A Million Yucks
I don’t propose a unifying theory as such, but I’ve found it remarkable that the dominant tone of the wikinovel so far has been comic. Not that I don’t think it’s a good thing, I’m all for humour. It’s just surprising, is all. But what kind of humour is it? My view is that it’s a Menippean satire penned in the age of The Simpsons. The idea of Menippean satire (as opposed to, say, Horation or Juvenalian satire) is that the narrative is broken up, or fragmentary, and the (typically) acerbic humour fires out in a scattershot fashion. And what is the wikinovel if not scattershot and fragmentary?
But even more important than the swotty lit-crit term I’ve used is the bit about it being inspired by The Simpsons. In 1910, Virgina Woolf once overstated, having been an exhibition of Impressionist paintings in London, thus: “human nature changed”. That’s a pretty outrageous thing to think, let alone write in print, but something similar, I reckon, could be said that wonderful animated television show. The Simpsons has shaped how people are funny - both publically and privately; it has been a profound influence on a whole generation’s sense of humour, their understanding of what is funny and why. Jokes from The Simpsons not only constitute an almost self contained language of their own, they are responsible for the wide popularity of a kind of detached, ironic whimsy in contemporary culture. This can be seen, I would argue, in the wikinovel.
This might have to do with the cartoonish quality of the novel itself. Because it’s so discontinuous,moving from line to line or section to section with no real sense of accumulation, it can begin to look self-parodying, a fact which you, amillionwiseguys, have chosen to exploit. And in places it is very, very funny.
And, from an editorial point of view, it is getting much better. It may be a giant wall of graffiti (someone else’s metaphor) but some of it is rather good.
We’re closing in on the end of the project - what will happen in the next week? It would be great to be really proud of this at some level. I think most of us are delighted by the response to the wikinovel, but imagine if amilliongroenings produced a piece of work that had some real merit to it. So whoever’s been hanging on to their best material - now’s the time to set it free…
Jon
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March 2nd, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Hi Jon,
thanks for your insights. They are interesting and I certainly think that some aspects of the text of this project certainly appear to have that aspect. Although, I do wonder whether you and I are reading the same novel, and the one that has been updating itself over the last week or so. I do not see it as ’simpsonesque’ in fact some of it references back to styles and humour of the 19th century.
When i first read your posting above, i felt offended. Since, although I like the simpsons, it is not my favourite show, and definately one that should have left the tv airwaves quite a few years ago after such a long run. (In tv parlance, it has, in my opinion ‘jumped the shark’.
But anyway, I see you theory.
But Jon can I put it another way. Ignore the comments of newsweek (i feel they wrote that article when the ‘banana’ plague was in full swing, or earlier. I think that the novel has transformed several times.
Also, in a chapter i posted on the blog, and its still there in some form but highly transformed by other writers, George and Walry and Jim talk about a community novel and espouse the fact that in these conditions and in this day and age, the result will almost certainly be humour/satire, because that is a fundamental tendency when a group of people get together to write. In my view, when a group of people rom different areas get together, it is irony that comes to the fore. cheers
ps, Jon, i am not meaning to attack you or your team, but have a look back at the ‘team blog’ entries, and i don’t know if it comes from disappointment or embarrassment at some of the comments the wider media had published, but several comments come across as ’superior’ and ‘putdown’ and (we’ve created this project but now we will sit with our pinot noir’s and make fun of the things we find there). I don’t find it a nice feeling. I think one can be proud of this project and positive towards the people who have participarted. Let’s not fall for the tendency to join the bandwagon of critics. As I said before somewhere. Who ever achieved something by listening to a chorus of critics, naysayers and snobs.
cheers to you. I really appreciate what you people have done here in this project
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:46 pm
And lets not forget the great Terry Pratchett who’s train of thought seems to have a million junctions……
Personally, I’m LOVING the novel, but then, i haven’t been reading every day, watching edits and developments. I had to back off, it’s was annoying the hell out of me, so having opened and read the whole novel as a piece of finished work, I REALLY enjoyed it tonight. Funny & touching.
So many peoples mark is on the work, whether their individual contributions remain or not, the evolving process has merged so many points of view. I get an impression from the writing of an intangible remnent of people making themselves heard by one another, and listening in return.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Beldarin,
I totally agree with you. That is my impression. I feel that this novel (and i do believe it is a novel, - who said a novel HAS to be linear) and it is not just a series of short stories (for they are -even if somewhat obtusely - interconnected) is quite extraordinary.
It has, as someone else said, the quality of a dream. It is hypnotic. The reader can dip in and out of it like a book of short stories, but if one is to read it as a whole it appears to demand that the reader work with it and really make connections that are not always handed on a plate.
