Living by Fiction (7 page)

O
ddly, almost everyone who can read feels qualified to discuss works of fiction, and even to discuss their merits and demerits in print. You could work yourself into a genuine froth over this: everyone who reads fiction seems to feel qualified to review it. One might as well let children, who eat, judge restaurants. Some book reviewers have no training in literature whatever. Now, no one would collar a man in the street to review a showing of a contemporary painter's work. The man in the street would be decent enough to beg off. So why do people with no special training in literature discuss so unabashedly their tastes in fiction?

The preceding paragraph was a hoax. I want you to feel, as I mostly do, that although its argument has a few
merits in the abstract, it is essentially elitist, curmudgeonly, and morally wrong. Why? We would swallow the same argument about painting or music without demur. Clearly, our assumptions about fiction are different.

In the simple answer to this exaggerated question lies one of fiction's great strengths. It is of course that fiction, as a field, is not entirely the prerogative of specialists. And the fact that fiction is not the prerogative of specialists militates in favor of its traditional virtues simply because nonspecialists prefer depth to abstract surface. Specialists are interested in form; nonspecialists like lots of realized content.

This little social phenomenon is more a symptom than a cause; but it is an interesting one. How many educated Westerners feel free to comment, especially negatively, outside their fields? Who apart from specialists will say of a Di Suvero sculpture, “It doesn't work,” or of a Alvin Lucier composition, “It's no good”? Yet who hesitates to rate contemporary novels? This symptom reveals the assumption that fiction, even when it is literature, should answer to its audience by pleasing it. The notion is still abroad, even, that pleasing an audience is precisely what the fiction writer had in mind. Given these assumptions, any member of the audience—any reader—naturally prizes his own reactions and considers them useful and pertinent. The extreme of this position is Philistinism, which permits a reader to fume and rage, disbelieving, at those contemporary modernist works which do not engage him. The Philistine does not fume and rage on the grounds that the writers' aims are uncongenial, but on the unquestioned assumption that writers
intend
to be congenial first and foremost, that writers' aims are changeless, that everyone is trying to be Charles Dickens.
Of course, by these lights the works fail miserably, and the reader is aghast that living writers could so lack talent to please, and suspects a hoax.

But Philistinism in the raw is not our present concern; and although all this is decidedly unnerving, it is by and large a healthy state. That fiction is not yet the exclusive province of specialists, that those who make it their business to understand it are not quite yet priests, that most of it requires of its audience no initiate status—these things distinguish fiction from most of the best contemporary poetry, music, painting, and sculpture. Fiction has a wide audience. The audience that a serious short story writer or novelist may address is literate and perhaps educated; but it is not necessarily educated in the formal issues of literature per se. All sorts of people read good fiction. All sorts of people may not read Henry Green or Julio Cortázar or Italo Calvino, or even Henry James, Bruno Schulz, or Samuel Beckett, but all sorts of people do read Faulkner, García Márquez, Nabokov, and Grass, say, and the contemporary picaresque novelists. By contrast, the other contemporary arts are marvelously down to essences. They have rid themselves of all impure elements, including an audience.

 

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it. The world's abounding objects, its rampant variety of people, its exuberant, destructive, and unguessable changes, and the splendid interest of its multiple conjunctions, appeal, attract, and engage more than ideas do, and more than beauty bare. When the arts abandon the world as their subject matter, people abandon the
arts. And when wide audiences abandon the arts, the arts are free to pursue whatever theories led them to abandon the world in the first place. They are as free as wandering albatrosses or stamp collectors or technical rock climbers; no one is looking.

I would be the last to argue that fiction's wide audience keeps it responsible. Anyone could far more easily argue that it keeps it mediocre and stunted. This latter position is as familiar and self-evident as it is valid. God only knows what works of art will not see print in this generation, or ever, in the name of that wide audience whose wide neck one so often wishes to wring. Fiction's wide audience does not keep it responsible; it merely inhibits its development away from the traditional.

Contemporary modernist works, which concern themselves as much with the solution of their own formal and intellectual problems as with the peopled world, have no very wide audience save for a few isolated works, like
Lolita
and
Giles Goat-Boy
—which in fact treat of the great world more than their sibling works
The Gift
, say, or
Chimera
. The taste of fiction's wide audience inadvertently preserves fiction in its historical context and keeps fiction's aesthetic impure. These things in turn enable fiction to maintain a breadth of practice, a material density, and a richness of inventive possibility.

All this works only because the wishes of fiction's audience carry weight. So long as fiction is mass marketed, the taste of the “mass” is a
force majeure
. By contrast, the audience preference for representative easel painting is as irrelevant as wind. The audience is no longer attached to the mechanism. The powerful force which drew such enormous crowds—hardly Philistines or mere nostalgics—to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropoli
tan Museum for their Degas, Cézanne, and Monet exhibits is virtually lost, unharnessed to the mechanism of contemporary practice, which whirs, pops, and whistles along untouched in its several corners.

Its wide and influential audience is only one of many factors which keep fiction traditional. Each of these factors, as it muddies the purity of fiction as art, also enhances its popularity. Similarly, everything which encourages fiction's audience also, and incidentally, discourages developments in contemporary modernism.

A case in point is the blurring of fictional genres. Fictional genres blur in a way that plastic art genres have not done since Cellini and Ghiberti turned out hope chests and salt cellars. We do not find Sol LeWitt painting on velvet, nor Rauschenberg trying his hand at motel art. Yet we do find writers of real stature writing literature in any category: spy and detective novels (Chandler), murder mysteries (Robbe-Grillet), gothic romances (Murdoch), fantasies (Calvino), fairy tales (Barth), and science fiction (Disch). We cannot eliminate any genre or any materials across the board, saying, This cannot be art. (Similarly, the large audiences for these sorts of fiction are broad-minded and generous; they do not, I think, discriminate against literature, saying of a Graham Greene spy novel, This cannot be good.)

