Modernist Legacies in Small Press Fiction
Photo by Kevin Bosc on Unsplash
This week on The Conch, we’re featuring an article by literary critic and Alluvium editor Liam Harrison. Here, Harrison explores the ways in which small presses have provided a place for the expression of modernist energies in the twenty-first century. Parts of this article were originally presented as a research paper at the ‘Love Takes Risks: The Poetics of Contemporary Small-Press Fiction’ symposium. Organised by University of East Anglia doctoral researchers Olivia Heal and Rosalind Brown in collaboration with the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the symposium provided a forum for authors, publishers and academics to discuss the role of independent publishers in British literary culture. You can hear all of the papers and discussions on SoundCloud.
Claire-Louise Bennett’s book Pond is a work of strange, alluring opacity. Across twenty stories that can be read as a single narrative or a series of inter-connected vignettes, we follow a woman as she prevaricates around a cottage in what appears to be Connemara (she tells us ‘I live on the most westerly point of Europe, right next to the Atlantic ocean’). The longest of Pond’s stories are around twenty pages, and the shortest are no more than a few lines, such as ‘Stir-Fry’:
I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so I put in it all the things I never want to see again.
Pond was originally published in 2015 as a collection of stories by The Stinging Fly Press in Ireland, and later released by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK. Before Pond, Bennett’s work was published in The Stinging Fly magazine, gorse, The Moth, and The White Review, and the genealogy of her work reflects how literary journals and small presses can provide vital spaces for new and innovative writing to emerge.
Pond has been associated with a trend of ‘new modernism’ in Irish literature, a trend that has been detected to various degrees by Anne Enright, Stephanie Boland, and Brian Dillon amongst many others. This ‘new modernism’ can be loosely defined as a rich strain of experimental, formally dissonant writing which is particularly prominent in contemporary Irish fiction – illustrated by writers such as Eimear McBride, Anna Burns, Mike McCormack, Sara Baume, David Hayden, and Kevin Barry. Dillon has qualified the term in relation to Bennett, writing: ‘If there is a modernism of sorts at work in current fiction in Ireland, it’s less a return, in the manner called for by writers such as Tom McCarthy, and more an acknowledgment of the variety of experimental traditions on which young writers now draw’.
In an interview with Emma Nuttall, Bennett was asked if she identifies with this ‘new modernism’. Bennett responds: ‘The term “new modernism” is meaningless, but we are always looking for parity it seems, rather than being alert to what is distinct and fertile’. In another interview with Susan Stich, Bennett elaborates:
I do like modernist writing, but I don’t know if it’s been an influence. I think my way of writing has been there from the beginning, and I struggled with that because it didn’t fulfil orthodox notions of narration or representation. […] I wasn’t so anxious anymore about whether a text I wrote was a short story, a chapter in a novel, or a poem. I think what’s interesting for me about writing is not so much what you intend to do, but what materializes.
Bennett’s reservations about influences and genres echo broader resistance to the idea that literature which is ‘difficult’, innovative, or opaque must necessarily be labelled ‘modernist’. Such labelling can imply that inventive writers are merely trying to catch up to a historical moment that has already passed. The critic Kevin Brazil sums this up, writing that, ‘for authors as well as critics, it has been easier to cling to the value of the modernism they think they know, rather than respond to the strangeness of writing they don’t’.
What materialises in Pond is not a rehashing of previous forms of modernist narration, but a focus on materials themselves. Bennett’s stories are preoccupied with object relations, with intense contemplations on specific things – an apple, an ottoman, a lilac seashell, a tube of tomato puree – rather than any focus on plotting or linear narratives. Bennett has spoken of her desire to write in a de-anthropomorphised form, where ‘objects are not simply insensate functional things, but materials, substances, which have an aura, an energy – even, occasionally, a numinosity’. The ending of the story ‘The Big Day’ in Pond beautifully captures and combines this sense of the numinous with an aesthetic opacity:
It’s not a very deep pond after all. I always believed they were endlessly deep. But when I took something down there one day that I needed to get rid of fast, a broken, precious thing, I dropped it into the water and it did not sink and go on sinking. It just sort of wedged itself and was horribly visible. And within moments lots of very small things, some of them creatures I suppose, collected and oscillated, slowly, along the smooth crevices of its broken precious parts.
The objects in Pond are often approached from a vertiginous perspective, where we cannot quite make out the composition of these ‘broken precious parts’. The stories consist of distorted encounters with textures and sensory explorations of ‘Material. Matter. Stuff’, as one story puts it, where it locally manifests. The lists of strange objects are assembled by Bennett into something paradoxically productive, giving Pond its distinctive, unwieldy shape – while also forcing the narrative to go on, to delve deeper into its murky surfaces, and on to further tangents. The useless object here becomes something textually fertile. This narrative tendency to flout generic expectations of what a story might or should do is one reason many critics trace a modernist legacy within Bennett’s work.
