Țara Isabella Burton at The Wisdom of Crowds: Last week, I spoke at an event at Barnes & Noble with Agustina Bazterrica, an Argentinian writer whose “splatterpunk” novels and short stories are characterized by the granular precision of their descriptions of gore. I asked Bazterrica whether she saw herself as working within a particular tradition of transgressive violence — Burroughs, say, or Mirabeau — and how she hoped the reader would respond to her novels’ most violent scenes.
Her response struck me. She didn’t think about the reader at all, she said. Her writing was, rather, a process of self-exorcism: of finding stories, and words, with which to give voice to the “obsessions” that haunted her.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation all week. It’s been years since I’ve approached my own fiction as the untangling of obsessions. Sometimes I miss it.
It’s not that I don’t love my work. Part of the reason that my writing is less personal, less self-disclosing, than it once was, is because I love novels — writing them, reading them, imagining them. I think about technique and craft and what it means to engage with the expectations of genre. Generally speaking, I think it is a good thing for any artist to think of their work as something more than merely personal — a book or a poem or a painting or a piece of music that is intelligible because it exists in and through a shared human vocabulary. There is a difference between a novel — even a deeply personal novel — and a diary entry; between singing in the shower and singing on stage.
But there is another, less noble, side to the shift in my approach to novel-writing. The same self-conscious, self-overhearing authorial voice in my head, which tries to dialogue with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, also argues with imagined reviewers, posters on Goodreads and editors. I hear scary voices telling me that The World Cannot Give is best advertised under the label of “dark-academia,” or that Here in Avalon should be shelved alongside other “literary fairy tales.”
It’s inevitable, of course. The algorithmic matchmaking of “cultural product” to “cultural consumer” prompts writers to think in terms of branding and marketing. Being conscious of readers, even when it is necessary, means also being conscious of buyers, of reviewers, of “fans.”
Which is why I’m so drawn to Megalopolis.
Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million Robert Moses-meets-Rome epic is a failure, as far as movies go. I’m not even sure it’s a noble failure. The plot makes no sense; the love scenes are bloodless; characters shift their storytelling signifiers from scene to scene. (Is Mayor Cicero concerned with social welfare at the expense of utopian greatness — or does he just want to build casinos)? Much of the central story seems like a thinly veiled allegory for Coppola’s self-conceit: An implausibly rich, implausibly brilliant young architect with time-stopping powers and access to a mysterious and possibly organic building substance that may come from outer space, has a thoroughly anti-democratic dream for remaking the city of New Rome into his personal utopia, and despite mass opposition is ultimately vindicated in said dream by everyone around him.
I was warned of all this, going in. But, somehow, Megalopolis managed to be one of the only films I’ve been excited to see in theaters in a long time. Two hours and eighteen minutes later, I was glad I went.
More here.
