In Defence of Pretentiousness
“To call someone a “writer’s writer” sounds obnoxious, as in, “This book isn’t for civilian eyes. You have to be one of us to get it.” I know a better word for people who think this way: assholes.” — Anna Fitzpatrick, A Book About Writers That Even Civilians Can Enjoy
By the time you get to the end of this, you will learn why we need to be more German. This will not be mentioned again.
I enjoy being pretentious. I enjoy its playfulness, and I enjoy testing myself. My poetry collections are not designed with accessibility in mind, not even written with an audience to entertain in mind, and when I perform such work at gatherings of poets and poetry-fanciers I get the pitying form of applause, not even the one for the “well done you tried”, and especially not the applause of “you spoke directly to me.” I get the applause of “who's on next?”. I get the applause of “that guy was fucking pretentious.” I would fancy myself, as I hear that applause, as a writer’s writer, and I imagine Anna Fitzpatrick would fancy me as an asshole.
This is not an article in defence of my assholeness, but rather in defence of pushing to be pretentious.
The kind of applause I want for poetry collections such as The Hook is Wider than The Snail and Murmurations (all the links, buy my shit!) is the kind I imagine Arthur Rimbaud would have got for being “a trapeze artist”, or the kind Antonin Artaud should have received after his vagina scorpions licked his audience's feet. Whether I have actually achieved this is beside the point; I’m not here for the applause, I’m here to defend why I want that kind of applause. This article is not in defence of me, and my quality as a writer, this is an article in defence of that elusive, effusive, effluvial little word: pretentious.
People have an aversion to the pretentious. Work should be for the most part accessible, delivering an often politicised idea to everyone to create a sense of community and a sense of oneness, self, individuality, and other paradoxes. This is no longer the era for Ulysses, this is the era of Rupi Kaur, for under the bed poesy, for blunt statement-making and the torn edges of a teenage diary; people will relate to the sentence pictured left with faux enjambement and a cute picture far more readily than the trials of Bloom and his razor blade. Think; no one reads Infinite Jest to learn about depression. They read Infinite Jest — as I did — to hold up on trains for young impressionable girls to oversee. Jokes (not jokes) aside, poetry, and art in general, requires simplicity of language, because art — as it rightly should be — is for everyone. And everyone can’t read Ulysses. But everyone can read Rupi Kaur.
Many would argue this is not the dumbing down of artistic expression; to make work accessible to the most people — to fully comprehend and deliver the human experience without complication — is the goal of the author, creative, performer. The point of art is not to distance each other from ourselves, but to bring us closer together. Anything that prevents the work from being comprehended is in direct opposition to human interaction and completeness; K.I.S.S, keep it simple stupid, and make everyone the happiest you can. If you are indeed writing for ‘assholes’ — being the writer’s writer — you are excluding huge swathes of people who also deserve the right to your work; your art has failed if people cannot understand it. If, in another word, it has become pretentious.
Pretentiousness also means something else though; it isn’t just work that is complicated, but work that appears complicated: work that pretends it is smarter than it is. ‘Pretentious’ are the men on the same Infinite Jest trains teaching women about feminism (and how irrational it is); pretentious, much like the word pretend, is fakery. It is quoting four philosophers in as many minutes without having read any of their work (I have, definitely, never done this. I shared the meme at the start, remember?).
Pretentiousness is two-fold; it is adding a veneer to a work of art to make it impenetrable, to make it’s meaning impossible to access. Or it is, worse, adding the same veneer to hide the fact you couldn’t give it meaning, that is does indeed say nothing. Pretentiousness is pretending to be clever.
Is it though?
I have two issues with the use of the word pretentious, one personal, and one social. I’ll start with the personal one, because it’s better to end an article mostly read by liberal cuddle-monsters with something about everyone, than it is about my ego.
Personal.
Whenever I have heard someone use the word pretentious — and this isn’t going to be backed up with a bibliography of evidence; this is experiencial motherfuckers — I only ever hear “I didn’t get it.” Rather than people try and push themselves to understand a text, people will flippantly sip a macchiato and say the work was just pretentious. “It didn’t say anything.” “The artist was just masturbating in the warm wet tissue of the world.” It is always said snidely, by the very people who say everything is special, by the same people who say every artist has a place in the world, that every voice is valuable. Pretentious, for me, is synonymous with difficult. I have never heard people say pretentious when a work is — legitimately — just trying too hard, but rather when only a select few esoterics get the piece, and the rest, who haven’t put in the hard work to learn the craft, can’t fucking get it.
Pretentious has become a slur. It is a quick and easy way to discard an artwork that is not accessible to everyone. Some artworks are not easy to grasp. Poetry, especially, falls into this category, for it comes in a format everyone can create within, but can be exceptionally experimental. Poetry has become the artwork of the masses, because anyone — surely — can pick up a pen and write a poem. Everyone knows how to write and speak and read. And therefore the poets who are not easy to grasp are thrown aside, as pretentious; they are not one of us, the many, they are the few, the try-hards, the wankers of art.
As someone who greatly admires artists who push form, and learn craft, I find this mentality disparaging, disrespectful, and rude. Some works, darlings, are just not for you. They are for those who have put in the work. They are for those who have studied the craft for many, many years, and wish to advance the practice of their medium. This is not negative. You would never tell a scientist to stop experimenting; you’d never have told Katie Bouman to keep her science simple so you didn’t feel left out. You need to be an elite to discover black holes, and you need to be an elite to transform art into something new.
