There are a few things combined in my work, an interest in myth, folklore, magic, literary theory, Tasmanian gothic, a voyeuristic fascination with the flirtation between narrative and magic and how, as Terence McKenna put it: 'The world is made of words, and if you know the words the world is made of you can make it whatever you wish.'. This has been my life's work, a fairly hefty goal to set for one's self, in fact my post-graduate thesis work was all about trying to establish a deep historical interconnectivity of these things. In my view all poets are sorcerers, whether they acknowledge themselves so or not, and sorcerers tend to be pretty bad at belonging to contemporary movements and lean towards anachronism. However, we all need to step out of type occasionally for variety, and for fun, and for this reason I position my genre writing within the Folk Horror umbrella (thought I have been accused of erotic horror), and my more literary oeuvre within The New Sincerity movement
So what is the New Sincerity, why are we, or should we be living in this new era right now and does it belong on crackers or melba toasts?
"New Sincerity is an art movement which reacts to and builds upon postmodernism. A hallmark of postmodernism, if not its core defining feature, is focus on and signaling of self-awareness and awareness of context. Generally this signaling takes the form of ironic reference to these things, as if to say to the observer, "I know, I know -- I'm laughing with you." c.f. Hipsterdom, Margot Tenenbaum, Girls (the band), Dada. New Sincerity is founded in the critique that ironism escapes culpability and criticism by not actually saying or standing for anything, that irony is a cop-out from real discourse. However, rather than moving back to the good ol' days of modernist self- and context- ignorance, New Sincerity attempts to maintain the depth and awarenesses introduced by postmodernism while eschewing ironic response to them. New Sincerity says, "Of course it's absurd. I'd laugh with you, really -- but it's also perfectly human, and I think that's what makes it so absurd, and awesome, and just a little bit heartbreakingly beautiful."
I think anyone who lived through the nineties can agree that you can only stack so many layers of irony on your world-jaded irony before it collapses in on itself and accidentally produces a moment of sincerity. My work self consciously belongs to a movement of people who are sufficiently self conscious to be ironic if we weren't so bored with it and really just can't stand having to be a wanker about everything all the time. Whilst we polish our sophistication life continues, dreams are made and broken, as are hearts, lives end and begin. Whether we wish to strike an ironic pose or not, we experience reality sincerely, directly, viscerally, and we are in need of an art that is not forgetful of history yet allows itself to move out of it's head. Otherwise people will still continue to seek narrative that takes them out of their heads, those stories will just be low quality. Literature has too often meant trying to produce work about the most mundane and mediocre people and situations possible, all lest we accidentally look like we're trying to give a little grandeur to something and be exposed as not yet cynical.
For me the reaction with/against postmodern is aesthetic, at core, rather than based around concerns about art escaping culpability. I am a lover of tonal variation in literature. Irony is like the sour flavour from lemons, for instance, it gives a piquant variety to the palate but you wouldn't want to eat foods only tasting of lemon. In my view irony is still an important part of the New Sincerity, how can any thinker not experience irony as a facet of our contemporary condition? But just because we've discovered it doesn't mean we need to marry it. It is possible to be brave sometimes without being foolish, sincerity, true, bald, unadorned, under-stated, sincerity can bring tonal variation to writing that is otherwise absent if we are all too hip to allow for such a moment. My idea of the New Sincerity is a written world where stories emerge (whether they have their origin in an author or whether the author is dead is only really relevant at one level, what matters is that the story itself lives) which are educated in the absurdity of existence but still aware that the whole spectrum of human experience continues despite it.
Let me give you an example. Under the New Sincerity one might treat of love with the full dignity and grandeur allowed to writers in earlier times, yet the characters may still be self-aware, self reflective of the fact they themselves can see that Romantic love is a trope imposed on us and that their feelings are likely just like thousands of others, and yet the experience remains and happens to them anyway. The overall message is that the heart and guts are not co-operative with self-consciousness, they wriggle free, serve us up fresh organ meat narratives that refuse to be products of the human awake, aware mind. Eventually we see that this polymorphous monster of our humanity was already present in the thinking of post-modernism, and so the new sincerity is revealed as in conversation with PM, rather than in opposition to it, an outgrowth in a particular direction that takes us home to our feeling life, whilst still keeping the cleverness and the the experimentation with forms of storytelling one might associate with the PM era.
To me this is important, this sense of somewhere to go. I remember being introduced at university to the idea that we were in the post modern era and feeling instantly deflated. Even just existing in a time that began with the word 'post', as if I'd already arrived too late for something, as if we were already surviving in the ruins of history, not even early enough to be there in time for Eliot's Wasteland, but post wasteland! I remember once I understood it more deeply thinking: 'But where do we go from here?' (We as in the young people coming through as writers and literary theorists) It didn't feel like a movement that existed with the future in mind, there seemed a sort of hubris around it, as though it had been theirs alone to stop history. I remember asking the Baby Boomer at the front of the world if she thought there would ever be a 'post-post-modernism' and she smugly explained to me why that was theoretically impossible, as the definition of PM as it stood would just somehow swallow that future right up in an oraboros that eternally consumes its own young instead of its tail. And I just thought to myself, but what if we just change the rules? Because we are the future, we will be like that, as The Future People always are... What if we just change your rules? What if we just declare your forever movement to be historical, taken as a given, something we build on? I for one welcome the New Sincerity.