Has Literature Succumb to Grognard Capture?

Posted on December 1st, 2007 by Carlos

I’ve been reading a lot of game sites lately as part of my continuing interest in them both as artistic artifacts and as educational tools. Today, on the very thoughtful site Play This Thing, I came across an interesting post: the idea that games, as they evolve, run the risk of becoming so complex that they begin to alienate the average user, become the purview of fanatical players, and steadily begin to die. Here’s how Greg Costikyan described the phenomenon:

All game styles run the risk of what I term “grognard capture.”

“Grognard” was a slang term for members of Napoleon’s Old Guard. Hardcore board wargamers adopted it as a term for themselves. By extention, grognard capture means capture of a game style by the hardest-core and most experienced players–to the ultimate exclusion of others.

This quote represents to me just how useful and portable good thinking is: “grognard capture,” though created to describe something that happens with games — particularly video games, since they tend to “evolve” more than other types of games — seems to me something that can easily apply to all artistic production. We can think of much of the 20th century’s artistic production — music, theater, literature, painting, sculpture, dance — as an experiment in grognard capture. The “average user”of a De Kooning painting or a novel by Burroughs or anything John Cage has ever done hasn’t much of a clue as to the method, purpose, or quality of these works. In the mean time, the grognards furiously debate the relative merits of the work, quibbling amongst themselves in an increasingly arcane and haughty nomenclature. In fact, one might argue that current academic discourse in the humanities currently is dominated by unchecked grognardism.

Is grognard capture bad? Well, the exclusionary aspect of it, the pomposity that often accompanies it, and the increasingly iconoclasm of the community might count as strikes against it. At the same time, however, I think it is impossible for a work to be “generally” popular without also creating a gaggle of grognards; I think artistic production tends to engender grognardism by its very nature. I think it’s meant to. And I think that the reason artistic movements tend in many cases to be cyclical is because of grognardism: the grognards don’t let us forget that these movements exist, which creates the conditions for a resurgence in them in the future.

As a person who has just published a co-written, experimental novel (see sidebar) in an age where pundits love to pronounce literature dead, grognard capture is a very interesting concept to me. Experimental literature is subject to all of the faults and foibles of any fanatical group of grognards, but at the same time, I think the fact that it seeks to keep certain ideas alive, perhaps with the hope that historical conditions will one day be right for people to revisit them, gives it a kind of … well, please pardon the hyperbolic language, but I think I mean this sincerely: a kind of nobility.