic and lowly are still the material for the privileged observers here, be they academics or poets. Which often equals bad anthropology. Literary dynasties are part of the problem, and McMillan alludes to his own briefly, before offering himself as the solution. But McMillan’s solution is to set up yet another award, another school prize day. This prize is also clearly a mirror of sorts, too.
So what’s wrong with another prize? Well, from one perspective, absolutely nothing at all. And what business of yours is it? it’s none of my business whatsoever! But that it triggers the above in me is worth writing down.
There’s still a lot of ambient rhetoric in cultural discourse which tries to proclaim an a-hierarchical landscape: ‘everybody matters.’ But the literary prize is the place on that supposedly flat landscape where that sort of gushing gets the lie, the place where everything goes vertical at 45 degrees again. The same sort of rhetoric in corporate culture has always been bullshit, too. To proclaim everyone matters and to also put in a fast track upwards contains a contradiction. It leaves the proselytisers of the cultural scene as it stands in yet another awkward Twister endgame, looking slightly ridiculous. But of course not everyone sees this, or it wouldn’t work.
I’ve only been entered for a prize once, because a publisher did it and then told me they had. The book was actually ineligible as it had been published previously in another form, but they hadn’t read the regulations. So I just said ‘thanks’ and promptly forgot all about it.
I think the real answer is for the grassroots writers already making work to be funded and promoted better, whether collectively or individually, all of them. The Literature Festival barely touches the reality of the city. City of Literature picks and chooses. MRB picks and chooses. Prizes pick and choose even more narrowly. What is needed is a much broader approach. McMillan is right, there is a great multiplicity of stories, but you can’t curate a vast organic multiplicity via a panel. But even this misses the point: you don’t need to curate the vast organic multiplicity at all, you can however better fund and enable all of it.
The solution, in my opinion, is not for a fetishised individual to be lifted aloft by a self-appointed king or queenmaker. Because isn’t that the ultimate in condescension?
An end to literary king and queen making – a return to writing as writing, to cultural activity as use-value – now that would be a real literary revolution.
It isn’t going to happen, but I’m saying it anyway.
Dr Steve Hanson
manchestereviewofbooks.wordpress.com 