I was thinking, as I frequently do, about the truth underlying contemporary fiction. the truth is that the world is a copy of a copy of a copy, to us; we can’t use the old symbols because we’ve seen their likeness everywhere from Hollywood movies to advertisements for cereal. e.g., I wanted to include a lighthouse in my story but I realized that was one of the most cliché symbols available to me. I feel certain that, at least in my own case, being straightforward is impossible.
you could argue that fiction and art in general has reached the end of its rope and there is nothing left, but I would argue against that. though it might get weirder, it will always be changing. maybe it will double back somewhat, catching up with and then lapping what has been written before. but it will be new. there is no such thing as the end of art.
so also I was thinking about the bookworm interview with Michael silverblatt on KCRW I listened to yesterday while I was cleaning my bathroom. DFW was talking about IJ – it was 1996 – and he began to talk about romantic era literature, and how those writers were serving a totally different purpose, and were sort of straightforwardly emoting and generally focusing on expressing, their own selves being the end-all of the creative process. but now, DFW was saying, there is an entirely different spirit behind writing which incorporates a reader and so the model is less like a speech and more like a conversation, and this invites all kinds of difficulties with appearance versus actual intent and opportunities to be misrepresented and misinterpreted.
during this interview I stopped cleaning my bathroom and just stood there and said to no one, “wow, did he really just explain the last several hundred years of literature in the space of two minutes?” I felt like I had never heard anything so succinct and useful. I feel that way pretty much anytime I listen to him, but in this interview especially I was just transported by what he was saying.
ok. then the other thing I was thinking about and making a brand new connection to was the group of writers who self-promote mostly over the internet and like to incorporate various absurdist techniques into their fiction. all of their characters, pretty much, are socially awkward and maybe don’t like people too much. more than that – they seem to purposefully misunderstand people, to kind of dig a nice hole of misunderstanding in which they are warm and comfortable and can hibernate. I had been aware of this but I had never thought of it in the context of DFW’s points on irony and empathy – this is the high ironic style he was talking about, this is its current manifestation. I thought about how in general terms this fiction was not about connecting to other people; it was about mapping places where there was a huge disconnect.
I’m not sure how a writer can manage to incorporate empathy into their work. this is something I would like to get more of a handle on. usually people find the character they identify most with, and the empathy comes in there. the characters don’t really have to be “good”, they just have to resemble something you can recognize. I think that’s pretty standard. but how do you generate a love for Other, instead of wonderful, funny, familiar Self? Tolstoy was obsessed with peasant life for some time in his career, and he wanted to portray those people sympathetically. Chekhov was insanely good at writing real, three-dimensional characters that were not him. I mean there are tons of examples everywhere. so that is good, that is not really new.
and yet. the other general topic I was thinking about, thanks to listening to these KCRW interviews, was how revolutionary it was for DFW to write like a person talks or thinks. he explained the “and but so” phrase that is so famous – he said, this is like when you hear an intelligent person talking fast and really getting warmed up and when they begin a new thought they insert three prepositions instead of one, because they’re not even sure yet if it’s going to be in agreement with the previous thought or opposition or just a continuation. I thought, DFW had even more of an idea of what he was doing that I ever realized. I felt dumb.
and but so – this is something I like about the new absurdist/ironic works, that they do attempt to mimic a certain style of speaking or thinking and not change everything into a literary sentence. that part at least is good. but can even that be a factor used to divide the glorious author from the much stupider audience? there is no way, after all, to point to an author and say “that voice is disingenuous because s/he doesn’t really think like that”. DFW was misinterpreted often as being pretentious but he worked really hard, I think, to explore complex territory without ignoring the fact that the reader might be just a little bit stupider than him and need some help keeping up. in a way this is just a take on the old how-much-do-you-reveal question which isn’t exclusive to just his works; how much do you make the reader guess? how much do you explain? that’s an old thing. maybe there aren’t actually any new questions.
after I thought about these things long enough I felt divorced from the ironic style of some of the twentysomething authors that are getting published in small house presses. I don’t know what fiction is supposed to be, if anything. there’s nothing wrong with books that are snide and entertaining. is there? but I at last understood DFW’s points on irony in a very immediate manner, because I had made this connection myself.
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