The New Syllabus is a critical framework through which we will contextualize key texts of the Decayed Modern period in American Literature. These texts explore the convergence of post-war linguistically hyperaware literature, anarchy, philosophical Taoism, contemporary sexual theory / radical feminism, and quantum physics toward a human (local, codified male) interpretation of a nonhuman (universal, codified female) reality.

During the adolescent years of our century, at a time in which the cynic-sarcastic consensus claimed that such a thing could not be accomplished, the public of contemporary American Literature witnessed the development of a unique, impassioned, and exciting zeitgeist unfold via lecture between the novelists Carla Marborough and Walter Kogard. The lectures were not academic. They had evolved, rather clumsily, from parties of close and narrowly like-minded artists spewing drug-fueled sewage sewn sloppily from a medley of yesteryear’s theory and the fringiest of contemporary cultural references into public forums attended by the adherents of such wild conjectures and the curious, who remained unsure if what they heard professed was actually devoid of all meaning or if it was obfuscating a more unsettling and incomprehensible truth. Soon the gatherings grew past the intimacy of parties; some attendants were people from the suburbs looking at the weird scene, some were people from the city looking at the weird scene, and some were the weird scene.

During this period of development each member of the recognized Five Schools of the Vanguard had released anywhere from two to six books, at least one of which had to be a criticism which elaborated upon its cohort’s unique aesthetic. Public adherence to these letters had been quite productive for the publishing industry, despite its previous aversion to the experimental, likely because it allowed the intellectual landscape to unfold more like baseball, in which stats, which Americans adore, became supreme, and less like hockey, which offered the rare bestseller goal and the odd scrap between ignorant players. Where once the Author wrote her heart out ever so individually, disdaining compartmentalization, and leading inevitably to the generalization of an indistinguishable mass of voices, the emergence of the New Schools offered the public the spectacle of sport.

Walter Kogard, who led the equally lauded and lamented New Syllabus School, had released his first novel, Monolith, two years prior to his noted association with some of the discipline’s most eccentric practitioners. The fringe had initially ignored him, despite the Gaseous odor of his prose, because Monolith had sold exceeding well, to the point that one could say that it revitalized an interest in reading in the American public, not to mention its preeminence in Western European, Chinese, and South American markets. His fame as a Time-sponsored literary poster boy, however, soon fell to his infamy when the violently resurged Occupation took as its anarchist doctrine that same work. While he was blacklisted from the corporate side of literary sponsorships, this did little to disrupt his position as one of the most respected men of letters. Should the Occupation not have been subdued, he may very well have been convicted of treason.

Regardless of the success or failure of the New Occupation, whether or not one “believed” in it, Kogard became a person of interest to the far left and those whose work observed it. Naturally, persons of great note gathered round him, most frequently at drinking and reading venues like Samsara, the Narrative, and A Ubiquitous and Lasting System of Hexagonal Galleries, a grassroots library composed of a block of interconnected warehouses in Bushwick.

Adherents to the New Syllabus formed a somewhat militant cohort, although most of the members self-identified as pacifists. How their politics bent left as west while their intellect remained far from confrontational could only be apprehended through the convoluted literature of their metaphysic, which Kogard left unnamed, though certain critics (notably, Susan Strehle in Fiction in the Quantum Universe, 1992, an indispensable prerequisite to the present school) describe it as “Discrete” or “Actual” Taoism. The scientific implications of Strehle’s Actualism upon the literary and religious philosophy of the NS will be later expounded. 

Politically, one could distill the message of the NS into the slogan “The state’s demise is in its stars,” which meant that while the Syllabus advocated such an end, no action was needed to fulfill it. The use of developments in the new physics to support key tenets of philosophical Taoism and the fulfillment of the inevitable Way formed the foundation of Kogard’s unique brand of passive anarchy. And the Syllabus followed Kogard. In practice, they did not so much antagonize the state as disincline themselves to apply rules of law and conduct to their actions. Most of them actually led quite meaningful and productive lives.

The dissenting politics of the New Syllabus naturally influenced their linguistics, aesthetics, content, and form. Ron Silliman makes an interesting foray into the intersection of protest and poetics in his superb and important essay, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” from The New Sentence: “What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of ‘realism,’ the illusion of reality in capitalist thought.” The significance of this commoditizing effect on language may strike the contemporary reader as familiar when we consider the command of that unworthy king Franzen to make the text “transparent,” to make the novel as consumable as television, as if their audiences constituted the same market; how this mantra infiltrated, if but unconsciously, the approach of everyone from bestselling hacks to internet alt lit gurus to confessional memoirists to Pulitzer Prize winners of this century (and might we consider furthermore how Gass has felt about that Prize, being awarded almost pointedly to the most mediocre and remedial of works toward the effect of giving the consuming public only that which will appease its lowest common denominator, degrading the prime rib to the commercial quality of a Quarter Pounder). 

