The Age of Wire and String

"It makes me think of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) – they both have structure, with sections and subsections – they are catalogues, but of what? – and, again, they examine the absurdity of systems. One thing I’m very interested in, and am using increasingly in my own work, is the structures and language we use to impart knowledge to each other. Wikipedia fascinates me because it’s completely amateur so there’s absolutely no reason why its writers should imitate regular encyclopaedia entries, but mostly they do. Age of Wire and String creates systems of knowledge that push themselves towards absurdity. And because Marcus has often used structure without content that we can easily identify – although it has emotional resonances (he uses a lot of family vocabulary) – he’s creating a gap to enable a leap of imagination between the text and the reader… not an invitation to make some kind of direct sense of it, but to make it work in some way for us. That’s interesting. I didn’t find it easy to read myself but I didn’t feel angry by being made to feel I had to work things out – I suppose that’s because I enjoy that kind of thing. And I could see from very early on that the book wasn’t going to provide me with a ‘satisfactory’ explanation. Marcus’s book seems to be an experiment across or through language, and every sentence is itself some kind of attempt to wrestle with the materiality of words. I think about writing like I think about music: no one says ‘Can you condense that piece of music or explain it in a shorter piece? The experience of listening to music is not considered as something that necessarily has a subtext that is more important that the text. There’s this wonderful movie called Barcelona , directed by Whit Stillman. It’s very funny, and it’s about two American expats who are trying to settle in Spain and there are cultural tensions and they’re trying to get laid and all sorts of things are happening. One of them works in advertising – he’s a writer and he reads a lot – and his cousin – the other guy – is in the navy. One day the advertising guy’s cousin is asking him about reading books – he’s curious and doesn’t really know much – and he says ‘I’m always hearing about this thing called the subtext and it’s, like, what’s the thing that’s above the subtext?’ And the writer just says ‘Well, I think it’s called the text.’ “Being a writer is a very untrustworthy position – you are trusted, in that readers put themselves in your hands, but also distrusted, because they think you’re holding something back” There’s this feeling in reading that the writer is fooling you somehow, and that the point of reading the book is to find the thing that they are not saying instead of the things that they are saying. But writing can be, and should be, also evaluated at the level of the sounds it makes and the patterns that can be experienced in reading it. Being a writer is a very untrustworthy position – you are trusted, in that readers put themselves in your hands, but also distrusted, because they think you’re holding something back. I suppose absurdism’s habit of placing terrible human events into rather silly scenarios is a form of irony. But absurdism doesn’t tend to participate in the reticence that we associate with irony. Absurdism is completely out there – it’s about clashing and bright colours and over-the-top metaphors. Well, on the back it says “comic and disturbing” and I think I’d go with that. It has this nice modulation between cold and heated language, which is exhilarating. Its power lies in its combination of these things."