A NONSENSICAL PROSE STYLE THROWS THE NORMS OF THE WORLD INTO DOUBT

I opened up the new issue of tin house and I was immediately bored. I already knew that I am easily bored; but I used to have more interest in what was being accepted in mainstream magazines. every story seemed to have the same setup - mention some kind of historical circumstance, bring out a main character to guide us through this factual morass, and, I assume, although I wasn't able to read more than a few sentences of every piece, have that character go through some kind of change and triumph.

I know fiction is formulaic, and this is both comforting and frustrating. the question is whether I am ultimately interested in fiction, or something else. I have decided that I am not usually a storyteller. stories don't occur to me. characters, positions, ideas, random thoughts - those seem to me much more immediate and pressing than some kind of this-happened-then-that-happened sequence. I'm really not usually interested in setting a scene, although that has been known to happen. but if I could somehow boil fiction down to some kind of written-out thought process, I would. I'm trying.

lydia davis does this. she doesn't have stories, she just has these things - essays, testimonials, lists, or whatever - that give you information without bothering with story. the reader can construe a story if she wants. for example she has a thing where she just lists the various maids, over 100 of them, who worked for this woman named Mrs. D., and if you want, you can superimpose a narrative which includes the decline of the maids, although they don't necessarily get progressively worse. they just come and go. this is both closer to reality than most fiction and also less "interesting" because it doesn't spend every sentence trying to entertain you. I got bored while reading it, but I read the whole thing, then wasn't sure how I felt about it.

then there are books which are both nonlinear and nontraditional and entertaining. I read frances johnson for a class. this book is fucking hilarious in a way that is impossible to explain. there are beginnings of storylines - stupid, bizarre ones - but they kind of fizzle out. the only thing unifying the whole mess is the consistency of the characters. otherwise, it's just a collection of funny sentences.

this is the main fake plot, the quest to get this totally bizarre item that makes no sense and is hilarious:

The man scooted forward. "Frances, what if I were to ask you to help me with an errand?"
"Errand? What errand?"
"I'm no competer," Palmer began with controlled excitement. "But like most professionals, I've long been drawing up elaborate plans in my bedroom at night. I may have mentioned my experiments before...you see. I've been tinkering with a wax-and-oil compound for quite a while. The project excites me terribly, Frances. To be exact, I'm trying to invent a special balm."
She listened with absorption, watching the man's chin and its movements.
"I hope that one day, this balm will stand up to criticism, and maybe even help people far away. Does that sound silly?" The man stared ahead, pushing his glasses up his nose, resting his forearms on lean knees. "Well, you see, there's a particular ingredient I need to finish the project, but lack. The stuff isn't available in Munson - "
"You're not like anyone," she observed.
"...and which is not exotic, by any means. It is, however, an unusual, semihardened oil with some far-reaching, healthful properties I've long admired. I want my balm to have pizzazz! Searching for far-flung ingredients is not my forte, however, and I can't take time to travel, not with my responsibilities in town. Frances - can you help? If you find the oil for me, I think it would help us both. Besides, travel makes me queasy. I need the darned oil - "
"What sort of oil?"
"Chicken-beak oil," he replied, "and lots of it. Can the stuff be found in this state? Christ, no! You have to look elsehere," he added softly, and his light eyes bored into hers. "This errand could help you leave town, Frances, as a push, a starting point, a way out of your own hesitation. If you go, I'll be standing right behind you."

I know I am not the only person who gets bored with realistic fiction, and I'm wondering what is at the root of that boredom. it seems connected to this problem of whether or not to accept archetypes, or narratives, which is also bothering me. when I first read joseph campbell I thought that this was essential knowledge that was being forgotten, that every strong story has some kind of mythic basis; but now I'm not sure we should really be reinforcing the same old stories that have been told for years and years. I think many of the people who read a lot are totally bored by them, and tired of being forced to read shakespeare or melville or whatever.

on the other hand, I think there is a lot of stuff getting written now that is not serious in any way, which is good, but I also like serious stuff. even frances johnson has some serious stuff going on which is thematic and can be explored in a conceptual approach. I think it might be an extremely strong example of merging a new style with an old one, although I wish it had been a little more conclusive instead of just meandering until it was done. still, for an audience that gets bored pretty easily, it's more than satisfactory.

narrative is addictive and I don't know that the new crop of writing can do without it; at the same time, the usual causal chain of events that normally drive a narrative might not be enough. certainly, a story based in reality where a character learns from the external world and has a growth experience is easily recognizable to most readers. I think writing a story based in reality is the first mistake a writer can make, I think realism is a myth and my brain won't accept it. whether or not the rest of the world is heading this direction I can't definitively say, but I think there has been a huge upsurge of fiction which deliberately avoids reality in order to interest the reader and be more accurate. I am a fan of this kind of fiction. I think I see realism as a lost cause, as striving toward some perfection of artifice where the reader forgets it is artifice. this is totally impossible.

it's not even "magical realism" I'm talking about, although that definitely fits; it's the kind of fiction where the universe is represented in a manner that is skewed somehow. sometimes the irregularity is in the actual events of the story, which might be impossible in the real world - magical realism - and sometimes it's in the way the thing is told. in either case, we are being confronted with the fact that everything we see is a metaphor, as nietzsche said.

A PARTIAL LIST

1. being open has a lot to do with it. this quality of 'openness' is a hard one to define, but entails taking a basic risk: namely, admitting that you, like anyone else alive, have weaknesses and flaws, are essentially incomplete. this can be done in a zillion different unnameable ways, which everyone performs pretty much every day. if you want to be really inclusive about it you could say that every phone call is a risk - will the other person answer? will there be a connection? implicitly, you are saying, I want a call back. need is scary. every interaction is a potential risk.

2. understanding, the next step of openness; 'understanding' being that fundamental shift in the brain which allows it to recognize an emotion or sensation felt previously by the self, now being felt by the other. in theories on autism the phrase 'theory of mind' comes up a lot (an understatement - autism is sort of incomprehensible without this concept). can you grasp that another human being might potentially feel the same things as you, as a result of having the same hardwiring? and then, if you take into consideration that they have had different life experience, can you extend your theory of mind to include this new thought they might have? and understand it? this step, of course, takes the most work - to construct another brain, on top of the one you already have, could be a process that takes up an entire lifetime (e.g., trying to understand a parent or child), and still be incomplete.

3. can you, then, forgive the differences? can you actively extend yourself by acting with this understanding? and how is this done, exactly, besides not killing/harming other people? do you have to, after finally achieving their perspective, inhibit your own? act like them?

THINGS I WAS THINKING ABOUT WHILE LYING AWAKE FEELING GROSS BECAUSE I DRANK SOME BAD GUINNESS

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.