From http://reauthoring.wordpress.com

Amused and bemused by Alex Clark’s big feature in the Guardian Review section this past Saturday, chronicling in some detail the rise of scrum-like live literature events so varied in tone and scope that she, wisely, doesn’t even try to slap a collective label on them. But we are more foolhardy: let’s call this movement-ish thing, ‘Cabaret Lit’. And let’s talk about why it’s not the other way ’round.

We at the Re:authoring Project have, in our various guises, attended lots of CabLit events including some mentioned in Clark’s piece. As she notes, they’re often a lot of fun: chaotic, boozily entertaining, occasionally even thought provoking. But I would argue that they’re not really about literature.  I would argue that you could replace the ‘lit’ in most CabLit events with most anything else that is nominally thought-provoking–with politics, with psychotherapy, with a troupe of dancing bears–and still have essentially the same experience. The CabLit movement is really about the Cab, not the Lit. At best, it’s about a post-modern retro idea of a bygone literary experience; dark, noisy, combative, vaguely risque…think the Algonquin Club or the Stein/Toklas salon, add some social networking tools and a portable PA, and you’ve got the template for pretty much everything mentioned in Clark’s piece.

I realise that this may sound bitchy, but it isn’t meant that way. Anything that takes a fair swing at opening literature to new audiences is to be applauded, particularly if it is meeting with some success as some of these CabLit gigs clearly are…as I’ve said, they can be fun and interesting. But CabLit is ultimately a conservative movement, a truth that Clark herself is clever enough to note: “Even though readings are shortish and punctuated by live music, they are still essentially readings.”

Within such conservatism, well-disguised as the hip-n-now, Clark highlights something that is more insidious: “What of the writers who can’t, or don’t want to (perform)? Those for whom the words on the page are the thing, not their talent for doing a turn?”

CabLit has no answers to these questions; indeed, the Guardian itself gives the game away by electing to use a photo of Zadie Smith, reading at Bookslam event, to illustrate the CabLit phenomenon. Surely, Smith is the poster child for the CabLit generation: young, beautiful, articulate, writes like a dream, and no more at home than in the limelight. And oh yes, established: no grubbing up the ranks for Ms. Smith, which is what the CabLit movement, like our humble Re:authoring Project, nominally was founded to address.

In a literary world where life really is a cabaret (c’mon, you knew it was coming…) it is increasingly tough for the shy, nerdy, perhaps even physically unattractive writer to break into the limelight…precisely because of the nature of the limelight that is becoming de rigueur. We worry that movements like CabLit create self-fulfilling prophecies: the good performer becoming the lauded writer on the merit of the former skill, not the latter.

It’s still early days here at the Re:authoring Project; we are small and toiling, aspiring to mighty things. But we began this endeavour by stating categorically that our process did not require the author to become a performer, even while it would strive to keep him or her at the centre of the work. Deviser, manipulator, self-effacing deconstructor….sure. But people, particulary writers, are either performers or they’re not. We want to work with them find a unique and compelling alternative live voice for their work…one that is literarily,  if not necessarily literally, theirs. We stand by that slice of dogma because it keeps us focused on the writing itself. If that ain’t right, all the rest is noise.

Posted via email from gregklerkx’s posterous