Jan Baetens

Jan Baetens

Jan Baetens is professor of cultural studies at the university of Leuven. His research mainly deals contemporary writing (in French) and issues of storytelling in minor genres such as novelizations, comics and photo novels. Some recent books are: A voix haute. Poésie et lecture publique (2016) and, co-edtied with Hugo Frey and Steve Tabachncik, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (2018). An award-winning poet (in French), he is the author of some fifteen collections, among which Vivre sa vie. Une novellisation en vers du film de Jean-Luc Godard (2006) and La Lecture (2017, in collaboration with the photographer Milan Chlumsky). In 2017, he also published a novel, Faire sécession, which rewrites the history of the visual documentation of the Civil War.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What drew you to literary and cultural studies?

JAN BAETENS

As Samuel Beckett used to say when asked why he was writing: “only good for that”, and I think this is the right answer. It must also be the only thing I have in common with a giant such as Beckett. But there is of course much more. My fields of interest reflect, I think, one of the basic tenets of cultural studies: “culture is ordinary” (R. Williams). Long before there was something like the high/low debate, I was already attracted by the creative interplay between “elite” culture (say: avant-garde French writing, French not being my mother tongue) and “commercial” culture (say: comics, which were not yet “graphic novels”). However, the high/low distinction cannot be made in terms of fields, genres, or domains, it is something that structures any field from the inside (there is good and bad French avant-garde writing, good and bad comics, etc.), and I have always tried to look for the best in all possible domains and to see what links the best of the best regardless of the fields under scrutiny. Cultural studies helps me think that way. Moreover, and this could be a second meaning of “ordinary”, culture is not something that comes on top of our life, but which is part of it. From that point of view, no art is virtually more ordinary than poetry, since there are no obstacles whatsoever to read and write it (and even to buy, to possess, to share, to remake it, etc.). Comparatively speaking, the art world (that is the world of visual arts, which is a museum and gallery world) is much more difficult to join –and the snootiness of parts of this world, certainly when it comes to contemporary art, is impossible to swallow for me.

Another wonderful aspect of literature and cultural studies is that it breaks down the frontiers between “professionals” and “amateurs” –a divide that is unbridgeable in the “art world” (except when it can be curatorially and commercially recuperated, for instance in “folk art” or “outsider art”). I do not consider myself a specialist of any discipline or practice whatsoever, and it is a pleasure to observe that in the world of literature and cultural studies there is room for amateurs, that is for “lovers”. A couple of years ago I published a collection of poetry entitled “Pour une poésie du dimanche” (In Praise of Sunday-Poetry), which contains two sections: first a portrait gallery of major 20th Century poets who were Sunday-writers (and I suppose that many readers will have been surprised to discover that most of the greatest poets of the 20th Century such as for instance Wallace Stevens were people with often very demanding day-time jobs, often also very modest ones), second a theoretical reflection on or more precisely against the professionalization of poetry (which I think often leads to bloodless and uneventful writing, only made because a grant or a residency obliges the author to “produce” something).

Following the famous quote by WJT Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media” (by which he meant that visual media –and more generally all media whatsoever– are media that combine different senses and materials: visuality has also to do with tactility, for instance), I have always considered the combination of words and images (or letters and sounds, drawings and balloons, etc.) something utterly normal and banal –which does not imply that one should not explore the specific affordances of each type of medium and material. More interesting is the link with content matter, an issue that is generally overlooked in modern critical thinking. I do believe that there is a strong link between the way we chose to tell or show something and the type of content we show or tell. In other words: one cannot freely decide to address this or that theme or subject in any medium whatsoever –hence my fascination for issues of adaptation, both theoretically and practically. I adore for instance reading novelizations, that is the transformation of films into novels, one of the most despised genres in literary history, and besides I like to write novelizations myself –yet not as novels but as poetry collections and it is amazing to observe how the shift from film to writing and from novel to poetry forces the author to reinvent stories in ways that are more influenced by media and genre affordances than by individual decisions of the author eager to retell the story in this or that way.

I have just finished a book-length study on the film photo novel (to appear with Texas UP later this year), which offers a kind of synthesis of this kind of questions –and which I have complemented of course with a creative work (a collaborative didactic graphic novel, co-authored with Oulipo-member Clémentine Mélois, also to appear later this year with Le Lombard).

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What were some of your formative influences? Were your parents teachers?

