Hypnogogic (Hyp Prose)

8 tenets for the rhetorical engine of New Scripture

Literary manifestos are rare these days.

Publishers treat them with suspicion, and if you set one down you might be accused of the worst literary crime you can commit: the crime of actually having something to say.

(Of course it’ll be put a little differently… you’ll be accused of being preachy or didactic or heavy-handed or perhaps just… off putting? To the prosperous white women of a certain age who buy almost every literary book these days).

I personally love to find writers who have manifestos.

I love to see their aims and their aspirations set out clearly, I love to know what their influences are, and I especially love to see them position their work as part of the great chain of literary endeavour that stretches all the way back to ancient scripture.

Jack Kerouac drafted at least two such manifestos in his lifetime.

Here is a blog article I wrote about one of them: #5 Something that you feel will find its own form.

They are almost essential for any experimental writer.

Love him or hate him, Kerouac was a literary innovator whose new style won him very few fans until he turned 35. Even his closest literary friend Allen Ginsberg initially described his spontaneous prose masterpiece On The Road as “crazy and not in a good way.”

Writers like this set down manifestos as an essential part of their craft, partly so that they can look back at their aims and compare them with their work and be satisfied that they're not just going crazy.

It’s a sort of self care, I suppose you would say these days.

In this article I set out the eight basic tenets of an adapted and updated style that I call Hypnogogic Prose (Hyp Prose for short).

It is my modernised and democratised version of the repetitive, insistent, rhythmic and mildly hypnotic language of scripture, owing a particular debt to the metre and style of the Hebrew poetry of the old Testament, especially books like Song of Songs.

It also borrows from many other styles especially the modern Greeks.

My contention is that this kind of rhythmic and penetrating language is a huge part of why scripture is so affecting, and why books written in such language have had a completely disproportionate influence on the history of the world.

For good and for ill, it has to be said.

Below I set out the eight tenets of Hyp Prose. I drafted them with a view to economy, and also with some light obfuscation in mind. People really don't like it when you claim to have created a new literary style, so a little bit of camouflage can come in handy.

I will discuss each tenet in detail in my next few articles, and provide substantial examples from my work to illustrate the point of a particular tenet.

So here we go.

1. Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose is prose imbued with various features of poetry, the stark metre and strange run-on rhythms of poetic and scriptural speech.

2. Hypnogogic: from the Greek hupnos (sleep) + agogos (leading). Lulling the critical mind, awakening the receptive Heart (cf Song of Songs 5:2).

3. The mechanism of Scripture: Hyp Prose wedded to the deepest themes. Love, death, love as stronger than death.

4. The language of the unconscious, the sensibility of extreme and elevated states. Writers must go back to this source, then bring the Word back down from the mountaintop.

5. Hyp Prose waxes dense but depends upon the brevity of the whole. Short books stripped of modern dilatory techniques. Narrative rendered in linear, old-timey “straight-telling” of the story.

6. Detailed description reserved for movements of the spirit. Intricate interior action (cf the dense interiority of the Psalms) making profound passion plain.

7. Hyp Prose works through familiarity: poring over the same chapter, the same verse. Repetition reinforcing the hypnogogic effect.

8. Hyp Prose should move the spirit, in sensitives towards tears. Scripture as empathy training, New Scripture designed to heighten and democratise this effect.

So there you are.

I would be quite pleased for anyone to respond to these eight tenets with (at least) some constructive criticism.

I have had plenty of comments in the nature of “these are crazy and so are you” so if you wouldn't mind holding your fire if that's the way you’re thinking.

It might be better to keep any commentary until after you read the detailed article on a particular tenet but if you have something urgent to say then do go ahead and say it.

Thank you for reading!

P.Julian

You can find more detailed discussion of Hypnogogic Prose and New Scripture at this website if you follow the links.

I also have lots of related content on this blog.

All of my books are available for free on this website (again just follow the links) and they are also posted in a number of downloadable formats at the Internet Archive.

But why oh why are they free PJ?

Because as they always say: true teachings are never sold.

And poverty is apparently a virtue but I’ll get back to you on that one.