New technology always makes possible new art forms

New path: Salman Rushdie. Picture: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

“In the history of literature there has been only one change,” Albanian writer Ismail Kadare declared. “The passage from orality to writing.” So what will the next big change be in terms of literature? I’m hungry for new ways, new forms and creative synergies in this screen-saturated, attention-veered world. How can the long-form novel compete?

In the meantime, traditional publishing models are breaking down. Salman Rushdie recently moved his fiction onto Substack, the online platform that’s aggressively targeting big-name writers by offering them a new way to disseminate their writing, via email, to paying subscribers. Roxane Gay, Jeanette Winterson, Patti Smith and Cheryl Strayed have also ventured into this world, which gives the writer a large amount of autonomy removed from traditional publishing models. Any would-be writer can do it. It circumvents the traditional gatekeepers.

Rushdie is releasing his newest novel, The Seventh Wave, on Substack. The move harks back to an earlier mode of publishing fiction, as serialisation. The likes of Madame Bovary, The Pickwick Papers and Heart of Darkness were all originally published in magazine instalments that people paid for. Rushdie believes the next great innovation in writing hasn’t yet emerged. “I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” he said recently.

Ezra Pound in 1940. Picture: LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

As a writer, I’ve always been interested in the audacity of risk. Innovation. Rule-breaking. “Make it new” was Ezra Pound’s call to arms and 35 years ago a slim little volume entered my world like a depth charge of possibility. It made writing new; felt like it minted a form of its own. It was Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, and I’ve carried my battered Picador paperback around for decades now; the pages are almost greasy from being dog-eared and scribbled upon. What is it, exactly? An account, of the life of jazz musician Buddy Bolden. A daring little book that defies categorisation, experimenting with fiction and nonfiction, photography, diary entry and reportage. Bolden was known for his dazzling musical improvisations and there’s something of that rhythmical energy in Ondaatje’s alchemy.

Coming Through Slaughter is the embodiment of Pound’s aphorism. The aim, as a fiction writer, is to create something fresh and startling and bold; a new voice, a new way, perhaps a new form. It’s fearless writing with something so beguilingly youthful to it. It captures a muscular, seemingly effortless moment of creative risk-taking which is often so hard to return to as life closes around you and you have to think about sellable books; about actually making a living from the deeply insecure creative existence.

“I got very attracted to the idea recently… of trying out things I’ve never done before,” said Rushdie of his plunge into the Substack world. “I’m going to make it up as I go along… I’m just diving in and que sera sera, you know. It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.”

Now I’ve found another writer who shocks with their audacity, in the most exhilarating way. Joelle Taylor has just won Britain’s premier award for poets, the T.S. Eliot prize, with her collection C+nto. Her writing blazes with rage and tenderness. Again, what is it, exactly? Poetry and performance, stage direction and incantation, elegy and manifesto. It is a new tuning fork.

I’m restless for new forms of writing. Was recently approached by a composer who suggested a collaboration on a song cycle, an old musical form of narrative; we’re using, updating, the voice of the audaciously honest Heloise of Heloise and Abelard fame. I don’t quite have the courage for poetry – fiction covers over the cracks – but this feels like the next best thing. It’s gleeful, reviving, to be plunging into something fresh.

[e-mail]