BAETENS

Yes, my father was a high school teacher, and I am very happy to say that I have always been encouraged to read and study. I belong to the last generation of those who still received a highly classical high school training, with a tremendous amount of Latin and Greek, and this has been crucial to my development both as reader and as writer. As an adolescent, I only read comics and detective novels (I still do, by the way), for adolescent and young adult literature hardly existed (and I don’t regret this absence, for I sincerely believe that there is no reason to prevent young readers to access “adult” literature). First of all, Latin and Greek put me in contact with “real” literature, and the awareness of this “real world” outside the walls of my own little and silly world is a key feature in the development of a human being. Second, Latin and Greek were awfully difficult, and since I was not a brilliant student I permanently struggled with texts that promised me to deliver their meaning, while never really doing it, and this is a wonderful lesson. It helps me understand that meaning is never given, and that there is always more to understand and to do –in my eyes an extremely rewarding and challenging perspective. It is also a very liberating awareness, for it encourages me to explore texts in languages I do not speak (I am reading poetry, with the help of a dictionary of course, in languages I can only read, more or less, and the benefits of this widening of my horizon are tremendous).

In my reader’s biography, there is a before and an after. My memories of comics and detective novels are still very strong, but the day I read, out of curiosity (and of disgust of the “appropriated” reading at school, which I considered infantilizing) Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner, a book I didn’t understand at all, my life changed and I voraciously started reading “difficult” books, that is books I did not understand very well but that made me understand that I was leaving behind the limits of my own small world. In practice, that meant the French New Novel (for then I had decided to study French, which doubled the difficulty in all possible regards). My memories of these readings are still extremely sharp.

As far as my writer’s biography is concerned, things are more complex, and also more personal (and really personal things are not to be shared). However, I would like to stress two elements. First, writing is the natural second step of active reading. I mean by this that it is not possible to write without being a heavy and passionate reader. My discomfort with creative writing (as an institutionalized practice, for it goes without saying that writing is something one has to continue to learn every day) can partly be explained by the quasi-exclusion of the importance of reading in this kind of classes –as if one could learn to write without having an intimate and life-long practice and experience of reading. Second, it is important to stress that one never writes alone. I strongly recommend all beginning writers to join literary groups, circles, journals, sites, etc., for it is an illusion that one is the best judge and critic of one’s own work. Of course, this advice also applies to seniors.

Since I am working in a cultural studies program with no specific literary classes, my personal experience is quite limited in this regard. I think however that teachers should teach the way parents try to raise a child: by giving the (best possible) example. If students see that reading and writing really matter in the life of their teacher, then something will happen. My most sincere wish is that students discover that difficult works are key to their development (what does not mean that I despise “easiness” – I even like “silliness”, which often learns me a lot), but that it is not an end in itself. My motto would be double. On the one hand: elitism for all (I think it is humiliating and stultifying to lower the standards). On the other hand: complex does not mean complicated, simple does not mean simplistic. It is much more difficult to explain difficult things in simple words than the other way round, and the real challenge is there.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As you think about the future, what for you is the importance of the humanities?

BAETENS

Although we may have the impression that times are changing really hard (and I will not deny this), all media are both extensions of the human body and self, as McLuhan rightly claimed, and inextricably linked with technology and materiality, as all medium theoreticians ceaselessly repeat. In that sense, there is nothing new under the sun. What has become a problem is less the sheer quantity of available material (I don’t think it is absurd to believe that it was already beyond any human control many centuries ago) than the fact that our societies have problems in elaborating a workable selection of shared works, ideas, and questions beyond questions of pragmatic survival in a globalized work. Thanks to Google translator and other software, we may be able to say in all possible languages of the world: “What does this cost?” “Do you accept credit cards?” “Where is the form for customer satisfaction?”, but we do no longer read Homer or Sophocles in the text –a mind-blowing experience for 16 year old high-school students. A new Renaissance might be very welcome, knowing that what has to be rediscovered (and, yes, reused and reappropriated) is no longer just the Latin and Greek heritage, but many other forms of often much more recent heritage –and that includes for instance the Historical Avant-Garde of the 1920s (but also the rearguard production of that and other periods).

The humanities are vital in this regard because they can bring together the best of two worlds: content and form. Humanists create new content because they are open to the challenges of changing forms and vice versa. Moreover, most of them are deeply involved in creating an interplay between theory and practice, while having the possibility –as teachers– to question their own work. Their contact with students is not a way of making possible more sophisticated ways of audience survey and customer inquiry –in culture, the only viable principle is the “uncertainty principle”: nobody knows (beforehand) –, but a way of challenging their own working hypotheses, sharing their doubts, helping others to be confronted with issues these others may be fitter to solve than themselves, in short of becoming a springboard to the past as well as to the future.