From Battersea Power Station
Literature as a method
One of the many memorable scenes of Children of Men features our flawed hero, Theo, visiting his cousin, Nigel, at the Battersea Power Station. Nigel, rather implausibly, owns a luxury private residence at Battersea, which now houses the “Ark of the Arts.” As Nigel and Theo enjoy their decadent meal, the viewer can’t help but notice the Picasso on the wall, the inflated pig floating outside, an homage to the Pink Floyd album, Animals—not to mention Michelangelo's David. We understand that the defunct power station is where the best of the past is being curated. Whatever human ingenuity gave birth to such vital past masters is close to being extinguished.
We don’t know if we’re living in the end times, but there is a sense, to quote Mark Fisher (an admirer of Children of Men), that our culture is “excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty.” Worldwide infertility, the premise of Children of Men, is a fitting analogue to our cultural impasse. Quite literally, no new life is being born.
To be original in these times entails two great struggles: one, the struggle to overcome the inertia and general despondency of the 2020s and to summon the supreme effort that originality requires; and two, the struggle to find an audience. No great artwork can languish in total obscurity. We are long past the days when mad geniuses could be supported by wealthy patrons. Today’s original artists have a status no better than the creators of vinyl records. Their productions might as well be housed in the Battersea Power Station for a small audience of devout collectors.
If originality does not have the broader social value that it once did, it doesn’t mean that the effort is not worthwhile. On the contrary. Such struggles are among the few struggles worth engaging in during these bleak and violent times. The motivating force has less to do with a search for “great themes” as it is the desire to find language and forms that can disrupt the banality and paucity of humanity in contemporary life.
What makes literary works great? Is it the stories? I don’t think so. Romeo and Juliet is a drama about two “star-crossed” lovers whose families are feuding, Grapes of Wrath is about poor tenant farmers who leave their home in Oklahoma in search of a better future, The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a dystopian future where women are forced to be childbearers for oppressive male “Commanders.” All of these very different works are considered literature. And yet these stories, strictly at the level of content, could also be rendered in non-literary ways if retold by total mediocrities—or, for that matter, ChatGPT.
Literature is method—a method that arguably can only be deployed by humans. With growing consternation about AI, one could be forgiven for thinking literature might also come under threat. This isn’t going to happen. As Sam Kriss has pointed out, the problem AI poses is not to literature. The problem is that “most written communication is expected to be perfectly average and formulaic.” So it is that pretty much “every memo, every letter, every email, every birthday message to your mum, every proposal of marriage is now being written by the machines. Literary prose isn’t being automated, but ordinary communication is.”
Whenever I accept the auto-replies offered by Gmail or Outlook, I feel a brief twinge of guilt, which quickly dissipates when I realize I really have no better response than the one the computer has suggested. LOOKING FORWARD TO IT! SURE, SOUNDS GREAT! THANK YOU SO MUCH! This is because most office communication is boring and repetitive. Should I communicate in a more original way? Probably, but not at the office.
The socialist magazine Jacobin has noted:
When we write with strong constraints on what we’re able to say, we tend to average out the choices of words and sentences too. We call this type of language “ideology,” and GPT systems are the first quantitative means by which we have ever been able to surface and examine that ideology.
Office communication is inherently conformist. It’s a matter of repeating what you’ve heard, saying what you’re expected to say. MOVING FORWARD, WE WILL SEEK GREATER EFFICIENCIES AND ESTABLISH INNOVATIVE PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE GOAL OF LEVERAGING PREVIOUSLY UNTAPPED POTENTIAL YADDA YADDA YADDA…. I recently, quite by accident, opened a PDF from the French hospitality multinational, Accor. It was a report called “Meeting Expectations: The Future of Meetings & Events.” For my sick amusement, I decided to read all of it, and by the time I was done, I had learned nothing and felt nothing. It could well have been written by ChatGPT. The initial query was: “How will business hospitality be conducted in the post-pandemic era?” and the bots dutifully spat out sentences like this one: “Everything from changing demographics to new technology and the climate crisis will affect the way business events will be hosted, but in the words of Accor CCO, Premium, Midscale & Economy brands, Karelle Lamouche:’Business is back!’”
It’s easy to encounter people’s innate resistance to any kind of disruption to formulaic, everyday communication. People often ask, “How are you today?” Personally, I don’t like the straight answer to this question. If I’m feeling a bit ornery or more tired than usual, I might say, “Very OK,” or “reasonably OK.” If my interlocutor has actually been listening and hasn’t automatically assimilated what I actually said with what they expected me to say, they might pause and ask “Very OK?” “Reasonably OK? What do you mean?” And then, having disrupted the usual cadence of banal speech in my annoying way, I typically reply: “Today, things are neither good nor bad. They are perfectly OK—perhaps reasonably OK, perhaps even every OK.”
My experience of life is that most of it is, in fact, simply OK, but the algorithmic patterns we’ve all fallen into assume that we should say “good” most of the time and to only say “bad,” when we’re with a therapist or a trusted confidante to whom we can be more honest about our tennis elbow or gout or recent argument with our child… But literature doesn’t expect a pat response to a standard question. This is why literature can’t be automated but also why it’s incumbent on lovers of literature to protect the “how” of literature more so than the “what,” Literature can be about almost anything—the what is almost inconsequential. The method is what matters.