Again, I am not saying this because I think I have succeeded. I have no idea if I have succeeded in my self-appointed challenge to develop absurdism, experimental writing, and metamodernism (all words, I am sure, you regard as pretentious), but I feel it as valuable as the work that translates the human experience in the simplest, sensible-est fashion. And I have no true idea if I have succeeded, because my nature of being the inaccessible artist by choice (as practice) means I do not get the discussion relevant to develop. How will I ever know if I have done what I aimed to, if the conversations are pitiful back-patting applause, or that most egregious of phrases: “god, isn’t Nathan pretentious”?
Why is it such a sin to aspire for greatness? Why is it wrong for artists to wish to continue developing craft from the foundations of the format to something other, higher, impossible? To announce work as pretentious — when you truly mean difficult — is to say that no one should try, and no one should learn. This is not the era of the idiocracy, but by hell will I let it be the era of kneeling before the bland.
It perpetuates the idea that artists are everyone. You would never say everyone is a plumber, or astronaut, or carpenter, or doctor. And yet everyone is an artist. And with that comes the lack of pay, and respect. If every single thing we do is artistic, then nothing is. And the ones who spent the time to learn how to make the difficult, complex, work — the writer’s writer work — are the least respected, because how dare they treat art as something to be worked hard at, when everyone can do it. People see it as an affront; if this guy thinks he’s better than me, he’s saying I’m not an artist, and that is a direct attack on my identity. Again, you’d never do this to Neil Armstrong, Katie Bouman, Megan Rapinoe — that they need to be ‘less good’ so you feel accepted in the canon — so why the fuck are you doing this to artists? You should aspire to beat those who have bothered to train, not cast them aside as nothing more than wankery. It is important to learn your craft, your trade, to better yourself. Not everyone is an artist. Not everyone is special.
Social.
But I can hear you already. This kind of elitist speak is what makes the world a terrible place, surely? To create hierarchy is to crush creativity. To say all those other people who didn’t practice — train, learn, educate — are not artists is gatekeeping of the highest evil. Nathan Dean, you pretentious asshole, shut your poetic little ranty mouth.
No.
Let me place a condensed version of my argument, and then your counter. That artists need to be educated, they need to try harder, they need to learn their craft to develop it and create work that has merit not just emotively, but artistically. You must study your craft if you wish to get better at it, and to not bother to try and learn your craft because “you are already an artist” is disrespecting the form, and all those artists who put their brains on the line daily to bring you something fucking special.
But, Nathan, not everyone has access to an education. To put up such barriers between people is the exact problem with the world today; the elite are only the elite not because of their education, but because of their economic value. Only a few can afford education — especially arts education, the greatest place to throw left-over dosh — and your statement that pretentious art is not only “not pretentious”, but the only way, is to basically say only rich white kids get the right to make artwork.
Good, fucking, point.
There is, distinctly, a big problem in the world that education is not as accessible as it should be. Everyone should have access to education, and someones financial status should not affect their ability to join in the great conversational chaosphere that is existence. And yet it does.
And for this reason, I continue to defend pretentiousness. Because it isn’t accessible to all. Because, firstly, if you are the kind of person who hasn’t had a formal education but is angry at my statement because you are reading this blog right now, you have access to the internet, an infinite resource of infinite ideas, mostly free. Do the work. Use that privilege and access the phantasmagoria of human experience and do something with it; analyse, critique, think. Do not squander this gift you have been given. If you haven’t learnt, for example, the ins-and-outs of poetry, its form, function, rhythm, syntax, lexis, et cetera, to develop your practice, when you have access to the internet, then fucking shame on you.
And where does that shame come from? Because if you know that there are people without formal education, any education, no internet, nothing — they are lost on the vicissitudes of evil men controlling the social dystopia, hungry, starving, thirsty, dead — and you decide not to use what you have, you are patronising them. It’s like saying “there are homeless people, so we should ban houses”. Just because someone cannot access what you have, doesn’t mean you should race to the bottom. Don’t patronise the experiences of others by denying yourself your gifts. The social systems we operate within are suppressing huge swathes of humankind, and your answer to this is to, what, not participate? Lazy.
If you are in a position where you can educate those around you, if you are in a position to help make fair a world without rules, then you should. And if you can’t, then don’t undermine the struggles of others by lowering yourself — by choice — to a level not even comparable. Don’t dumb down the arts, just because not everyone has access to it. 1) help them access it, and 2) use that shit.
I cannot abide this kind of thinking. To squander your privilege is not the same as being an ally to the less fortunate. It’s half-arsed caring. It’s watching someone burn whilst you own a fire hose. Pretentiousness is water.
In German, the word for artist is Künstler, from the word Kunst, which stems — through the power of linguistic history — from a verb. A very powerful verb. Can. An artist, in German, pseudo-translates as… the one who can.
If you can, you should. There is nothing abhorrent, or egotistical, about using that brain of yours; selfishness is not a crime all the time. And if that brain leads you to make something difficult, awkward, esoteric, and only accessible to a few, then do that fucking thing. You’re not undermining populations. You’re not missing the point of art. You are advancing the greatest thing — perhaps the only thing — the human race has ever achieved: thinking. We’re pretty fucking terrible at everything else.
Whenever I hear someone say my work is pretentious, what I hear is “I don’t get it.” And when I hear “I don’t get it”, and not “what did it mean?”, what I hear is “I can’t be bothered to learn.” And when I hear “I can’t be bothered to learn”, I hear, “I don’t care about the ones who aren’t able to.”
An artist is someone who can — whether a poet, a black hole hunter, a football player, or Hobo Johnson and the Lovemakers — and if they ever didn’t ‘can’ — didn’t try, didn’t long, didn’t hunger — then we’d be lesser for it.
Stop calling people pretentious, and instead fucking read a book. It’ll be hard work. Your brain will melt. You will realise so many things are unreal, fabricated, and bizarre. But you will be better for it. Until you’re not. But stop saying you can’t, and start saying you can.
