The use of silence, or blank space, is a concept which has been embraced by experimental musicians and artists since the latter part of the twentieth century. By removing the artist from the process of creation and performance, creative work can be stripped of cultural bias and preference, allowing chance to dictate the sounds and sights which the audience will experience. This conceptual framework is supported by ideas from Zen Buddhism, as explored in Kay Larson's Where The Heart Beats.
But where can a writer of literature go if you take away their words? In his essay The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes argued that critics should avoid looking at the biographical and cultural context of an author's life when evaluating their work, but it is nearly impossible for an author to remove themselves from the creative process. Post-modernists have made various attempts, for example BS Johnson's The Unfortunates, in which each chapter was presented as a self-contained pamphlet; the reader would pick sections out of a box, creating a random and unique ordering of the novel and therefore diminishing the author's control over narrative structure, whilst retaining control of each individual segment. The French Oulipo movement sought to constrict an author's input by creating rigid rules for each new piece of writing, but the author's influence still existed in the creation of the rules.
In his new book Evie and Guy, Dan Holloway has attempted to take these experiments further by creating a novel without words. Holloway has been pushing at the boundries of language and form for some time; his recent limerick series All of These Taxonomies are Political used repetition to try to break the political associations of sexual language. In Evie & Guy, he moves away from language entirely, representing his characters' solitary activities through a series of dates and times. Refraining from any form of authorial comment, Holloway attempts to reveal his characters and their relationships without colouring the reader's view with his own cultural input. Here, he talks more about the ideas behind his novel, and what he hopes to achieve.
1) Your recent work has included a series of two-word limericks, and then Evie & Guy, which abandons words altogether, Do you feel like we're reaching a point where traditional forms of literary expression are becoming exhausted? Or is there another reason for you pushing the boundaries in this way?
Mm, that's tricky, because in a way that's exactly the reason and in a way I don't think it's true. There are still amazing things being done with words every day, particularly in poetry, and yet there's also somewhat of a complacency, an acceptance that "this is how it's done", an unwillingness to consider that syntax and semantics as we traditionally conceive them may not be the be all and end all. And that's got to be bad, surely? We always need to be questionning, even if we're essentially happy with where we are. I think that's what I'm really trying to say. I love the traditional literary forms. I think people are doing amazing things with them, but still there's no excuse for laziness.
And beyond that general need for questioning, I do think we should be looking more at the politics of language, and how we can get outside of the ways that traditional language constructs first our thoughts and through them our aspirations and our lives. So I will carry on nudging with these questions, but at the same time I'm very happy to write poetry that's really very traditional and novels and short stories. They all come from the same place, really, the desire to dig out the truth inside us, to get beyond the regular, flat representations of how we see ourselves and get closer to the sensual way we experience life - to see ourselves not in terms of this category or that category but as beings made up of a glorious morass of powerful, jumbled experiences.
2) Do you think this book could have been written at any time, or is it a product of the rise of self-publishing, blogging and so on?
No, absolutely it could have been written at any time. I am certainly amazed not to have found anything like it yet from the 1920s or 1960s - it's very much akin to the spirit of Dada or Modernism. And whilst I don't think it would ever find a mainstream publisher, books that are that far out of the fold always, whenever they're written, seem to find their place through a pamphleteer somewhere.
3) Why did you decide to produce a print edition of Evie & Guy, when much of your recent work has been made available solely online?
It's only really my conceptual stuff that's digital only. Everything else has always been available in both formats. If anything, I think Evie and Guy would work best as paper-only. Because of the way people might want to think about reading it (and, from comments I've had, have done so), it lends itself to dogearing and flicking backwards and forwards between sections constantly, which is something for which paper still works best
4) You're clearly a writer who relishes taking part in readings, poetry slams and so on - do you think about how your work will work in a live environment when you are writing?
Yes, absolutely. I think people who say there's no distinction between the page and stage (or whatever other rhyming cliche they want to use) have missed the point entirely. As I said to the first question, I think all my work comes from the same place, but how I express it differs, and whichever medium we choose for expresion of our ideas, I think we have to commit absolutely to that medium. That doesn't mean blindly accepting and following "rules" about how it's done (there are far too many self-publishers out there who call themselves "indie" and yet genuinely believe that a good novel can be boiled down to a formula of x narrative arc and y amount of show not tell and z degree of description - that's Stepford-level scary), but it does mean thinking seriously about how this medium can work best for this idea.