Instead of reducing modernist legacies in post-millennial writing to superficial stylistic similarities or comparisons, we might rather consider ‘modernist strategies’ through a range of formal disruptions and ethical engagements as they specifically emerge – how they animate fiction that is strange, ‘distinct and fertile’.
Eimear McBride, whose debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) was published by Galley Beggar Press, is another writer who epitomises these issues, as her novels have suffered from a case of heavy-handed modernist comparisons. As Chris Beausang detects in many reviews of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, these comparisons often act as an ‘interpretative distortion whereby McBride’s works are not the object of study so much as an ongoing level of attention to a reified canon of male modernist writers’. McBride has spoken at length about the influence of Joyce on her novels, but she has also noted the reductive sense of such comparisons, as they mark a kind of erasure of her own work and identity (see also how critics are often unable to praise Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport without invoking her father).
In a more positive take, Solar Bones (2016) author Mike McCormack has spoken of the enabling aspects of modernist legacies, stating that, ‘In Ireland, our pinnacle, our Mount Rushmore, is the Father, Son and Holy Ghost: James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. And it feels like we’re digesting their legacy’. Putting aside the slightly unnerving image of these three faces carved into Ben Bulben or the Sugarloaf, McCormack suggests that contemporary writers may be finding ways to digest (and excrete?) these legacies, rather than constantly striving for a vague sense of ‘parity’.
I am not suggesting that works like Solar Bones, A Girl, and Pond are not in dialogue with modernist predecessors. However, I propose we need to move beyond constantly reducing modernist legacies to a game of literary top trumps – where we superficially spot influences and count scores. This only reduces the innovative capacities of modernist forms to a checklist of stylistic features (stream of consciousness, anyone?), as well as diminishing the strange and distinctive qualities of contemporary writing. As David James writes in Modernist Futures, ‘a closer scrutiny of the compositional elements of contemporary writing is required if we are to differentiate with any precision the strategies of writers whose affinities with modernism can be as complex and contradictory as they are explicit and self-conscious’.
We can also scrutinise contemporary writing in terms of the publishing routes of recent innovative literature. McCormack has noted: ‘In my twenty odd years as a writer, I think this is one of the most exciting times for the generation behind me. […] young Irish writers are going to Irish editors for the first time in my time as a writer. They’re going to Stinging Fly, Tramp Press, New Island’. In tandem with these publishers, Sarah Gilmartin, writing in The Irish Times, has highlighted the vital role that literary journals and magazines play in fostering the grassroots development of new Irish literature. While the literary eco-system in the UK might be more diffuse (McCormack argues that ‘Irish writers are selling their books into what is one of the most conservative literary cultures in the world, into Britain’), there are a plethora of small presses whose work is celebrated by the Republic of Consciousness prize.
A far from exhaustive list of examples might include Fitzcarraldo Editions who have published Charlotte Mandell’s translations of Mathias Énard, Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ translations of Olga Tokarczuk, and Sophie Hughes’ translation of Fernanda Melchor. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann has been published by Galley Beggar Press. Jacaranda Books have published Lote by Shola von Reinhold. Dostoevsky Wannabe brought us We are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner, Influx Press published Eley Williams’ Attrib., Little Island Press published Darker With the Lights On by David Hayden, and CB Editions gave us Murmur by Will Eaves.
Many of these works may appear to have little to do with modernism or its legacies. But a more capacious understanding of modernism that conceives of it (in James’ words) as a set of ‘persisting resources’, rather than as a collection of ‘historical artefacts’, allows us to consider these novels as mediums for ‘connecting interiority and accountability, braiding the description of characters’ innermost reflections into the fabric of worldly situations’. The dedication of small presses in publishing these works of literature underpins how they play a crucial role in catalysing these ‘persisting resources’. Publishers can render a diverse range of ‘worldly situations’ into being, and provide the space for new voices to emerge.
In an essay on still life art for Frieze, that echoes her story ‘Morning, Noon and Night’, Bennett summons or stumbles upon one of these moments of inner and outer worlds colliding, as she recalls chopping some vegetables:
I stand in the kitchen and, through the sudden generalizing of my personal reality, begin to experience a generalizing of myself, so that I am but an instance of woman, and my heart is but an instance of the overlapping heart that has always strobed the night sky with its fantastic schemes, and has always burrowed its plangent suffering deep into the earth’s marrow. It is at such moments, when the inner, the outer and the beyond are caused by simple things to somehow merge, that one briefly feels at home.
Liam Harrison is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham researching modernist legacies in 21st century fiction. He is also a graduate representative for BACLS and an editor at Alluvium.