Fiction
Many onlookers and occasional practitioners were eager in modern times to announce the death of this or that art form. Painting died, classical music died, formal dance died, the novel died, the sonnet died: the obituary list is an imposing one. This funereal impulse, replete with shouts of “good riddance,” emanated from that craving for novelty and impatience with tradition that were hallmarks of a modernism preternaturally alert to any signs of anything being worn out. Suspicion alone was ground enough to announce a genre’s demise.
Fiction did not die. Countless remarkable books were written during the age of modernism, books that often challenged notions of how fiction could be constructed but that remained securely within the domain of the fictive impulse: their authors made things up. As far as fiction was concerned, time did not have a stop. The variations on the human themes—love, loss, childhood, coming of age, death, ordeals of one sort or another—were endless. Through finite means, fiction registered the infinity of human actions and insights. Although it typically spoke to the mores of some socialized world, fiction emanated from a very deep place in the human psyche, where narrative met imagination. The narrative might be fragmented—for understandable reasons modernists adored fragments—and the imagination might cleave to real events or invent pure fables, but the power generated by the confluence of those two forces was undeniable.
I grew up as part of a generation that, for those who had an interest in literature, testified to the power of fiction. Everyone had read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and writers perhaps not now as widely read but very much read when I was young such as Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and Edith Wharton. We experienced writers such as Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and J.D. Salinger, among others, as revelations. Aiming to write the great American novel was a cliché of sorts but spoke to the feeling that fiction somehow could give voice to the impossible sprawl and complexity of the nation. In order to understand the nation it was necessary to read its fiction. Strong feelings went with that reading and not just in the United States. Joseph Brodsky wrote that in the Soviet world in which he grew up, quarrels about the relative value of Hemingway versus Faulkner could break up friendships.
Over the course of my lifetime, something happened, to quote a title of a Heller novel. Though plenty of worthwhile and often powerfully moving and acute fiction continued to be written, the sense grew that somehow fiction was not up to the demands of the real world with its space travel, genocides, sex changes, revolutions, and computers, to choose five categories among many. Reality was at once startling and dumbfounding. The human race came to inhabit a permanent Ripley’s Believe It or Not, even as Ripley’s became quaint and passed into cultural oblivion.
There was a concomitant sense that literary imagination was irrelevant. Put very bluntly, it wasn’t true. Whether lavish or modest, it offered little more than decorations and fakeries. The rise of reality shows on television testified to the need to be in touch with actualities of many stripes, mostly sensationalistic and often utterly trite. The relentless surge of nonfiction books about every conceivable topic testified to the need to know something unassailable. Information—an array of details—offered an alternative to the singularity of a fictive vision. A book about a topic offered a sense of something to fasten onto that would not evaporate into mere feelings.
Philip Roth once noted in a Paris Review interview that “The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction.” The “noise” is all the cajoling, demanding, testifying, advising, ordering, wheedling, instructing, lying, and miscellaneous advertising (attempts to “change, persuade, tempt, and control” in Roth’s words) that goes on under the rubrics of politics, entertainment, and commerce. Reality gives us each day a set of blinders; fiction takes them off. This may seem cock-eyed because fiction is made up, but, because it is made up, fiction possesses a freedom that readers may partake of. Its means are not bound up in any profit-making, power-mongering ends. An alert story is always going to be more than a message. The peculiar textures of any well wrought, fictive moment are incontrovertible.
At their best, those stories possess especial insight. Typically, as the lives of the writers testify, those insights are hard won. To have written a book such as Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates was to have opened a door into a reality that everyone recognized—the lure of suburban America and the fates of the women who lived in those houses—yet no one had entered. That was an enormously important story, just as April Wheeler was as important a character as Hester Prynne, Isabelle Archer, or Daisy Buchanan. It seems impossible to live in the United States and not know who those four characters are but clearly that is not true.
That unknowing may be in part because many of the stories happened in something vaguely known as “the past” and hence not applicable to the present. Perhaps because such stories were often encountered under the aegis of education and responses to the stories wound up being analyzed and graded, the stories became burdens or mere exercises in attentive (or inattentive) reading. Again, there may come to be a feeling that fiction is something lesser because it is so vulnerable to reduction: the book was about how Puritans were hypocrites or the Jazz Age wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Holden Caulfield was some loser kid.
Reality impresses because it occurs in real time. Fiction is suspended in a wordy ether that spreads time out as the reader enters the lives of the characters. Fiction works a spell but, unless it is outright fantasy, keeps pertaining to some daily world. That pertaining was and is a mysterious process. Inside even the most prosaic novel or short story, there lies a heady equation: fictive life equals and does not equal real life. To be so impressed with inventions and events (or merely hypnotized by them) so as to abandon faith in the visionary power of fiction was to give up on the tutelary nature of imagination. Whether things were falling apart or coming together, fiction proffered a precious coherence.
A superb essay----I loved “....a precious coherence.” Cheers.....
Such an reasoned and passionate voice on matters that are so important! Thank you.