Publishers encourage this healthy confusion, seeking readers where they can. They fertilize these fields heavily, and reap the harvest. The advertising and jacket copy of books make little or no distinctions between junk fiction and works of art, and in fact may cloud the issue. The issue is certainly clouded anyway. It is clouded even in the minds of critics, even in the minds of writers: who among serious literary novelists or short story writers
dearly wishes not to be widely read? And conversely, what junk novelist, no matter how calculating, no matter how languidly he taped his latest blockbuster from the deck of no matter how large a boat, will dismiss any suggestion that his novels may, in fact, in part, in significance, or in skill, in the long run be considered literature?

The journals which print reviews also seem at times to dwell in a marketing wonderland of undifferentiated objects called “books.” If the new Updike novel is good and the new Junker is good, reviews saying so are apt to appear on facing pages. Rarely does one find a printed distinction drawn between real literature and mere entertainment. It is as though distinctions, per se, might be thought illiberal. Since most serious contemporary fiction falls somewhere between realism and contemporary modernism, and since good literature is usually entertaining, most new novels please in many ways. Both reviewers and the journals which print reviews would be hard put to define all these overlapping categories.

No one, in fact, is losing sleep over these things anyway—over the blurring of genres in fiction and the blurred distinctions between literature and non-literature—although they interest me enormously. Is
Appointment in Samarra
literature?
Sweet Thursday? The Bridge of San Luis Rey?
Is
On the Road
literature? If it is, was it when it was published?

Of course, literary fashion, which may determine which contemporary works are considered canonical, is a whimsical thing, determined by nobody in particular, and stressing authors as dead personalities. As I go to press, for instance, Steinbeck's stock seems to be very low, and presumably that of his novels as well, on the wondrous grounds that he was not always a nice guy,
and even on the grounds that as a philosopher (!) he was not entirely original, but instead openly acknowledged that his friend Ed Ricketts influenced his thinking. Similarly, Flannery O'Connor's stock seems to be high at the moment, and perhaps even, by extension, that of her cryptic, Catholic stories, on the grounds that her posthumous letters show that she was witty and knew her place. The concepts of canon and literature do not coincide. Canon is an historical category which includes failed works of literature like Shakespeare's worst play and
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. Contemporary works of highest-quality literature, like Fred Chappell's novels say, or Doris Betts's stories, are not yet canonical; they must wait until time, or the cult of personality, catches up with them.

 

Among works of nonfiction, which are literature and which are not? Surely there is a distinction between such works as
A River Runs Through It, Green Hills of Africa
, and
Wind, Sand and Stars
and other nonfiction, from field guides to cookbooks. But where are the boundaries? Is
In Patagonia
literature? People seem to think so, apparently because it is very well written, sentence by sentence, and nothing happens in it. Precisely where does journalism or memoir become literature? Surely Gorky's
My Childhood
and Nabokov's
Speak, Memory
are literature, because Gorky and Nabokov are canonical. But what of John Cowper Powys's
Autobiography?
This is a strong, vivid, and eccentric artifice whose author is not quite canonical.

I have never read a story better than
Endurance
, Alfred Lansing's account of the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica; but no one considers it literature. If Mailer had written it, might we not read the same text as a parable of
something or other? The matter of context here is interesting. When Capote called
In Cold Blood
literature, he made it more likely to be read as literature than is, say,
Hiroshima
, whose author kept mum.

Mailer's
The Executioner's Song
is the new case in point. Mailer's calling this documentary account of the life and death of convict Gary Gilmore a novel seems to say, This text is meaningful, it is a work of art. The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism. This is interesting because it means that in two centuries our assumptions have been reversed. Formerly the novel was junk entertainment; if you wanted to write significant literature—if you wanted to do art or make an object from ideas—you wrote nonfiction. We now think of nonfiction as sincere and artless. According to Wesleyan historian Henry Abelove, this changed assumption makes it impossible for modern historians to understand seventeenth-and eighteenth-century texts so long as they assume that people have always written essays in order to proffer ideas in which they sincerely believed. In fact, writers then were more apt to write essays for the same reason that Wallace Stevens wrote poems. Now we have come half circle. Now the novel is seen as the literary form, the art form. This is actually great news, for which we have to thank generations of serious novelists and also the defenders of the novel at the much-publicized 1933
Ulysses
controversy. Less great are its implications for nonfiction.

Mailer gets it both ways. Nonfiction is more popular than fiction; but no one is in danger of mistaking
The Executioner's Song
for invention. What if another novelist, say a housewife in Illinois, contrived a novel about a fictional murderer who was executed to national fanfare?
What if this fabrication matched Gary Gilmore's actual life? What if it matched Mailer's text? Would the meaning be the same? Would anyone give a blessed fig? If you want to analyze society, people will listen to your data, but not your parables. Diane Johnson, reviewing
The Executioner's Song
for the
New York Review of Books
, wrote: “It is finally the fact that all this really happened that moves us most.”

 

Similar juggling of context surrounds Melville's
The Encantadas
. This wonderful essay, a wholly factual account of the Galapagos Islands, is always considered fiction—for no reason which I can learn. Is it because Melville usually wrote fiction? Is it because it is narrative? Is it because the characters are colorful? Is it because it is
good?
Or is it because much of it is hearsay?