"Experimental" Writing Isn't Just for Incel Bros

On Federico Perelmuter's "Bromodernism" Meme

Several years ago, from before the COVID pandemic, I was thinking hard of how to put a different spin on my preoccupation for that which, whether we like it or not, has remained known as “experimental” literature. So before I rant about the present-day meme of “bromodernism”, which seeks to stigmatize, more or less justifiedly, certain strands of writing - including the literature of Mircea Cărtărescu - for their appeal to the so-called “incel bros” demographic, I need to make a digression and step into “my time”, that of an experimental autistic queer poet in late 2010s Romania, who happen to have also been infatued with Cărtărescu (back in high school, more on that later.

It was a time when comrades such as feminist poet and editor Iulia Militaru urged me to rethink the category of “experimental” literature - she thought I might be “essentialist” about it -, which years later resulted in my argument For General Literature. There was also a raging debate among my North American peers that some people who still were practicing conceptual writing were trying to distance themselves from that notion, due to the racist antics of major names within that movement such as Kenneth Goldsmith. (Full disclosure: I tried to promote conceptual writing in Romania, believing in it - I still believe in the power of its techniques, even though I’m more eclectic/hybrid now.)

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To add salt to injury, I was being harassed by the late Liviu Cristescu, a local writer whom I encouraged myself to learn about conceptual writing and react to its innovations. He was consistently rude to many peers, but for a long time I brushed it off as avant-garde provocation - the reasons I maintained a literary relationship with him for years is that he seemed to have inexhaustible energy and curiosity. Things started falling apart when, during a private conversation, he dehumanized a common acquintance - for him, ex-girlfriend - and I accused him of misogyny. When I showed him pages from Simone de Beauvoir and from Deleuze and Guattari that I wanted to discuss with him, he refused reading them because they were “commies”. The beginning of the end was when I reviewed his second volume of poetry and criticized a concrete poem published there in binary code, which suggested… women are “0” and men are “1”. As if he took the machismo of futurism too seriously, he was most furious when I told him I disagree with the notion that such complex realities as gender could be reduced to binary code and that experimental writing maybe shouldn’t merely reproduce or even further dumb down so-called “common sense” ideas.

In the years since, I’ve came out as queer and did two things in the literary plane - one of them was trying to lay the ground for ALGER, this newsletter (that I failed to deliver the promised content comes down to factors such as near-constant burnout over the last years, struggling with my doomscrolling addiction when I had free time, having to work 7 days/7 for most of the past year!), the other one was joining in 2021 a circle of queer writers, which went on to become known on the scene as Cenaclul X, a landmark group for our recent intersectional feminist left which is now extensively protesting in favor of Palestine (unlike the vast majority of Romanian intelligentsia).

The very first poems I’ve read there - one of them was a tongue-slipping tribute to Surrealist poet Gherasim Luca (not many in Romania know he theorized “non-Oedipian” love, which at least I interpret as a kind of queer love), and in another I wrote for the first time about my intimate affairs in 3-day Airbnbs, but in stead of a “straight” lyrical text, it’s framed by the “voice” of a social network algorithm pissed off that “the user” has dropped their online activity because of love! - left fellow writers - admittedly, most of them much younger than me and not coming from a strictly literary background - confounded as they struggled at first to confront these texts with how they expected queer writing to sound like.

In order to persuade them of my queerness it took me a… modernist convinction, that the author can and should not just write “difficult” texts, but also defend them and give explanations, rejecting anxiety about being perceived as a vanity author writing boring manifestos. Otherwise, I didn’t believe I was being deliberately difficult - in fact, most of my poetry contains clues to their more elusive meanings, and as early as in my 2012 debut book there were clues to my queerness, despite them not having been picked up by all but a few readers, and no critics (but that’s a Romanian problem: poetry criticism largely died out here in the 2010s and most poetry books of my generation and until today only receive very few and superficial reviews). No problem, many of the authors and artists I’ve revered were also ignored for decades!

That my texts and those of a few other poets such as Tudor Pop have been legitimized after all as queer also has to do with how Cenaclul X went on to defend how “queerness” can encompass not just the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, but also disabilities and neurodivergence, as confusing as that might seem to normies from the literary field who were expecting us to just “write about gay sex” or who believe autistic people are not oppressed or anything, "just look, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are obviously autistic”.

Obviously, fuck Musk and fuck Zuckerberg. Tech bro monarhism is NOT going to benefit autistic people (high time to incorporate more on that in my final, perhaps soon-to-come version of a long-winded text I’ve been cooking up for ALGER about Hamja Ahsan’s “Shy Radicals”, a wonderful and frustrating half-ironic book which presents the utopian prospect, tempting to me for reasons such as the possibility of dedicating one’s life to just contemplation and research in 24/7 open libraries!, of a state for introvert people only, which however is disturbingly proposed in fiction to be practically a settle colony on grounds which, in the real world, are inhabited, inevitably not just by introverts! But more on that in the article…).