In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their co-authored volume, Lyrical Ballads. Many years afterwards, in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge explained what the young poets had been up to. His own contributions to the collection, he wrote, had been “directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” Wordsworth, meanwhile, had endeavored to “give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.”
Let’s not gloss over the fact that Coleridge uses the word “supernatural” twice here. In the first instance, he is describing poetry that aims to make supernatural or romantic occurrences believable—to convince us that incredible things are true. In the second instance, he’s describing poetry that does the opposite: to elevate ordinary, everyday situations to acquire supernatural properties, as if we are seeing them for the first time. This is not the automized, banal work of ChatGPT sifting through trillions of words on the internet and spitting out chunks in the order in which they are usually presented. For literary text to work, we need bodies and feelings. It is our bodies and feelings that provide the intelligence necessary for creating as well as receiving the text.
“Do you sometimes at earliest waking observe yourself struggling towards a pronoun?” asks the narrator of The Baudelaire Fractal, Hazel Brown. “Do you fleetingly, as if from a great distance, strain to recall who it is that breathes and turns?” The poetic image, says the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, is "a means of intensifying an impression." This transitory moment that author Lisa Robertson captures in The Baudelaire Fractal—of emerging from sleep and toward wakefulness—is rendered with an economical and yet startling deployment of words: “struggling towards a pronoun.” The impression that is intensified is of not quite remembering the self, searching for the “I.” Everyday speech doesn’t mix the various ingredients of language quite so creatively. Struggling toward… a pronoun? How about if I introduced myself this way? It would be even more jarring than saying I’m feeling “Very OK.”
The rigour demanded by literature is one of consistent and artful resistance to the usual way of saying things. A creative writing professor could usefully open a new semester by telling the assembled students: “Think of the normal way of saying something. Then express that idea completely differently, in a way you haven’t heard before.”
One of the aggravations of contemporary life is when people announce that they are “beyond excited” about something. “I am beyond excited to receive this prize.” “I am beyond excited to be going to Paris.” Stop it! There can be no excuse for a writer, a lover of words, to say such things. What you’re saying is there is a regular state of excitement that you have travelled beyond to achieve an elevated form of excitement that has no precedent or equal. First of all, saying this in the same trite way as everyone else has the effect of glossing over the exact emotion. You hear or read something a hundred times in the same way; the hundred and first time it’s definitely no more interesting than it was the first one hundred times. At this juncture, there are many ways of copping out, and saying something like “Words cannot express how excited I am to be going to Paris.” Such descriptions cancel themselves out. If words can’t do the job, why say so… in words? If you really need to tell everyone you’re excited AND you’re a writer, you need to do so in an original way. That is one of the rules of literature. Twitter will forgive you. But if a literary writer puts these kinds of words in a book, they will need to somehow subvert them. Such utterances might be indicative of a boring and predictable character. Maybe the person saying these words is lying. Viktor Shklovsky, again—“It is the automatization process which explains the laws of our prosaic speech…” You cannot be more prosaic or predictable than “beyond excited,” an utterance that is actually supposed to describe a unique and singular moment.
So literature is always striving to be unusual, to be different, to break with convention, while nevertheless having to adhere to certain rules of internal consistency and grammar. It is freedom, but with constraints. It’s rebellion, but with a cause. Shklovsky could be describing most contemporary meetings when he says about prosaic speech that it is never “fully heard.”... “A thing passes us as if packaged; we know of its existence by the space it takes up, but we only see its surface."
My Monday to Friday routine follows more or less the same path every day. I walk to the train station. I wait. I take the train. I get out at the correct stop. I walk to the office. I stay there for the next seven or eight hours. I depart. I walk to the other, older train line, the one that takes me to the university. I pick up my daughter at the school a short walk from campus. We take the #4 bus home together. A few weeks ago, the usual routine was disrupted. On that day, after work I was supposed to head straight home instead of to my daughter’s school, but upon leaving the office I started walking to the train line that would take me to the university and it took me several minutes to realize my mistake. Automatization can really catch you out. You’ve been doing things without thinking. You were caught nodding off at the wheel. It’s just as easy to say or write things without thinking, perhaps even more so.
Literature won’t allow for this. Literature is the process of thinking about every single word and why it’s there. It’s the process of the words arriving the way they do during a period of prolonged concentration and trying to figure out what gives them coherence—what exactly connects them to the thing in the real world, the thought being described, the place you’ve never seen, or only seen once?
Shklovsky tells us that on February 29, 1897, Lev Tolstoy wrote in his diary “If the whole complex life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been.”1
The field of literature is constantly replenished by fresh words that fall like rain from each new writer who hovers above the soil. Sheila Heti just published Alphabetical Diaries in which she arranged ten years of her diary from A to Z.
