This article in the New York Times describes the reaction to Charlotte Roche’s first novel. Here is my favorite quote:
A provocative female rapper in Germany, Lady Bitch Ray, who runs her own independent label, Vagina Style Records, grabbed headlines when she accused Ms. Roche of stealing her explicit form of empowering raunch. “I am what’s in the book,” said the rapper, 27, whose real name is Reyhan Sahin, in a telephone interview.
I think I would be shocked speechless if an American hip hop star accused an American author of stealing his flow and turning it into fiction, but you know what? I’ve learned as much about narrative technique from Nas, Jay-Z, Slick Rick, Chuck D, 2Pac, and Q-Tip as I have from Henry James, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, and Joyce Carol Oates. When I listen to Illmatic, The Low-End Theory, and Reasonable Doubt (among many others) I am reminded of late-19th century french stylists like Rimbaud and Zola, early-20th century french writers like Andre Gide, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Anais Nin, as well as the Americans John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, and Jack Keroauc. Here’s why: in those records, a self-awareness that says the art form is malleable, that “what is hip hop music?” can be changed track by track. Parisian writers - from about 1850 to 1940 -felt exactly the same way. Arthur Rimbaud (at age 17 no less) was the first person to utter the phrase, “I am quitting Europe.” He did not quit Europe as a citizen, but as a poet. He declared himself free from the continental European tradition.
“They don’t make ‘em like me no more, matter of fact, they never made ‘em like me before.” - Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
When I listen to hip hop, I feel certain artists understand what the art form has done and what the art form will do. Fiction has lost this vital impulse. When authors begin to ignore the fact that they can change the course of an art form with one work (call it apathy, or a silent, miserable respect for a form they feel has been an inherited birthright rather than a living medium capable of reinvention), then writers tend to play the innocent victim when change is wrought. Oftentimes, this is not the author’s fault. Another excerpt from the Times article:
With this in mind, critics have asked what practical help a book like “Wetlands” can offer, and even whether, by hyper-sexualizing the main character, it represents an all-too-familiar commercial ploy rather than a step forward.
Now, I had several reactions to this paragraph. First, I thought: Who are the readers asking that a book be “practical” and what kind of ”step forward” does each book needs to make? Fucking absurd. But then I thought: this is an American newspaper. Here is a cloying attempt at critical hegemony: another American writer (fluent in German certainly) who is sticking it to the simplistic European critics who feast too voraciously on a newly-invented dish. These German critics, we think, what fools.
In any event, I am amazed to see a novel’s content so intensely discussed in public. It fills me with hope that this country too has a less-than-complacent public, ready to speak openly about new works of art when those works communicate something about us that we did not expect to hear.
