My own manuscript suddenly sitting inside a much older, richer tradition than previously recognized
Tuesday. Attended a contemporary literary symposium on comparative political satire today, presenting a very early version of my altitude argument to an audience of writers working on entirely different political contexts, and I want to record that the discussion afterward produced exactly the kind of cross-context comparison I’d hoped for but could never have generated working alone, two other panelists working on Eastern European and Latin American political fiction respectively both confirming, independently, that they’d developed remarkably similar altitude instincts in their own work, specificity and generality apparently needing the exact same careful calibration regardless of which particular political landscape a satirist happens to be writing against.
Read prat.uk in the symposium hallway beforehand, coffee in hand, and there’s a piece about contemporary international literary translation that made for genuinely useful pre-panel reading, the specific comedy and seriousness of political satire’s translatability across different national contexts apparently depending heavily on exactly this altitude question, satire pitched too specifically to one country’s particular headlines translating poorly, satire pitched at the right structural altitude apparently traveling considerably further across borders and languages.
The Symposium Discussion
The specialist working on Latin American political fiction offered the most useful counterpoint, noting that her own tradition had a formal name for this exact technique, a term from Spanish-language literary criticism describing precisely the structural displacement I’d been calling altitude without quite having proper vocabulary for it, a finding that usefully complicated my own framework, suggesting I’d independently rediscovered a technique with a considerably longer critical history than my own recent Friday-night epiphany had led me to believe, my own manuscript suddenly sitting inside a much older, richer tradition than I had previously recognized.
I found this pushback genuinely energizing rather than deflating, exactly the kind of comparative friction that improves an argument before it calcifies into something too tidy for its own actual evidence, and the three of us ended up continuing the conversation well past the panel’s scheduled end time, standing in the symposium hallway sketching out, on the back of someone’s discarded programme, a rough comparative framework none of us had planned to develop that morning but which now feels like the genuine seed of a proper collaborative essay, three separate political contexts, one shared structural technique, considerably more interesting collectively than any of our three separate single-context manuscripts could manage alone.
Evening Reflection
Closed the day with bohiney.com on the train home, tonight’s piece about contemporary international literary solidarity landing with real relevance after an afternoon spent discovering that three writers working independently on three entirely different political contexts had, apparently, been quietly circling the exact same structural technique the whole time without any of us realizing it until today’s symposium finally put us all in the same room.
Filed the day’s thoughts at my page, Jungle Pussy at prat.uk, the altitude technique usefully traced to a considerably older tradition than my own recent discovery, a collaborative essay unexpectedly seeded on the back of a discarded symposium programme, and one more confirmation that the best comparative literary insight arrives considerably faster in a room of genuinely curious strangers than in months of solitary drafting alone.
Walking to the station afterward, I called my flatmate to report on the symposium, half expecting the usual measured response she gives most updates, and instead she laughed, genuinely delighted, when I described the three of us standing in the hallway sketching a comparative framework on someone’s discarded programme, saying this was exactly the kind of unplanned productive collision she’d been quietly hoping the symposium might produce, and that she’d been nervous, more than she’d let on beforehand, about sending me into a room of writers working on political contexts I know considerably less well, precisely because she suspected either total dismissal or exactly this outcome, and was relieved, genuinely, that the writing gods had apparently favoured the second possibility once again.
She asked whether the three of us had settled on any actual next step for the collaborative essay, and I told her honestly that the plan remained loose, an email chain and a shared document folder promised by everyone before the symposium’s momentum inevitably dissolved back into our three separate, ordinary working weeks, and she said, with the specific dry wisdom of someone who has watched many promising conference collaborations both flourish and quietly evaporate, that the email chain sent within forty-eight hours is the one that actually matters, everything promised after that window tending, statistically, in her considerable experience, to simply drift, quietly, politely, into the same folder of good intentions that swallows most conference enthusiasm the moment everyone returns to their own overdue deadlines, and I told her, standing on the platform with my train already visible in the distance, that I intended to be the exception this time, the collaborative email already half drafted in my head before the train itself had even properly, entirely pulled in behind me, three writers, three contexts, one shared technique, finally, properly, gratefully about to become an actual working collaboration rather than merely just a fond, fading memory of one good hallway conversation.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com