This language is utterly contemporary. It’s not highly figurative, poetic or dramatic, and yet by starting each sentence with the same word Heti creates a rhythm that is percussive and compelling. I can only imagine the delight she will take in reading aloud excerpts like the one above. If I were to go to my day job and write a press release in which every sentence started with the same word, I would see a lot of cautionary red squiggles on my work afterwards. Yet literature not only allows such experiments, it expects them. But it’s important to note again that this isn’t perfect freedom. Heti had the freedom to choose the organizing principles of her new book, but once established, she had to follow them.
Or consider the freedom to write a story from the point of view of a horse. Real life does not allow us to be a horse; literature gets us as close as we’re going to get. In the short story, “Strider,” Tolstoy uses the perspective of a horse to defamiliarize the familiar concept of property. The horse hears the words “my” and “mine” over and over again and is puzzled at their meaning. Eventually he figures it out:
Their meaning is this: in life, people are ruled not by acts but by words. They love not so much the possibility of doing or not doing something as the possibility of talking about different things using certain words, on which they agree beforehand. Such are the words “my” and “mine,” which they use to talk about different things, creatures, topics, and even about land, about people, and about horses. They agree that only one person may say “mine” about any particular thing. And the one who says “mine” about the greatest number of things, in this game whose rules they’ve made up among themselves, is considered the happiest.
Last stop before we go: to the new Tube station at the Battersea Power Station. What will we find when we disembark? When Children of Men was released, it still sat empty, having been decommissioned in 1983. It was slowly falling into ruin. For the film it was striking to imagine it as the personal palace of a rich curator, collecting famous art like a boy with his toys. The real-world Battersea had to surrender to a far more predictable fate. It has been fully renovated at phenomenal effort and expense. It’s a place where you can buy a studio for £865,000, and a three-bedroom apartment for £6 million. It’s a place, in other words, quite unlike the realm of literature, where the self struggles toward the pronoun “I.” At the new Battersea Power Station—at the luxury residences and luxury shopping precinct lower down—people happily wield the pronoun “mine” without thinking about it. I have no hesitation in saying that the Battersea of the imagination is now superior to the real-world Battersea.
Notes
This is my ninth post since launching in October 2023. I was aiming to publish about one post per month and I am setting a slightly faster pace than that. In the new year I resolved I would work on two pieces for conventional publication for every Substack post. But the pieces for publication take a very long time. When striving to fit the form of any given magazine, I have to take a whole lot more factors into consideration. I’ll start a piece, realize there’s a bunch more research needed, get immersed, then get immersed in something else, not to mention the fact I have to do some properly remunerated labour sometimes (writing is a luxury product, let’s not kid ourselves), and then a few weeks later I return to the piece I started, do a bunch of editing, and I am forced to consider whether the original magazine I had in mind will still be the right market for what I’m trying to create, and then I might change my direction a little bit, and before I know it, a month has passed… two months, and I haven’t finished the piece. Meanwhile, totally different ideas will have flitted into my mind like bats into the belfry, and I am reluctant to sit on them… I have to explore these ideas too, to see where they will go, and so it is I end up with another Substack.
I know this post has been dotted with the usual “subscribe” and “share” buttons that Substack so conveniently provides, and yet I also want to urge you here, in my own words, to make use of them. The Substack Octopus is in for the long haul—or should I say—the long swim, the long crawl, the long backwards-moving propulsive scuttle, which is to say, at the current price, it’s a great investment. So here’s another button just for good measure. If you’re inclined, feel free to also send me a note to tell me if this posted resonated for you and what you’re thinking about. Feel free to engage in a long epistolary exchange of thoughts of feelings, the kind that characterized the correspondence of earlier eras—of the Romantic era, when Wordsworth and Coleridge were in their prime, for example Thanks!
Books
Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Princeton University Press; Annotated edition, Feb. 21 1985. Originally published in 1817.
(I shared a laughably small fraction of this gargantuan volume, of which I’ve read about one third. It is one of the granddaddies of literary criticism and one of the strangest, most uncategorisable books of all time, not to mention one that exposed itself to countless accusation of plagiarism, chiefly from German theorists.)
Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti, Knopf Canada, 2024
The Baudelaire Fractal, Lisa Robertson, Coach House Books, Toronto
Essays, excerpts, substacks
“Prophecies for 2024” by Sam Kriss
ChatGPT is an Ideology Machine
https://jacobin.com/2023/04/chatgpt-ai-language-models-ideology-media-production
“Capitalism Realism: A Review.”
https://chrisgregorybooks.wordpress.com/2022/05/16/capitalist-realism-mark-fisher-a-review/
(I’ve featured only a review of Capitalism Realism here to make it easy to go directly to the citation but the entire book makes absolutely vital reading.)
“Meeting Expectations: The Future of Meetings & Events." Accor
https://group.accor.com/en/Actualites/2023/10/future-meetings-events-report
“Art, as Device,” Viktor Shklovsky, (translated and introduced by Alexandra Berlina).
“‘Every square inch monetised’ – is Battersea Power Station now a playground for the super rich?” The Guardian, October 5, 2022
Images
Battersea Power Station
Empire’s 30th Anniversary – The One That Got Away: Children Of Men
It was actually March 1, not February 29, that Lev Tolstoy made that diary entry.