Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Losing the Plot

Not long ago I listed some pieces of fiction that I have coming out. Two of those pieces have now been mentioned in online reviews, here and here. The two reviews are not entirely unfavourable, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to be churlish about them.

I suppose there can be something a little pathetic about making reply to reviews of your work that you don't happen to like. I do agree with Dazai Osamu that there's really no point in trying to explain one's work to someone who doesn't like it. You can't say, "Well, you should like it." It just doesn't work like that. The two reviewers also seem to be in agreement about the quality of my prose, so I suppose you could say they are being even-handed. However, if I feel justified responding, it's probably for two reasons. The first of these is that I could write better reviews in a coma. And I shall (well, perhaps not while I'm in a coma, but I shall write better reviews). I think that a review should be a good read in itself if we are to take the opinions expressed even vaguely seriously.

The second reason is that both reviews seem to be in agreement that my weakness is a lack of plot. Apart from anything else, in the case of 'The Fairy Killer', I don't actually agree, but, being personally close to that work, I'm not going to argue the point. More importantly, this is something that I've encountered before and wanted to address because it's really beginning to get on my tits. This criticism is the equivalent of saying that Mervyn Peake is not realistic enough, or that Leonard Cohen is okay, but he just doesn't know how to play a kick-ass guitar. If I were trying and failing to write a conventional plot then it might be a valid criticism, but - here's the point - I'M NOT. To quote Lou Reed, if 'plot' is that important to you, then you're still doing things that I gave up years ago. LIFE HAS NO PLOT, or not one that would be recognised as such by a Hollywood scriptwriter. I don't actually think that I have jettisoned plot, any more than an impressionistic painter has jettisoned representation of form, but I'm doing something different with it that probably isn't recognised as plot. Fine, let's not call it plot. In that case, what you call plot bores me. I am not even attempting to play by yours rules. If I am failing according to the rules I have set myself that's a different matter, and perhaps I am. But please don't lazily talk about lack of plot without even questioning - as I have - what plot actually is.

So, just in case anyone who has read my work and found it plotless is reading this too, if you even give a damn (enough of a damn to write a review, for instance), I would suggest you first widen your horizons by reading Nagai Kafu's A Strange Tale from East of the River, the works of Bruno Schulz, Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human, La-Bas by J-K Huysmans, anything by Denton Welch... I could go on. If you read these and find them disappointingly plotless, maybe it will start to dawn on you that some people like it this way, even if you don't, and that losing the plot is not necessarily failure.