It has the feel of a ‘fast/forward reverse’ or a pendulum… where we go backwards and forwards, each time picking up a new conenction, a new development or now understanding a reference from before. I find this both exhausting and very engaging. It builds a picture and a storyline, but more like a spiral going outwards than a linear progression.
It is a bit like the steps at the vatican museam, did Michaelangelo make them?, which is actually designed as a double helix. As you walk up, you see people walking down the steps, and you expect to meet them, but you never do, but you then look down and see they are at the bottom.
The project has also revealed the authors important and tempestuous relaitonship with both editors and the media and the general public. As much as i hate to admit it, editors are an importatn part of a literary process, as are ‘critics’ in the true sense of the word, as opposed to naysayers and ‘people who criticise’.
In the end though, many, many writers do what they do because they are WRITERS…. writers write, painters paint. They do not do it primarily to satisfy the media or critics or perhaps even the audience..but to express themselves and some truth or insight fighting to get out…. painters don’t always paint for their audience..but to express….. that is not to say that such artists don’t crave approval or hoep for positive appreciation….. but i am grateful that Picasso didn’t stomp home after his first art show and and burn his paintings because people were outraged at the scandalous new form he was presenting.
cheers to everyone
March 3rd, 2007 at 2:05 am
The novel is anarchic, disjointed, fragmentary, funny, rude and annoying for all the obvious reasons. Despite that, stories and characters have emerged and (some have) lasted the distance. Writers work in an environment where anyone’s “best work” can be instantly wiped out with a drag and click of the mouse. Learning to accept that has been a very Zen experience for me.
Is it possible that flying has distorted emperor penguin’s perspective? “A million yucks”? “Simpson’s humour”? I’ll quietly disagree…
March 3rd, 2007 at 2:17 am
construction/desctruction i agree with you entirely.
March 3rd, 2007 at 2:37 am
Aren’t writers, the ones who make it, supposed to be of the stripe who wallpaper the walls of their office with rejection slips. And many of those editors, filling out the little pink slips with easy to check off boxes, indicating that they never really read, understood, or focused on our creations, so lovingly crafted, copied, packaged, mailed, SASE’d to the noble publishing with the hopes, much as the purchaser of a lottery ticket hopes, that this time just one honest hardworking editor will actually read the dang manuscript … well here it is read, and deleted, and modified, and regurgitated, and mangled, morphed and vanquished by millions of porous palms, flailing away at their keyboards showing that they gave our words the dignity of a read and the dignity of a multi-textured reply, albeit a rejection, and we can protest immediately, re-insert, go flame the damn editor elsewhere, or go kick the dog. All in public, all in sight of Newsweek or Joho The Blog, or anyone else who gives it a snapshot read. But that is all any of us get. We wake up, log on, and go OMG, what happened last night!? Have you ever read a Steven King, laid it by your bedside to sleep a few winks, open it the next time and find out it was a different story? Now that would be a best seller! Personally, I would love to own the movie rights to this thing right now! It is just I think the technology is not quite ready for the result, of that movie would have a million cameras, filming a million movies and merging and melting them all into one enormous creative nightmare. I love this book, I hate this book, I admire most of you, I hate the rest of you! Does anyone else feel these things? What have you read lately that made you feel anything? Think about it and rejoice that you lived to see the arrival of AMillionPenguins! I am glad to have had the experience, and will go through massive withdrawals when it is gone!
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:53 am
YEAH!
March 3rd, 2007 at 7:06 am
exactly. I absolutely agree with all the comments above. I am also a writer and along with publications have the pile of rejection slips. Wasn’t it Steinbeck that was said to have wallpapered a room with them? I will miss this immensely. It is like the computer becomes a writing group with the most amazing beyond exquisite corpse group writing experiment. There are sections I love, sections I don’t…..moments of bliss reading another’s work ….others maddening (the attacks especially)…..
Writing is always known as the solitary work. Here it is that and it is community. I love that.
I also do new media work and really think we should do another project after this as a bunch of writers on a wiki.
Cheers to all.
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:04 am
Who says that there are no published writers working on this wiki? I know of several and there are probably plenty more I don’t know about. The assumption that only writers who have not been published in print would bother to contribute to a project like this is very very wrong. I think you are taking the wiki discussion in the wrong direction by raising this issue. What is a novel? I asked this early in the project and got no reply so let me propose that it is normally considered to be a linear work of fiction, somewhere upwards of 65,000 words, printed in book form. Of that definition, this wiki certainly ain’t linear; most of it was written to be fiction so I’ll assume it is (although have we decided whether or not the talk and discussion are part of it? Because they are mostly not fiction); I have no idea of the length of words (has anyone counted?), and of course it’s not a printed book. So is it a ‘novel’? Can any of the authors be discovered already flogging their wares in Amazon? Do either of those things matter? My contention is that they don’t, but readers may disagree with me.
Something more interesting to ponder - a few years ago I visited The Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles. This is the bar where, in the 1920s, the silent movie industry dreamed up amazing ideas over their cocktails and wondered whether it was really worth trying to make a talkie. was it really worth all the hassle? Could deep human experience really be conveyed via such a glitzy techno medium? Would anyone ever pay to watch a film where the actors spoke aloud? Well, we know the answer to that. What we don’t know is what else they dreamed up and discarded, or tried and failed.
For me, this project is just one conversation in the Polo Lounge. There are others going on at the next table about multimedia, and at the next they’re back again to that old chestnut of the 40s - smellvision and other sensory media. And those strange characters at the table beyond that - who knows what they’re imagining? There’s still a long way to go from here to the agent’s office or the studio floor, but this is the first step, this is the dreaming place, and I like it here. Mine’s a Rusty Nail. Thanks very much.
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:48 am
Sue,
Yes. Absolutely agree. I love you describing it as the “dreaming place”. And it is a place of something absolutely like the talkies back then ( a place I love , this is m.r 34 north …)
It is not about what type of writer you are here, that is why to me it was like a writer’s group…….all kinds of writers meet to work shop , published or not. It is the dialog that makes it special. There are many great conversations here…..some in fiction …others in comments….
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:19 am
I have to add that the team blog comments haven’t bothered me at all…..the frustration seems to be with the folks that kept coming in and messing around…..have felt the same way……one part of me at times was really frustrated with the waves that came through but another part was emboldened by the wiki and the non linear narrative to move on
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:56 am
Hi Sue,
I too like your image of the ‘dreaming place’ too true. I also agree that there is no presumption that the writers are published or unpublished..in fact i presume there is a mixture of both….
I don’t agree that a novel needs to be linear. That is the only point i strongly disagree upon. If a novel is not to be limited in scope, it needs to be free for the possibility of unfolding its narrative in a myriad of ways, although a non-linear needs to provide some kind of roadmap to prevent people giving up confused or maddened.
Come to think of it I don’t believe a novel needs to be published nor does it need to be bound.
To me a novel is a lengthy text, usually fiction, or fictionalised fact, or narrative history, bound together by some form of a connecting theme or continuity (i do agree that this concept is stretching the concept of the novel but i do believe it is just within the definition. I also do not believe that this is a series of non-connected short stories, since they interlink, even if very obtusely.
the rough word count of the novel on the main page is 47,700 words.
cheers to all
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:16 am
i have just had another read-through of the novel as at this moment, i am sorry but it looks and feels and reads nothing like the Simpsons. eeek !!
March 4th, 2007 at 2:29 am
I have had an idea for how we might be able to do a future wiki novel with some structure…
1. have a pre-launch discussion to propose a general subject for the novel and a genre.(maybe we can vote on it to agree after some discussion)
2. the launch team writes the first paragraph.
3. later paragraphs are written by any particupants but
March 4th, 2007 at 2:32 am
a. one writer per paragraph, and the writer of that paragraph is the only one who can edit it, but…
b. the writer of the prior paragraph has the right to link their paragraph to the next one following, so if it is too way out or silly the prior chapter writer simply does not allow it to link through. a person can suggest changes to the chapter writer who can incorporate them.
c. if a person wants to add a chapter intervening between two chapters he needs to negotiate this with the prior chapter person who, if they approve will then link it to them, and that intervening chapterwriter must link their chapter to the chapter that originally followed the prior one.
d. the moderating team can engage in discussion and debate with all members and propose issues or matters for inclusion and exclusion
what do you think of this???
cheers
March 4th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
There are all kinds of possibilities emerging for future wikifictions with self selecting teams with codes of conduct and agreed themes. I think our team (and I apologise for failing to be a full member of this) has done a wonderful job, tending and pruning the entity, supported by the goody members of the growing community around it.
My biggest problem with it is that I find it hard to read this much fiction from a screen, but on the other hand love finding this book different each time. Very Borgesian. Imagine keeping it on a shelf, reaching it down daily to find a new chapter one, extra characters, sentences extended and ehanced…
The Simpson analogy is interesting as those shows have teams of writers, each cramming extra gags into a structured whole.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:59 am
..Rather helpful information you have here. Grazie!