There’s more than one way to sneak up on a herd of buffalo. –Tom Waits

 

There is traditionalism, and there is innovation. There are artists who, by temperament, tend towards the former, and there are those who tend towards the latter. While both categories are valuable and necessary, the most striking works are often created by artists in whom there exists a healthy tension between the two: fiction writers, say, who are enchanted by avant-garde techniques and hybrid forms as much as they relish the pleasures of a good yarn; or poets who enjoy typographical kinkiness and the worrying of language as much as they enjoy metaphor, rhythm, and clarity of image.

 

While modernism as a cultural-artistic movement was a spirited attempt to radically break with the past, novelty in art is more often a question of degree: a certain amount of tradition – the application of existing templates - together with a certain amount of innovation. The severest works of modernism, such as that fascinating abomination, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, have little to do with any pre-established templates whatsoever. Yet Finnegans Wake, let’s be honest, is pretty-much unreadable. We admire it for what it is: an audacious, near-insane act of literary extremism; but its radicalism, its monstrous solipsism, mean that very few of us ever really connect with it (even Ezra Pound, Joyce’s erstwhile champion, expressed disdain for Joyce’s 17-year descent into glossolaliac obscurantism.)

 

Exceptions aside, there is a sense in which, no matter how much an artist tries to ‘make it new’, he or she will always owe a debt to the past. There are templates, traditions, forms and techniques, built up over decades or centuries, which any shrewd artist will seize hold of and use for their own purposes. Nonetheless, even as they appropriate the received forms, artists will usually feel that something is missing. Artistic expression is a highly personal, bespoke affair – innovation usually comes about as a reaction to the feeling that the pre-made costumes don’t quite fit. This is where - dare we say it – experimentation comes in. Being an artist in whatever medium involves a certain amount of healthy aggression and impatience: you want to create something that expresses your world, how you see things, but none of the received templates provide a perfect fit. So what do you do? You twist and writhe and punch and grab and bend until you manage to remake the given in a way that fits - fits your subjectivity, your quirks, your customised array of fascinations and boredoms, your perversions and obsessions. All of this – the activity catalysed by restlessness and dissatisfaction – might be called ‘experimentation.’ But ah, what an unfortunate word that is – it gives the sense of something not fully worked out, provisional and half-baked, as well as dry, tedious, and merely technical. Perhaps a better word for what we’re talking about here is playfulness. How unsatisfactory it feels to label authors like JG Borges, Flann O’Brien, Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis, Eileen Myles, Sheila Heti, Gertrude Stein, Roberto Bolaño, Geoff Dyer, and Milan Kundera ‘experimental’. But to describe them as playful authors, now that’s a different story...

 

To illustrate what we’re getting at, consider Bolaño – one of the first great Art Heroes of the twenty-first century, whose oeuvre offers proof, if proof were needed, that literary greatness is still possible. Much of the pleasure afforded by Bolaño derives from his utterly promiscuous, don’t-give-a-fuck insistence on plucking his inspiration from wherever the hell he wants to pluck it from. While fascinated by the avant-garde movements that had gone before, and by the high-priests of modernism, Bolaño was equally in thrall, equally faithful and unfaithful, to detective stories, sci-fi, pornography and page-turners. On the one hand, surrealism, futurism, dada, stream-of-consciousness techniques and all the rest of it, and on the other hand, the glittering detritus of trash culture: disreputable genres, gripping plots, late night movies, whore-assassins, nine-inch erections and dirty jokes – all of it was material for Bolaño’s magpie-talent. Promiscuity; infidelity even to Masters; a gleeful exploitation of the new and the old, the well-worn and the obscure – the artist as Culture Slut, in whom innovation is the natural effect, the by-product of a rampant originality – the insistence on being purely oneself.

 

We see a fertile tension between the established and the trailblazing also in Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Her landscape is not new. It is an Ireland firmly-established in our literature, rank with guilt-ridden lives that are stunted by abuse. These themes of Catholic guilt and sexual abuse, while deserving of our continued attention, run the risk of becoming hackneyed in Irish writing. In McBride, we encounter an author who takes such potentially jaded material and rips it up, stabs and slashes – out of anger, playfulness? – until what remains is shreds of thought and faltering, neonatal sounds that throb into half-formed phrases. Meaning in this new idiom comes almost as a surprise to the reader. It is English – but not. McBride’s need to find a perfect fit for the rawness of her narrator’s inner world and the brutal relationships she endures, compels her to rejuvenate the form in which she works, infusing it with startling linguistic innovation. (‘Radical divestment’ is what Milan Kundera advocated – rub out all the parts of the received forms that aren’t you). A fertile collision, then, of tradition and innovation.

 

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The work presented in the first issue of Colony exemplifies the same spirit of playfulness, glee, and anarchic invention which animates the great, gust-of-fresh-air works given to us by the kinds of writer mentioned above. In the poetry and fiction offered here, we can see writers striving to find a better fit for themselves – not only striving, but achieving it (not only experimenting, but playing). There are the traditions, and there is the innovation. Some of the non-fiction and critical pieces call attention to works and byways in art and literature which themselves exemplify this spirit. There is work in translation which likewise insists on its own shape, its own unique mode of expression – from Spanish (Mexico), French (Switzerland), Farsi (Iran), and Irish, the first of the minority languages we aim to explore. (In the literatures of minority languages there is often little to be found in the way of formal or linguistic boundary worrying – however, the mere insistence on expressing oneself artistically in these languages is itself a subversive gesture, inherently anarchic.) The writings on music describe work that brushes aside, with more or less gentleness, any nostalgia-tinted past.

 

We hope you will enjoy our inaugural issue. Herein you will find some of the best writers and most gifted artists and thinkers in Ireland (and beyond). From here on in, we intend to bring you regular doses of the most exciting work we can find.

 

– The Editors