But I digress - back to literature.

From a distance, it seemed like the American literary powers that be didn’t care much about “small” literatures in translation (by the way, I disagree with how Romanians like to lament about themselves being a supposedly “small” literature, but that’s another story). However, for a few years now, Cărtărescu has become a darling. Seemingly everyone - from among book readers, at least - across North and South America has at least heard of him and “Solenoid”. For Romanians, it only takes now a Nobel prize win to believe things have turned around.

In my high school years (2007-2011), Cărtărescu was already in the race for the Nobel and his writing just had become more commercial, as I could tell by reading “Why Do We Love Women” (mind you, a title which was chosen by his editor, elitist philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, and which M.C. reluctantly accepted, before the unprecedented success of the book made some people distance themselves from the author, to his horror), which even my peers in the class made fun of back then.

Notwithstanding all the ridicule I received even from school teachers, I was a Cărtărescu fan, reading almost everything I could find from him (struggling even with his published journals, which already featured a lot of low moods and therapeutic venting, just like his most recent volume of poetry, which reads entirely like a homework for his therapist: “Never Cry for Help”), while writing prose and poetry, some of the first poetry I could call mine, albeit it being largely a “fanfic” response to Cărtărescu’s ‘80s poetry.

I didn’t know I was queer or autistic, I just felt like a creep, like Thom Yorke, I shunted society despite taking joy in walking around the neon-lit downtown, enjoying like a pop artist the colors and noises of advertising - and that is where Cărtărescu and his alter ego characters felt relatable, for once. After years in which school gave me the impression that (Romanian) literature is only about certain things - Big Philosophy, Big Politics, or the specific struggles of men from before me, mostly peasants for some reason that eluded me, there was Cărtărescu mixing these and more bookish concerns - with significant doses of what can I now call infodumping - with an urban middle-school sensibility that suited me well enough to make me believe I could write too more or less like this - taking seriously the notion that one can write about anything personal or literally about every single thing in sight - and make it a whole identity, if not career (the latter went on to obsess me as I’d face increasingly many obstacles).

That Cărtărescu’s texts do have some misogynistic and other problematic undertones was not something I could perceive at all back then; however, even before the college years, when I eventually had the chance of witnessing a ceremony where Cărtărescu received a distinction from my university, I was starting to get a bit worried about his increasingly visible obsession with invoking the canon, and especially Kafka. It took hearing Cărtărescu’s mistifying discourse on Literature as a Cathedral of the Big Books to realize his literature was really no longer my role model. But what exactly went wrong?…

The thing about Cărtărescu’s literature up until “The Levant” and “Glaring” - at least the first one or two parts of the trilogy - is that he used to make a convincing case for the possibilities of postmodernist literature to blend any and all traditional and experimental techniques and include any possible references and feature any style or subject matter. These possibilities also imply mixing up hierarchies: high and low, straight and non-straight alike.

And yet, for the last 15-20 years, Cărtărescu has narrowed his creativity to a recognizable pallette, relatively rarely dares to fictionalize outside the boundaries of his already canonized universe, and most strikingly, has been staking his cultural capital on invoking like a mantra the names of Kafka, Borges and very few others like them (whereas the 20-something-year-old M.C. peppered his poems with references to anyone from Eluard to some contemporary Romanian poet unknown outside the terminally literati even at that time, with no concern for whether those authors can be considered of canon importance or not),

Even worse, in an essay published a few years ago in the collection “Carpenter’s Pencil”, Cărtărescu sketched an obscenely schematic representation of what ought to be the definitive hierarchy of Literature, with the highest shelf reserved to Dante, Dostyoevsky and Kafka, “saints of literature” according to him; writers who were merely “great artists of the word”, such as Flaubert, Mallarmé, Nabokov, Mircea Horia Simionescu (one might add Cărtărescu himself), are condemned to be sandwiched between the truly great “saints of literature” and the lowest shelf, the masses of writers, the writers for the masses…

As critic Mihai Iovănel pointed out then, this pseudo-religious conception of the literary canon (even worse than Harold Bloom’s canon of Western literature, which has obsessed Cărtărescu and most other Romanian writers, as Romanian literature was entirely absent from the longlist Bloom conceded giving to editors) is at odds with the very postmodern theory - which speaks of the decentering of hierarchies - that writers of Cărtărescu’s generation have claimed to uphold, albeit they only did so in order to achieve cultural capital within the local literary field, regardless of how postmodern late nationalist socialism - Ceaușescu was more nationalist than socialist - really was. They also didn’t care much about the left-leaning politics behind the Beat generation and others they’ve revered (alongside Pound, who was allowed in Romania, despite his fascism, to be translated during the ‘70s-’80s). Ironically, the next generation, which grew with Cărtărescu among their real professors, ended up flirting with politics - left for some, right for others - and shunting complex writing for the sake of socially conscious and unpretentious autobiographic writing, while spreading the prejudice - that I tried afterwards to fight against - that "experimental” writing is necessarily “masturbatory”.