Such placating, however, was not a strictly modern trope. Language has had its enemies since the dawn of capitalism itself, which is namely the culprit for this leveling of meaning across all written mediums, from poetry to subway ads. Language, under this economy, must be subverted to invoke the absolute reality of the market, and, as Silliman continues, “These developments are tied directly to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality.” To what is this subverted language referencing?—to the social dynamics of capitalism: “Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities … torn from any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, a universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject” – hence recent contemporary literature’s desire to suppress all evidence of style other than a minimal, understated, gritty, realistic stylelessness, as if stories were universally applicable advertisements for the human condition. 

The New Syllabus was aware of this convention to efface the text in favor of a numbing pleasurable effect, and desired no part of the racket. The world which they sought to represent was not the world of consumer capitalism and its annexes, it was not the world of the suburbs or of Freedom. It was the discontinuous world between the deepest of human consciousness, the erratic absurdity of nature, and the sadomasochism of American society, things which are inherently unmarketable. Thus they who dissent from the approved reality become dissenters of the state. And this anarchy becomes not merely a war against the state but a war for representation itself. If we are to consider the import placed on the marks lain on pages, and the whole scam perpetrated by American society to suppress and quell their unique meaning, then the old NS mantra rings especially true: Wizen the Mark, The Jig is Up!

Gass writes that literature is written in solitude and read in silence, and this suppression of observed matter has exercised its effect through the ultimate erasure of the scribe in the wake of an erected reality in writing. Silliman writes that going forward from the introduction of the book and, later, the novel, as facets of capitalism’s strive for absolute reality of the subjection of persons and resources (in fiction, it is a subjection of the creator, either to exalt The Creator or to bring into relief created entities [commodities] as absolute), authors saw increasingly less of their audience (just as the factory seamstress never saw the wearer of her dress) until such a crucial point that Barthes declared their death (as if commodities sprung spontaneously from the miracle of the capitalist machine). (It may as well by now be said that everyone is dead: God, says Nietzsche; Author, says Barthes; Novel, says Sukenick — We are all deceased; we are not postmodern but postmortem; and our modern bodies have decayed; nevertheless, we persist through this bleak subreality …) 

The New Syllabus retains the need for personhood, the acknowledgement of the hand of the scribe upon the world she has wrought in words; the person is of import; she will not be suppressed by the tyranny of colonial states. Further exacerbated by the quantification and analysis of human data collected increasingly more often in a digitized world, whereby, as Jonathan Crary writes for Newsweek, we’re turned into monetized bits of information, the NS sought to exalt the human in all her physicality, both in body and in text. “In [this] new phase of global capitalism,” Crary writes, “…every possible area of individual and social existence is being reorganized to coincide with the demands of the marketplace. The formula is to financialize whatever used to be part of personal or private life, or owned in common,” as in the public domain of internet profiles. Neither are humans susceptible to profiling, as we are not so conformable as to be contained within a standard mode of presentation (which is why, in my opinion, Tumblr, with its customizable themes, is far more creatively conducing than Facebook).

The real person’s wont is to break out of this rigid ordering and analysis of a spontaneous life; thus are the dissenters prone to be labeled as “experimental” in the world of literary review. This perceived “experimentality” constitutes rather a rejection of capitalistic commoditization and conformation of linguistic conventions. If the writer wished to turn her commas into colons and to indent five times minus one for every succeeding paragraph, then it shall be as warranted as an endstop like this one. Texts, just like their writers, have a right of individuality, and it is the glory of this great nation that we may all express our true selves. One will dare to wield one’s will within the world both real and represented. The NS sought, in this regard, to occupy the page just as their forebearers had done in Zuccotti Park those many years prior. It may seem hypocritical now that Kogard championed all of this having already made his monies in the capital marketplace, yet that success was precisely what allowed him to rally against it so flagrantly, and allow those other artists of similar mindset and skinnier pockets to pursue their important work in this field.

* * *

Kogard officially (that is, ritually) established his school at the Hexagonal Galleries on fall’s two-year anniversary of Monolith. Meetings were to begin with the reading of poetry (Kogard often chose “Into This Time” by Jayne Cortez), then a reading from the Tao Te Ching, then a reading of passage from one of the Syllabus’ exalted muses: Taylor, Browne, Valery, or Gass. (There were other figures of praise, to be sure, yet none achieved the effect of sublime transcendence through prose as these four). On this initial occasion, Kogard gave a reading of his now famous essay on the Way in Society, entitled “Beat Off, Seamen,” which came to shape the greater paradigm of the New Syllabus throughout its tenure.

With this introduction Kogard led the New Syllabus to much popular and critical acclaim, not merely in the political realm (which, while emerging from the personal, was marginal) but, via lecture, though the vallies of postmodernism’s most abstract labyrinths. He released his second novel, Wu-Wei, three years later, an event which was met less as his fictional sophomore than as the second coming of the Christ, or Lao Tzu, or any number of saints and sages and prophets, for they litter the annals of history like cigarette butts; their frequency not withstanding, Kogard entered among them. Which means that he was vilified by as many as exalted him.

Carla Marborough had released three novels and three works of criticism by the release of Wu-Wei, among them, Bruises, Braving the Waves, Queer Dykeotomies, Barely Escaping from Repression, and Mysogynistic Tendencies. She was often described as shrill (by her friends) and a bitch (by her enemies) and drank a burgundy with her breakfast of eggwhites and almonds. Where she lay within the schools was a subject of much debate.

There had once been a distinction between the Wound School and the Womb School. The former concerned itself predominantly with the lacerations of society upon the female body and nature’s sadistic sense of humor while the latter was consumed more with afflictions from within, but their ideologies, by synopsis, soon blurred, and colloquially they sounded too alike for many to bother distinguishing. This angered Marborough to no end, and she pointedly differentiated between the two when noted, though declined to align herself. A prudent critic would maintain the difference as well, though within the context of the Vanguard they comprised only one, called, infrequently, the O-Thing School. Arguments remained perpetually unclosed.

Not only did the O-Thing straddle two prominent aesthetics, but had within it many informal departments. The Modest School, also exclusively female (if you were to count the transgender /transvestite members), possessed the subtle biting indignation of some Old Realists, but they were too indebted to images of middle-aged women searching for lost socks to stir greater interest.

The Black Hole School, the branch of the O-Thing concerned with black femininity, also represented a prominent cohort, though to the discontent of its members, who longed to be respected as a school independent of the predominantly-white O-Thing. Certain factions within it differed on whether or not the school could sustain itself without the umbrella cohort. No definite conclusion was reached; both faithful and dissenting members achieved renown among Black Star School adherents and the general female reading public; but the only member who achieved crossover success was Sethe T. Garner.

The CUNTY School rested on the fringe of the New Feminist Writers, and could be aligned closer to the New Syllabus. Marborough certainly considered them as much of an enemy. Their scathing inverted misogyny polarized the female reading public, and it came to be a rule that brick and mortar booksellers only carried the OThing while the CUNTY School work was disseminated by chapbook, zine, and blog. These works were often short essays and sketches, for the CUNTY cohort abhorred the conventions of plot much as they abhorred conventions of sexual relation. The most prevalent among these twentysomething women was Renata Nigmedzyanov. She had, in some respects, assumed the once-exalted position of Séa Costilla as the self-exploitative confessionalist. Ms. Costilla herself had recently released a novel of great complexity and nuance which located her closer to the Modest School; it was generally the case that by the age of thirty CUNTY bloggers graduated to one of the mature cohorts. Renata, however, had proudly found her niche in this medium, particularly with the story “Date Night,” later titled “Gymnopædia.”

Renata had a sizable and loyal following on vagrag.com, as well as in their biweekly zine. In time, she alined herself squarely beside Kogard. Kogard, in turn, alined himself squarely inside of her.

In the beginning, life was simple. You met your cohorts through readings and seminars. The ideological bent of the event determined who would be in attendance. Neither Marborough nor her apprentice Deborah Scott would have been caught dead at a Henry Miller discussion. And Kogard would have been amiss to find himself hearing spoken aloud the paintpeeling recollections of Miss Scott herself. What they valued, as team players do, was solidarity, and Renata’s betrayal, so to speak, may have been the first straw lain on the camel’s back. Subsequently, the publication of Kogard’s short reverie A Grotesquerie further fanned the flame under the O-Thing skirts, and caused Marborough to retaliate in manners both professional and vulgar. She soon thereafter established a rigorous model of plot, theme, and imagery which was to more adequately guide her cohort, placing her dichotomously opposite the New Syllabus, who concerned itself with content more absurd within forms more daring, as was Renata’s wont. Kogard’s apprentice Jacob Schmidt complied his pedagogy in two works of criticism, Gassscape and Decayed Modern: A New Syllabus toward the Instruction of Literary Criticism and Execution. Schmidt had also released a novel called Dog Found which was not as readily received. His import lay only in that he catalogued the reveries of the prophet, and if Kogard was the savior, Gass was god.

New Syllabusers revered Gass the way Gass had Rilke. And just as the critical philosophe drew further back from Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor, so did the NS draw from their roster of Stein, Sukenick, Borges, Barth, Gaddis, O’Brien, Hawkes, Hofstadter, and Pynchon. Schmidt laid out their mission in this regard, as Gass had for Rilke, to the end of horizontalizing voices once reserved for doctorate theses, who, while immaculate, holy even to the literary sensibilities, were seldom noted.

