CYBER LONGHAND

by

Duncan Fallowell

In a recent interview, I referred to something called ‘cyber longhand’ and quite a few people have asked me to explain it in more detail. Let us then call it a style, and the first thing to be said about style is that it should be instinctive not contrived. Some think style is superficial, and denigrate it on that score. But though style may be the skin of some phenomenon, it is not detached from it but the direct precipitation from an inner nature – or should be. When it isn’t, it’s called technique. An artist’s style, being authentic, cannot be adopted and therefore cannot be planned in advance, so any account of its appearance in one’s own work must trace it backwards. In this sense a style is the opposite of a manifesto.

The first intimation of what I called ‘cyber longhand’ was on the dust jacket of Drug Tales (1979), a collection of short stories which I edited. On the back flap, I described myself as ‘the inventor of the electric novel’. I remember that Sebastian Faulks – and he was the only person to do so – asked me what the electric novel was. I didn’t quite know at the time, and indeed it was a sort of joke, but the phrase felt apt. I obviously felt myself to be writing in a way different from anyone else and wished to signal that.

The development of cyber longhand was greatly advanced in my first novel, Satyrday (1986): chapters divided into numerous short or shortish subsections jumping between plot-strands and time-frames. I remember why I found it convenient to write the novel in this way. I was in my mid-thirties and compared to many of my contemporaries was publishing my first novel late. The pressure of experience, built up by delay, gushed forth in a mass of diverse characters, locations and ideas. Moving abruptly from one strand to the next allowed me to manage the material more easily, with the material reduced to discrete portions. There was nothing formulaic in this; I was guided by the validity of each portion. Which meant that they varied greatly in length. When I say ‘short’ it should be born in mind that once I produced (in The Underbelly) a cocktail party of thirty unbroken pages (the party itself became a microcosm of the book’s overall, interwoven method). Elsewhere I’ve had a sub-section of a single sentence.

This was years before the use of computers became general and I didn’t start using a computer myself until the late 1990s. In fact the use of a computer to write first drafts facilitates not my method but the undifferentiated run-on. So it should be emphasised that cyber longhand is therefore a paradigm of the cyber world; it is not something which has developed in me through using the computer.

It turned out that there was lots of life in all my books, not just in the first novel. Many different elements surged through them. This method of working must have evolved as a way of dealing with the variety and exuberance of material bubbling up in my mind. It parallels the strategies developed by younger people in the cyber age which has now succeeded modernism and post-modernism. Post-modernism was the age of information overload. Cyberism is characterised by the ability to deal more cooly with information by not permitting an overload, by taking only what you want.

Young people are accused by their elders of having a short attention span. That’s not true. We know they can sit for hours flicking the zapper and changing channels, clicking the mouse and opening windows, tasting morsels of different strands. They do not swallow things whole but take pieces. They are organising their information and entertainment by channel-hopping and window-hopping, synthesising their own coherence out of many often conflicting strands: the many streams of information available to them have become a palette. My sections likewise often clash, but the clash is only temporary; in due course all will be seen to be relevant to the whole.

So each of my sub-sections may be considered ‘a window’ belonging to a channel which interweaves with other channels into a narrative. And like ‘a window’ each sub-section is rendered vividly, distinctly, to avoid confusion. The process is always purposive because for me a book is a deliberate sequence. In this sense cyber longhand is akin to Chinese plate-spinning on tall sticks. You have to rush from one to another to keep them all alive and part of a functioning, incorporated whole. The old avant-garde experiments of shuffling chapters, or of cut-up/fold-in, were designed to randomise, to break down the tradition of authorial control. I am doing the opposite. A diffusion is being drawn into an intentional unity. For me, nothing is random. Every apparent divagation is there for a purpose, is contributing to the whole. The artist is taking charge and the outcome is clearly a book written by him and no one else.

New beauty in art  is usually strange and uncomfortable. Traditional readers may find my jumps disconcerting – where is he off to now? Traditional readers are still wedded to the long, singular drone in an undeviating tone of voice. This is not only the method of the present-day confessional novel written in the first person but also the ‘objective’ Henry James method, the ‘subjective’ Proustian method (two authors dear to me incidentally). A chapter running on without break must have a uniform texture otherwise it falls apart. The old idea was that you wrote the entire book in first or third person and in the past tense only, and divided it into unbroken chapters in which blocks of standardised description alternated with standardised dialogue. This is still the formula which straitjackets the fiction market. The non-fiction market is even more tightly constrained.

That is why books so often seem leaden to a younger generation accustomed to rapid variegation. Younger people have no problems with my variegated texts, though they may dislike them for other reasons. The narrative, proceeding via dislocating sub-sections, suits them perfectly. The story emerges in a spiral. A forward-moving spiral viewed from one end, and stirring a finite number of elements, would look like a kaleidoscope and people have described my writing as ‘kaleidoscopic’. Or to put it the other way round, a kaleidoscope operating through time forms a spiral of images, all interrelated but constantly evolving. The beauty of cyber longhand is its flexibility and powers of inclusion.

Usually the subdivisions are ordered by having page-breaks within chapters but in A History Of Facelifting for example I decided to number each one. There were 124 of them. It was in this book that the number of characters and number of plots reached a kind of acme of what is possible in 350 pages. This was indeed one of the book’s fundamental characteristics which cyber longhand allowed me to bring off. That, and rewriting. The novel went through twelve major drafts to ensure that all those plates were kept spinning and all the various story lines and themes were drawn together to an end. The computer is perfect for rewriting: reducing, refining, rebalancing. But I do write the initial drafts of all my books in longhand. The act of inscription is very important in order to confer a sense of reality on what I’m doing.

So cyber longhand deploys switches between first, second and third persons, between the inner and outer worlds of many characters, between locations and tenses, between the mandarin and the demotic, with many changes of texture as well as content. Like a car of a thousand gears, cyber longhand navigates the jumbled world in which we live. It is a way of capturing the complex interactions of modern life in a sequential text. I repeat: though it echoes the cyber world, the virtual world, the interactive world, it is different from it. It is a work of art. It exists not in simultaneity or in randomness but is a fixed prism for the reader's responses.

But let’s not overplay this. Nothing is ever ousted. The repertoire of possibilities is augmented. I am in the first instance noticing something in my own work, not asserting how other writers should operate. And again - one notices these things afterwards, not before. The process, whereby a style becomes apparent, must be organic and arise naturally out of one’s sensibility. Then the style can continue to develop and prosper and perhaps evolve into something quite different again.