I think the best way to think of it is like art. Just because you wouldn't whack a bit of clay in an oven and call it a painting, or bung some gouache on paper and call it ceramics, doesn't mean you can't push right to the edges of form. I think spoken word relates to, say, the novel, the same way painting and ceramics relate - they're just two different ways of doing the same thing. Get the difference or the sameness in the wrong place and you do a disservice to everything - your idea, literature as a whole, and your audience. So yes, when I'm putting a show or a spoken poem together, I don't really care what it looks like on the page - I think about how it will feel in a darkened basement with jazz wafting from upstairs and the smell of spilled beer leaking in from outside. And likewise, when I'm writing a novel I don't really care how it would sound in a pub - that's why I don't really do readings from my novels. Whenever I'm asked to do so, I will talk about my novel but then read a poem.
5) You've described the decision to avoid words in Evie & Guy as an attempt to create a feminist love story - can you expand on the idea behind that?
Ah, that's years of theoretical baggage I carry around from my postgraduate study of the French feminist psychoanalysis, in particular Luce Irigaray's glosses on Lacan's work on jouissance (hence the dreadful Eurotrash pun title of my short story collection Ode to Jouissance). Irigaray follows Lacan in believing that what is "real" is our prelinguistic sensual experience. That's what makes the real "us", the string of immediately perceived sensations (for Lacan, this pure experience, jouissance, is proto-orgasmic, which is a significant reason for choosing something sexual and solitary as the subject of the numbers). But the moment we acquire language, we objectify ourselves - we cannopt get out of the tangle of seeing ourselves in terms of generalisations or categories (race, gender, size, shape, interests, culture and so on). we acquire an "identity" but we lose ourselves because we are no longer able simply to experience. Irigaray takes this a stage further by saying that the language that traps us is a patriarchal construct so that whilst we are all removed from ourselves by conceptualising and expressing ourselves, women are doubly so because that conceptualisation is not just an objectification and alienation but an appropriation.
So there are two strands to what I wanted to do. The first is to try to enable my characters, and my readers, to step outside of language, to open the door to re-experiencing their lives and expressing themselves in their own voices - I wanted the act of reading to be not a reinforcement of the shackles that bind us to a fictional notion of self but a small step towards freeing us from that. Second, and specifically in relation to Evie, I wanted to bring her out of the patriarchal web in which telling her story in words would leave her enmeshed.
6) What sort of reaction have you had to Evie and Guy so far?
The pleasant surprise was that there's been a reaction, rather than the usual radio silence. In terms of what people have said, I was delighted that someone in a writers' group I'm part of fiercely took objection and cried out "the emperor has no clothes" because that's exactly what people say about conceptual art, so I must be getting something right. One writer I really respect called me out on the feminist angle because she feels that language, far from being patriarchal, is often a means of escape from patriarchy - that was a wonderful response, because it's such an important subject and it's great to get people talking about it. I've been overwhelmed by the reviews so far - all of which have shown a real engagement with the book and a willingness to take it on its own terms. And some of the private reactions I've had have extraordinated me, people saying they were inspired by it, or had their mind blown. And I even got a tweet after Chipping Norton Literary Festival where I'd given a copy to an author who'd been a real help through a bad case of writers' block, saying several famous writers had been talking about it and loved it!
7) And what are you working on next?
All kinds of things, needless to say. Right now I'm writing two new poems for the Hammer and Tongue slam final in May. I've just premiered my one man poetry show Some of These Things are Beautiful so I want to continue to polish that. I'm also working on a campaign for the Alliance of Independent Authors to encourage festivals, prizes and the media to open their doors to self-publishers. And my big project is NOTHING TO SAY, a collection of 6 books by emerging writers accompanied by a catalogue, an exhibition and a series of live shows that tries to present a slice of the contemporary literary cutting edge the way that Freeze did in the early days of Young British Art.
In terms of my next book, it's a big sprawling cityscape epic called Ninety Nine Nights of Urban Dogging that looks at (of course) the question of identity and disconnection in the modern world and takes place in cities at night, art galleries where the laws of physics don't apply, and Eastern Europe.
And finally, I am going to campaign for all I'm worth to get Evie and Guy shortlisted for the Folio Prize.
You can download Evie & Guy from Dan's website, here
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