A now marginal member of the New Syllabus named Edourd Ulger had released a novel of infamy in its early years, Please Don’t Let Your Dog Foul in the Mews, colloquially known by its latter four-word verb clause. He was due to be as notorious as Kogard, and his work ventured to mend the long unsewn hem of absurdist black humor; but key persons objected to his heavily trafficked fashion blog, Hasidic or Hipster, and he was damned to the obscurity of the unreviewed. He is still spoken of highly when noted in certain circles.

One could postulate that the incredulous, self-deprecating, and restless method of Ulger’s Foul in the Mews, and the generally lawless approach of the New Syllabus, could be traced from their infatuation with Gass back through the catalogues of the Dalkey Archive, to whom the philosopher offered numerous introductions. It was as if each of the members had been hypnotized by its spiraling monogram. Incidentally, Kogard’s federal hometown had lately been overrun by new developments funded in great part by the Douglas Development Corporation, who also possessed the same logo. He could not help but feel that their mutual omnipotence was not a coincidence.

It would be crass to say that the New Syllabus went so far as to try to undermine the canon and reinvent ontological principles of grammar, usage, and character (assuming, furthermore, that those are the sole components of creative writing), because another of the early crossover stars, Jean-Luc Godsdog, had written two heralded tomes, Go Back and Retrieve It and Atoms of Amber in the Fire Mirror, which operated within structural and thematic conventions implicit in the the Graduate School(s) manifesto; yet by taking on their aesthetic and subverting its effect, he essentially nullified the existence of this once prominent cohort, silently condemning them to a tenure of toiling tirelessly in untrodden halls of cultural ruin.

Godsdog and the greater New Syllabus could not have then departed further from the aesthetic of the Graduate School(s), which had existed some seventy years prior to their rise. Where the latter’s approach to language was purely utilitarian, a platonic code referencing only that prescribed signified thing (singular) which convention allowed, the former muddled the meaning, turning text to tar. Quite apprehensively, the literary landscape departed from the concrete, Newtonian, observable and verifiable codex of what the elders called Realism toward an ethereal, quantum paradox of fluctuations. To echo Strehle, they wanted to “comment on a lived reality through the pane of art,” they wanted to affirm both art and the real world. The reality remained, however, that reality could not be verified, and what was taken as real from one point to another varied widely. Furthermore, the mirror which the Realist once held up to the world was no longer as immaculate as Newton had polished: it was a stained glass, highly ornamental in many cases. If one squinted one could glimpse ripples of the world beyond. 

To the critics of this so-called narcissistic self-indulgence, Kogard only responded, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” To the Syllabus (in true Actualist fashion), reality is discontinuous, statistical, energetic, relative, subjective, and uncertain. Conflation is the rule, modeled off the particle approach to observation, that is, to sense beyond the physic, beyond the black-inked alphabet, to the negative space between letters, the interpretation unfixed, as if having floated coincidentally into that order between the inch margins of this chaotic blankness. When the reading public found itself unsure whether Doris had been looking out of a window or into a mirror when she saw the widow kill her husband in Atoms of Amber, it knew that what some had (naively) continued to assume as one consistent reality could no longer be applied to any representation of the world. Modernity, which had departed from the nineteenth century’s empirical historicism and romantic nostalgia in the same direction that the individual departed from social consensus, and interpretation from divine doctrine, had now departed from itself, decomposed, dismantled, decayed, its shattered fragments swept into a boundless dustbin. From Modern Relativity literature evolved to Decayed Quantum Theory, two entities which did not necessarily cancel each other out but deepen their water unfathomable fathoms and return the elementary particles to their mother ground. From the dominant Christian paradigm, Kogard moved human morale closer to that prescribed in the Tao Te Ching, though he often utilized Biblical passages for allusive, aesthetic, and ironic purposes. He, in particular, believed he was composing a new ideological canon toward the progress of American letters, as expounded to a pedagogical degree by Schmidt. He was, to many, the chair of the New Criticism. Whether or not their dogma exercises a lasting effect on the discipline remains to be seen.

As for Marborough, her unique influence has now expired, and the feud which once seemed so titillating has been reinterpreted as righteous indignation against a man who was working on an ideology not too dissimilar from her own. What she had not wanted—to be affiliated with him, an arrogant bastard who giddily accepts the label of prophet—has happened. It turns out that their aesthetics are quite similar. Marborough remains a significant figure, to be sure, but merely as a component of the now-comprehensive New Syllabus. And Walter Kogard was not so audacious as to believe that his cohort did not require the New Female voice. He exalted Renata to a position of import beyond even Marborough. It seems now that the spectacle of sport was simply a gimmick to get people to read again—and to get people to read rich writing. That was always the endgame: to instill a sense of immediacy, intrigue, and passion into the literary scene. No matter the self-designation of these writers, for labels are always inconsequential in this regard, the point was always to Make it Ernest. Make it Urgent. Make it New.