While I read in high school and college just about everything I could ready in and about poetry, from the classics to the most obscure, and from traditionalists to the avant-garde, it’s the latter I turned into a litmus test, as I discovered from the early 2010s that authors and institutions that didn’t like me also didn’t really like the historical avant-garde. Soon, it turned into a whole triangle of sin: by 2015, high-profile figures from within the Romanian Writers’ Union (an oligarchy which was close to not giving Cărtărescu an award just because he criticized on Facebook their oligarchic tendencies) smeared vast swathes of young writers for the supposed sins of being too “experimental”, “feminists”, and “sexo-Marxist” (the local equivalent of the “cultural Marxist” whistleblow) all at once.

Of course, this was actually a reactionary hallucination in great part, and the writers who were most specifically targeted by this smear campaign were not really experimental, nowhere near Marxist not even consistent liberal feminists, as proved by Claudiu Komartin’s latter-day trajectory as loud-mouthed anti-feminist (despite being married to a poet who claims to be feminist, and despite himself having promoted or translated countless other women poets), transphobe in approval of J.K. Rowling, and all-around culture vulture hypocrite always ready to attack poets from more marginalized backgrounds who refuse to play by his rules. Alas, such a gatekeeper is just one of the worst traits of a literary system which hasn’t managed yet to shake off the impulse to make idols.

So if anyone is still reading me right now, I only have this to say now: writing that is “difficult” in some way or another may or may not come in a long form. It doesn’t have to be a long book, it doesn’t have to be maximalist per se. If there’s a niche for difficult maximalist fiction, I don’t necessarily mind. But you can see now why it would make me vomit that someone out there who is a deranged-ass bigot incel bro actually decided to make an identity out of, at the very least, posing with just thick books of difficult maximalist fiction… which is the only reason why Federico Perelmuter seems to believe there would be such a thing now as “bromodernism”. Futurism and Pound’s “Cantos” already forced us to believe that people with reactionary and the most despicable politics can produce works of art of a complexity which mirrors that of whichever they seeked to suppress. But… it’s just sad that this can happen again.

Wait, did these bros find out already Cărtărescu didn’t entirely say no to gay marriage back in 2018? Did they ever hear of that Swedish interview where Cărtărescu claims to be very progressive and nearly an activist for minorities in Romania? Well, that was kind of a blatant attempt to appear politically correct in the eyes of the Nobel committee, and he hasn’t tried much to prove otherwise. Nevertheless, it’s a trace of a woke Cărtărescu; although the real Cărtărescu is nowhere near woke (in fact, for many years he has rubbed shoulders with philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici, who as early as 2001 suggested postmodernity should be shut down with a “return to the Christian god”; also, he hated gay people for “sindicalizing”), this virtual woke Cărtărescu is grounds enough for him to be potentially targeted in the upcoming reactionary purge.

Because, yes, the new reactionaries in the US dream of purging literature and arts of literally everything they deem “woke”, from Rupi Kaur’s barely-there liberal feminism to a myriad of academia-backed poets from just about all backgrounds, in a way the most democratic poetry academia there has ever been (aside the not-so-democratic prices which asked for ridiculously high student loans). Now, in Romania, we’re still a couple of more steps away from such a purge, one which will certainly target Cărtărescu. Like with Stalinists in 1948, I expect no mercy from these illiterates. Write queer, make crime.

Also, don’t be a bromodernist, don’t read just one kind of thick book, don’t believe even Cărtărescu is all there is to literature - I never actually did, which might be one of the reasons why I am sane enough to not participate in the “anti-woke” insanity.

Yigru Zeltil

P.S. “WHAT THE PRESIDENT WILL SAY AND DO!!” by Madeline Gins - I’ve recommended this book before, now is the best moment to do so again. At least as an appetizer for Bernadette Mayer’s “UTOPIA”.

[De ce nu există o traducere în română? Nu știu dacă mai are sens - multe dintre aceleași lucruri le-am spus în alte intervenții pe Facebook de-a lungul timpului.]