Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On the Avant-Garde and Expressing What it Means to be Alive:


p. 36-40

There’s ways that experimental avant-garde stuff can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings, in that way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.

[Realism] imposes an order and sense of ease of interpretation on experience that’s never there in real life. I’m talking about the stuff, you know, what’s hard or looks structurally strange—or formally weird—I mean some of that stuff can be very cool.

There’s really really shitty avant-garde, that’s coy and hard for its own sake. That I don’t think it’s a big accident that a lot of what, if you look at the history of fiction—sort of, if you look at the history of painting after the development of photography—that the history of fiction represents this continuing struggle to allow fiction to do that magical stuff. As the texture, as the cognitive texture, of our lives changes. And as, um, as the different media by which our lives are represented change. And it’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it.

And the reason that I’m angry at how shitty most of it is, and how much of it ignores the reader, is that I think its very very very very precious. Because it’s the stuff that’s about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief of what it feels like to live.

I’m talking about what it means to be alive. And how formal and structural stuff in avant-garde things I think can vibrate, can represent on a page, what it feels like to be alive right now. But that’s only one of the things that fiction is doing. I’m not saying it’s the only thing. I’m working hard here to try to make sense of what it is I’m saying to you. If your life makes linear sense to you, then you’re either very strange, or you might just be a neurologically healthy person—who’s automatically able to decot, organize, do triage on the amount of stuff that’s coming at you all the time.

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky