The work of fiction doesn’t really exist
until it is read.* And thus the effort of keeping a reader’s eyes and mind (and
maybe heart) glued to the page is attending to the entertainment value of the
work. This brings up the question of, is what we do as writers meant to
entertain? This idea can seem sacrilegious, because we’d like to believe our
work is about artistry. Yet why should artistry exclude being
entertaining? Though I’ve often felt
people will try to argue me into this position, particularly those people who
imagine they will become the next Steig Larson—claiming that “Fiction isn’t
art, it’s only meant to entertain.” The problem with this is the
absolutism. A lot of the party lines established in these arguments exclude
this one notion by which a work succeeds or fails: did the writing keep you
reading?
Sometimes in reading you can become bored
and can be assured that the writer must have been bored when writing.
This is a truth I hold to be self-evident:
At the very least, a piece of fiction has to keep you reading.
This, for some reason, has become the
determinant of the experimental versus realist divide.
There is an assumption that if you like
avant garde work, or experimental fiction, that you can’t have much interest in
making your work desired to be read, and this follows around any writer who
professes an interest in experimental work.
While researching the review for Ben
Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, (available
to read here via Rain Taxi), I read his long Harper’s essay “Why
Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destory Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and
Life as We Know It: A Correction.” Written in 2005, the piece, which isn’t dated at all, is
an intriguing insight into just how much of a struggle there is in this divide
for a would-be commercial fiction writer who aspires to practice in a strain of
the experimental.
One conclusion? Jonathan Franzen suffers
from having bought into the idea of the ascendancy of experimental literature
in the late 80s and early 90s, only to have failed to have actually written any
novels with spine or teeth--or known skeletal structure at all--and then
feeling betrayed by the failure to achieve the requisite fame from his
religion, only going on to find success when he sold out his po-mo leanings to
write straightforward realism. Selling out his “radical” past is what he’s been
doing ever since. Eventually atoning to the gods of realism because he feels betrayed
by the evil Gaddis, Coover, Hawkes, et al. This occurred, according to Marcus,
in the years between 1996 and 2005.
The turnaround for Franzen? He had been
writing books that no one wanted to read. Which is not to say they resembled
anything experimental. Rather, Franzen’s early work is only partially
successful in terms of reader engagement, and bears no semblance to anything
experimental. Mostly, I think, they are just unsuccessful as novels. If we’re talking
about quality, it’s easy to criticize a writer who seems not to want to be left
out of the flavor of the month game.
After The
Corrections he figured it out. He wanted to keep a reader reading. Freedom is the full flowering of his
mission and is successful on this eminent readability count, though the
unexpected praise that he received from N+1 for this novel was strange and
unwarranted adulation from a group that acts like it wants to be the rear-guard
action of the avant garde.
With a lot of these arguments, I find
myself questioning the either / or nature of whether one is an experimental
writer or a realist. In my ideal world, I would like to think that one could
write a number of different ways that suit their purposes for whatever piece
they are writing. Yet so often, one seems required to pledge their allegiance
to this camp, or that one. There is almost a defensiveness that creeps in to
arguments as to the definition of the fictional journey for oneself.
To quote Marcus, there is a strand of
realism; “[a]t its worst, it’s uninspired, dull and oppressively devoted to its
modern forebears Cheever and Updike, and it wears such a heavy tire mark on the
exhausted assumptions of psychology that reading it is akin to constantly
crawling from a trench of received ideas.” (Harpers essay, pg 43)
I’m guessing one could attribute to the
opposite camp, for all intents and purposes, experimentalism, a similar kind of
diagnosis—and any dull or uninspired fiction would fall into the category. In
fact, I think it could be argued that this is more likely with
experimental work, for how varied the parameters by which it might be judged
successful. I feel a little sting at Marcus taking a gut shot at Cheever and
Updike, yet I’m also skeptical. There is room for many approaches, even one
that might find inspiration in Cheever, of whom frequent Marcus champion and,
himself, equally criticized practitioner of his own realism (of a kind),
Michael Chabon, has been known to idolize.
Though I have an open heartedness toward,
usually, anything innovative and challenging which can border on an excited eagerness
to read—maintaining my own not so secret pedestal for Beckett—I often imagine
my leaning is toward the experimental (so many of my advisors were clearly in ghettoized
experimental camps), though I’m quite sure I haven’t pushed the boundaries and
am rather more working in the realism tradition. I assume that what Marcus is
saying is, we should challenge ourselves, ultimately. And if you are engaged
with your fiction, it’s hard to see how this won’t produce something novel,
compelling and hopefully, inspired. And that will keep readers reading.
*I would have timidly denied this before I
ever had anything published, I’m sure; now I tend to understand this idea as
putting my will into my writing so that someone will want to read it. And it
has to be at that level for me to put it out there—like I’m signaling a sinking
ship, throwing up flares for some distant horizon.
