Against Clarity

and in favor of charcoal-burners

For me, ‘Russian Literature’ (which isn’t really a thing in Russia) is a combination of a ~10-year cultural gap that existed for a certain number of years and an evolving, but generally consistent set of parameters for what can and can’t be published.

When I was in high school, our literature teacher insisted that every essay on every novel had to contain some form of ‘what the author actually meant,’ and looking back, it feels like an attempt to get away from these parameters, to say ‘we don’t really need them anymore, let’s do away with the artifice.’ Dead Souls was presented to us as a social satire, and Oblomov was a satire of decadence and sloth—a leftover from a Soviet interpretation, I think (and that book had quite a few radically opposing readings, and will have a few new ones, I’m sure).

There still is a general unspoken consensus that a lot of older and weirder fiction was written this way because the authors simply couldn’t risk putting down a clear message, and those who did ended up exiled or dead, even the more oblique and tricky authors like Babel. There is truth to that constraint, but I think it’s a good one to have, regardless of whether you face the risk of punishment, or not.

Work that says what it means is usually justified with the idea that the message (and the act of even expressing that message) transcends the realm of art and enters the fabric of life, which is allegedly more important. Myself, I’ve always been drawn to artists who deconstruct and reassemble reality into a shape that strips it of its context. This means neither fitting in with the given terms, nor rioting against them, but circumventing them through omission and approximation.

Without detachment from what Bernhard called ‘reality-debased world,’ work can’t even begin. Confusion is freedom. Clarity is a dead end. This is my message to myself at the beginning of the year when I hope to wrap up the Foghorn book. However it goes, it will say nothing!

Meanwhile, here’s an 8-page comic I made over the last few holiday-days of the last year:

Continued beyond the paywall: