What is the Next Literary Movement?
Stardew Valley meets the literary scene; meets self-indulgent deliberate mediocrity--is neo-decadence the next literary movement?
Like any artistic or cultural scene, literary movements tend to start underground, not in some big publisher’s boardroom or an “important” literary agent’s office in New York somewhere. In some ways, a literary movement is the underground of the underground. While most people can understand music, fewer tend to get geeky about art, least of all literature. Many people, if they do read, will read Dan Brown or the like. And every year all we ever read about is how much less people are reading. The writers—the real agonized artists who live on whiskey and cigarettes and the sound of their typewriter tik-takking late at night, sweating over a piece of paper and torturing themselves over a sentence, exploring language in an ever obscure, almost mystical manner… these are the people who create literary scenes.
They’re also usually dirt poor and no one cares about them.
A few of them are trailblazers and become prominent, whether by luck, determination, or a patron. These are the Ernest Hemingways (The Lost Generation), David Foster Wallaces (Post-postmodernism, or New Sincerity), or Jack Kerouacs (Beat). Since the 90s, however, things in the literary scene seem awfully quiet to me. No one is rocking any boats. Perhaps everyone is just trying to figure out how to actually make money as a writer and don’t have time to agonize over anything?
Maybe I’m wrong. And I guess one can ask what do I know, really. I don’t get to hang around in some secret bar in Paris somewhere drinking whiskey with the highbrow of the literary, philosophical, and poet world. I’ve done my fair share of reading, but I’m not as cool as the real cool kids. I’m not torturing myself over my Substacks at night, believe me, trying to break the rules of language or pondering what more can be said after post-structuralism in the literary world showed us that all meaning is fluid, there are no grand narratives, and there is no “right” answer anyway (except, of course, post-structuralism).
It may be no wonder that there hasn’t been a great literary movement as post-structuralism kind-of told us it all had no meaning anyway—or, at least, no objective meaning.
Perhaps, if I’m right (on the post-structural scale, somewhere), since that time, it may be no wonder that there hasn’t been a great literary movement as post-structuralism kind-of told us it all had no meaning anyway—or, at least, no objective meaning. What is Art if what it’s trying to say can’t truly ever be understood? If the only truth is your ‘lived experience’? These are fascinating questions and the postmodern artworks and literature attempted to explore these, but eventually it’s self-defeating. What would be the point? The end result of it all is that art is eating itself, and if you read the article I’ve hyperlinked there, you will note that art has mostly evolved (devolved?) into activism as it seems the only meaning people are able to finally extract from postmodernism is the idea that everyone’s truth ought to be heard and considered equal, which is of course impossible, as someone’s ‘truth’ can be completely out of touch with reality or morality, or both.
Perhaps this isn’t quite what the great post-structuralist Jacques Derrida had in mind when he taught the world the value of deconstruction and opened up new thoughts around intertextuality (that all texts are connected and influence each other). Nevertheless, the world took so much of his work and ran with it in a million directions, and here we are.
Moving on. David Foster Wallace, in writing his exceptionally hard-to-read novels, was known to be influenced by post-structuralism, giving us true postmodern novels where he even pushed against the very things that seemed to inspire him about post-structuralist thought. And he delved into important criticism of mass media, a fascinating subject to think of in the light of intertextuality. (Man, what would he say about social media? If only he were alive.) Interestingly (look! A squirrel!), U2 hopped on board at the time too I think, offering its unique ZooTV tour, mocking what television had become and parodying even their own success, while mixing different styles of music from several inspirational sources. (Imagine if someone could do the same thing mocking social media today? That would be fun). I honestly think a study of the ZooTV tour would be a fascinating study on postmodernism. And by all accounts, U2’s peak (I consider the 90s their best music, with the 80s at second place) was definitely a postmodern effort.
But note where it all went: activism. By the 2000s, activism was on the forefront of U2’s agenda, and today Bono has almost become the parody he mocked.
Am I rambling on a bit here? Yes. And you’ll soon see why.
Back to literature. Perhaps David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) is worth a mention, once touted as a great postmodern writer, although I don’t know if that has stuck. I would say he was at the tail end of the postmodern scene, which Wallace perfected and then took with him to the grave. Since then, the great writers of our time have been the G.R.R. Martins and the Brandon Sandersons of the world, both fantasy writers and yet polar opposites. Sanderson seems to be averaging something like four books a year, while Martin has been promising the next installment of his pivotal Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) book series for 14 years. That’s almost as much time as it took to deliver on the first five books, and apparently we’re waiting on two more. (Thankfully, I never got into it, so I can find it amusing.)
To be honest, it’s a bit of a downgrade. Martin is for me a boring writer, with an infatuation for killing off a character once they get interesting. Sanderson is, for me, boring too. Maybe I’m the boring one? Who knows? But this is ‘my truth’.
Neo-Decadence?
I’m waxing lyrical in an attempt to showcase some of what some people think the next literary movement is, which is well underway. It’s being called the ‘neo-decadence’ movement. It’s listed now as a literary movement on Wikipedia’s list of literary movements, which I guess makes it a movement, but we’ll have to see if it’s a good one.
Neo-decadence is meant to be avant-garde: it’s supposed to be about experimenting and throwing ideas together, hoping that somehow they’ll glue together; riffing and going off on a tangent in a long sentence that just has a lot of ideas and engages in some kind of automatic writing without regard to tightening it up with editing or making it more interesting but just going along without much or at least very little regard for commas and punctuation except, maybe, in, awkward, places, just like a character from some video game, none, of us have ever heard of—complete with a metaphor or reference that makes no sense except for those that have heard of that said video game. For this reason alone it’s deliberately difficult to describe or pin down with a single idea. It’s meant to be a reaction to cultural and moral decline; to be self-indulgent in writing; deliberately cheese or campy or over the top; and in a sense go with the decline, rather than do anything about it, documenting things along the way.
It’s “neo” decadence because it’s meant to share some commonality with the original decadence literary scene. As defined by owlcation.com:
“The name "Decadence" was originally meant as a negative critique of those who wrote lavish and ornate poetry, sometimes with little to no meaning or purpose, full of artificiality and dramatic grotesqueness. The writers and their works were often accused of a lack of morality.
“Decadence is often seen as a kind of Neo-Romanticism, being similar in style to the poetry of the Romantic writers from the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth. An overarching theme in the poetry of the Decadence is the belief in original sin and the idea of the "fallen man", as well as the commonality of evil and society's lack of innocence. There is a common mood of nostalgia for times past, a sense of ennui or lack of hope and motivation, a sense of isolation and a sense of loss.”
When looking at neo-decadence however, definitions are a bit harder to pin down. In a series of posts, various writers try to define it, which was then expanded upon and put into a manifesto. The only way to explain it I guess was to come at it from several different angles, as that’s the nature of avant-garde. The usual ‘edgy’ topics get explored: drugs, self-absorption, obsession. Sounds like Trainspotting in the 90s in a way, so nothing new here—the usual boring crowd of ideas. (That’s my use of a reference to some metaphor that not everyone knows, although I suspect it’s not nearly obscure enough.)
But there are some interesting things being explored, such as excessive retro gaming and what that means:
A third-eye opening approach to a 48-hour-long RPG where instead of facing an eldritch abomination in an existential duel with the fate of entire galaxies at stake, you decide to go on a pleasant side quest in order to grow radishes and cabbages, the freshest and most delicious vegetables that those 32-bit High Fantasy worlds have ever seen. As fast as a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300 or as slow as a three-toed sloth, there is no goal to stick to except for the absolute pursuit of jouissance.
Perhaps you ask yourself: what did I just read? It sounds like nonsense. And why is any of that remotely important?
That’s kind of the point: it’s meant to be self-indulgent nothingness in a way. But despite that, which is a style that will annoy many, it does capture an interesting cultural trend that highlights why a game like Stardew Valley is so popular.
In fact, the whole point is that the writing is supposed to be bad. Another quote from the manifesto:
“There’s nothing wrong with writing a lousy book. Just make sure it’s really lousy. There is nothing worse than competence.”
Another quote:
Neo-Decadence is more likely to cross 1990s video game dialogue with the structure of a 16th century picaresque to discuss a drug deal in present day Mongolia. Fealty and earnestness can only hold back progress. We do not have saints, and we consume our idols.”
You think the last sentence is an overdone trope? That’s kind-of the idea.
As with most literary scenes, it can all seem exceptionally overdone, overly dramatic and sickingly self-important. We’ve all met someone going to art school who acts the caricature more than actually just does the art. It’s sort-of ironical that neo-decadence pokes fun at its own self-awareness for being exactly that.
But there is something in it. Literary scenes are always reactions to the previous, and of course reactions to what’s going on in a society, just like the music scene. We’re needing to come out of postmodernism, which is what society is presently doing. For a long time, postmodernism has almost seemed to be the end: when you teeter on the edge of nihilism, where else do you go? Perhaps only one place: to the beginning. So we’re having a revival of religion and a revival of what it means to be human again, in contrast to the rising transhumanism.
The Neo-Decadence reaction and making predictions
In my opinion, A.I. in writing is probably going to very quickly give rise to a literary scene that will be on one hand reactionary, and on the other embracing. Who will be the more influential? It’s not always the most commercially successful at first. The success usually lies in taking what is not commercially successful and packaging it in a way that it becomes successful. In this case, I have my bets on the reactionaries, because rebels are usually cooler and more fun.
A.I. currently writes very well. Too well.
A.I. currently writes very well. Too well. It’s come a far way very quickly, but perhaps too far too quickly. That’s generally why it sucks, because it lacks character. It can follow the rules of grammar, syntax, etc. and give you a verbose description on things, repeating itself a million times, bore you to tears, making sure to cover all its bases and also not offend anyone. One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek is when they meet an alien race that only speaks in metaphor. In many ways, A.I. can’t grasp this. Maybe if we reach AGI it will, I have my doubts, but metaphors are memes: insider jokes and references, and humans can always come up with new ones.
A.I. has, in a sense, moved from bad to too good. A prevalence of this “good writing” with perfect grammar that bores you to death all over the online landscape will mean that human writing is the reaction, the less commercially successful because it can’t be easily replicated. Human language may have aspects of mathematics, yet it functions deeper than that. A lot of human writing is ‘bad’. And, perhaps, bad will be the point, because bad cannot be emulated by the machines: it has to produce ‘good’ to be useful to commerce.
Lo-fi writing
It seems to me to all point in the same direction as where the other arts are going right now: a desire for ‘lo-fi’, for something to be almost deliberately unpolished, to be ‘bad’ and campy and useless; for there to be tech, but not social media and A.I. and wearable computing. Rather, a longing for retro tech, which has no purpose except to bring surface entertainment and nostalgia for a world that no longer exists (or may have never existed) but seemed better.
In fact, retro tech is the best kind of tech because it’s still tech, but you can use it without getting spyware, losing your mind, having to indulge in politics because the algorithm demands it, or needing physical therapy for your hand and neck because holding these stupid phones all day is actually a strain. That’s probably why retro gaming is a thing in neo-decadence. It’s also why Gen Z are falling in love with cassettes right now, although most think it won’t last. 90s tech, including gaming, may have actually been peak tech, when you think about it!
But one final word on this whole subject:
"Literary movements tend to be compounded, in various proportions, of the genius of two or three genuinely original talents, some few other capable or established writers who have been co-opted or gone along for the ride, the apprentice work of epigones and wannabes, and a great deal of hype.” - Thomas M. Disch
A whole article about “the next literary movement” and not a single new book or author mentioned.
Interesting take. Technology demands to be apart of every conversation. Every idea must include the 'tech-dimension'. Even the new trad-fad defines itself opposed to tech and hyper-modernity.