ABlog

Last Sunday (8/7/05), the NY Times Book Review ran an exceedingly irritating essay by Rachel Donadio. Entitled “Truth Is Stronger Than Fiction,” the piece finds merit in the proposition, advanced by V.S. Naipaul, that “nonfiction is better suited than fiction to capturing the complexities of today’s world.” One reason why I find the piece irksome is its connection to Donadio’s fawning interview with the reactionary Naipaul in the same issue of the TBR. (She gushes over the fact that the Trinidadian Nobel winner is capable of swathing his Orientalist attacks on “Islamic fundamentalism” in such marvelous bits of significant detail as the consumption of a plate of fried eggs by a supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini.) An appreciation of my more fundamental objection requires a more extensive quote:

“Another major writer, the novelist Ian McEwan,…said that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, he turned to history books, and books on Islam and imperialism. ‘For a while I did find it wearisome to confront invented characters,’ McEwan said on ‘The Charlie Rose Show’ in March. ‘I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes, and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.’”

Donadio goes on to provide a list of major magazines (The Atlantic, GQ, Esquire) that have severely scaled down their fiction offerings. “Depending on your worldview, fiction and nonfiction are either ensconced in a healthy, mutually affirming relationship, or they’re locked in a death grip, vying for America’s attention. Publishers are constantly debating which of the two is on top.”

How very American—and free enterprise-oriented—and how totally idiotic to set the two genres up as pugilists in a winner-take-all competition. Yet Donadio’s speculation, however oddly framed, does connect to my own questions about the dearth of contemporary U.S. fiction that attains what she calls the “eschatological urgency and ‘morally charged’ subjects of…nonfiction reportage.”

I’d like to turn the question around for a moment, conceding the point that the actual practice of fiction (in the U.S., anyway) is by and large falling short; conceding, as well, that there may be a variety of factors in the evolution of the genre that contribute to that failure; but also positing that there is nothing intrinsic to the novel that prevents it from mustering both a vivid sense of our historical emergency and the ethical imagination necessary to confront that crisis. At the very least, why isn’t U.S. fiction making a more vigorous effort to rise to the occasion?

I shall advance a few theses on the topic, for further discussion at a later date.

(1) Noting that such historically conscious, ethically engaged fiction is not being published is not necessarily to say that nobody is writing it. Furthermore, noting that such fiction is not being reviewed in the Times Book Review is not to say it’s not being published. Given the structure of the U.S. publishing industry, the great likelihood is that anything politically and formally challenging enough to seem equal to our “eschatological” circumstances will have a difficult time getting noticed, in the unlikely event that it succeeds in finding a publisher. There is currently a tremendous bias against literary fiction that requires more than a modest outlay of work on the part of the reader: anything that fails immediately to entertain, and/or to offer the comfort of a neat, familiar narrative arc. Some weeks ago, I complained about the predictability of structure and language—the signal lack of imagination—in the Left Behind series of Christian thrillers. I consider these novels to be a crude but telling instance of how a commercially viable fiction project in this country is likely to approach the gravity of the times: with a formula (as though the gravity of the times did not consist precisely in the stunning inadequacy of all formulas to describe or respond to it). Add to this taboo on formal surprise the kneejerk equation of any truly radical political questioning with a lack of artistic quality (an equation that the U.S. cultural establishment has been perfecting since the early days of the Cold War) and you have a pretty good recipe for the suppression of “eschatological urgency” and moral depth.

(2) Pressure for “topicality” (Donadio quotes Philip Gourevitch, new editor of The Paris Review and author of a celebrated nonfiction book about the genocide in Rwanda, as saying, “There’s an intense emphasis on topicality that also happens to coincide with a time when fiction is not particularly topical”) may actually work against the production of fiction that engages with our historical emergency. Tying oneself to actual events can be far too limiting. The literal only tells us what we already know (or could glean from the ubiquitous nonfiction reportage). The strictly topical is one- or at best two-dimensional—and its shelf life is five minutes.

(3) The carefully cultivated (imperial/bourgeois) prejudice that fiction is concerned with “private life” to the exclusion of public events has left most American fiction writers with precious few skills for making “the world” more than the “backdrop” to their work. But American/imperial/bourgeois fiction is not fiction in general, despite the reluctance of our publishing industry to allow us access to fiction coming from other traditions (especially when this would require translation).

(4) While nonfiction may be popular, the narrative conventions of nonfiction distort the world’s complexity just as much as do the narrative conventions of fiction. Specifically, demands for shapeliness, for climax, for resolution, and for characters with whom the reader can “identify” all tend to work against the “truth” of nonfiction narrative, if by “truth” we mean precisely the overwhelmingness of the world’s complexity that seems so salient now, and so difficult to grasp. For example, Gourevitch’s book about Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, depends heavily on the portrayal of several figures as real life heroes.

(5) Fiction relevant to the current predicament will not likely be written by people who were awakened to a sense that history is not going very well—and that this situation deserves literary treatment—only by the events of September 11, 2001.

(6) Fiction relevant to this period will be written by people who are interested in the interconnectedness of past, present, and future—not those for whom the judgment “that’s history” is a put-down (like the young Japanese man who wrote in a Times Op-Ed on August 7th that “at bottom, the bombings [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] don’t really matter to me, or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation”). This moment belongs to those who can establish their own original relationship to the past, not to those who believe that relevance means sloughing off the mark of the past. (See #2, above.)

(7) Fiction relevant to this period will be written by people who are not too hung up on writing things that “look like fiction.” Perhaps we will have to smash forms, like punk rockers smashing their instruments on stage. Perhaps we will need to recognize a book like "poet" Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely as a kind of fiction. Perhaps we will need to recognize that it’s not just European men—W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard—whose obsessions, enshrined in narratives stubbornly lacking every ingratiating hallmark of people-oriented “literary” fiction, nevertheless deserve to be read.

(8) Fiction relevant to this period will be written by people who cast their buckets of inspiration down into the deep, not quite dry wells of innovative fiction past (the science fiction and social-speculative fiction of the 1960’s and 70’s, including the British New Wave sci fi writers and Monique Wittig; writers like Christa Wolfe and John Edgar Wideman; writers like Leslie Silko and N. Scott Momaday and Chinua Achebe, who meld a deep knowledge of indigenous oral literatures with elements of the European literary tradition (and who often connect to local histories of world-ending, a.k.a. genocide).

(8) If no-world is possible, then everything is allowed, including the risk of being ridiculous on paper; including the risk of going unread (in a world that has effectively extinguished itself, even Hamlet and Harry Potter will go unread!), including the risk of being wholly noncommercial--a joke in the marketplace.

(9) Fiction that engages with our actual situation will have a ritual dimension. The most efficient “ax for the frozen sea within” will not be not mimetic but metaphoric (like the work of the man who first made reference to that ax).

RUNNING TAB

August 6, 2005: The 60th (sixtieth) anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I was glad I missed the survivors’ testimony on Democracy Now. I did not want to hear the memorial musical compositions featured on WNYC, or was it WQXR.