Grant Faulkner

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that Invites Manifestos

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It’s odd to say, but I have a soft spot in my heart for manifestos.

Despite what some might see as a fuming belligerence that characterizes our age (tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sheen, etc.), I think we’re hampered by a cultural tendency to be overly polite, especially when it comes to the arts.

Go to France and England and you’ll find people practically dueling over an aesthetic or intellectual dispute—and then inviting each other to dinner the following week for round two. But in the U.S., I’ve seen friendships break up over an artistic difference voiced only the slightest bit ardently—as if to talk passionately and argumentatively is bad manners. Kumbaya.

We’re a country of book clubs whose main purpose is to drink wine and chitchat about novels that go half-read and half-thought-about.

For God’s sake, let’s take our reading seriously and argue the hell out of it. Our books aim to represent life after all, metaphysically and phenomenologically. So…do you agree with an author’s take on reality or not?

That’s why I love the often pugilistic tone David Shields takes as he essentially puts up his dukes to the literary establishment in Reality Hunger. At the heart of Reality Hunger is Shields’s critique of the literary world’s rather stodgy proclivity to privilege the traditional realist novel as the mirror of reality—a representation of reality that has held firm since the 19th century despite all of the world’s changes.

What if Impressionism had continued as the dominant art form for the last 100-plus years, but just with different subject matter? What if Cubism still dominated the art world for that matter? Think of all of the exciting, compelling, challenging, wondrously disturbing (or disgustingly disturbing) art we would have been deprived of.

So Shields takes on this intractable monolith of realism, the novel, and exposes the form for its calcifications, limitations, and, well, its sometimes God awful boringness (Shields says he’d rather die than read Jonathon Franzen—oh, if there were a literary death match on TV, I’d love to see Shields vs. Franzen).

It’s all about a definition of reality in the end. “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art,” Shields writes (or does he write, because the book is an assemblage of short, aphoristic entries, many of which are plagiarized—with plagiarism operating as a premise of reality, so is it really plagiarism?).

There’s a disturbing complacency in how the majority of the reading public has come to unquestioningly accept the standards of literary fiction—usually written in the third person, adhering to Flauberts style indirect libre, removed from the heartbeat of reality that’s so immediate in a first person narrative of an essay or memoir that doesn’t adhere but explores, ventures, jaunts, and perhaps even fails.

Yes, fails.

Shields appreciates a text’s rawness—a messiness that is absent from much contemporary fiction and much of the real-life fiction foisted upon us in our lives, whether it takes the form of a politician, a newscaster, or an advertisement.

He prefers the essay—the attempt—to the polish of the three act plots that guide most novels. “My medium is prose, not the novel,” Shields writes.

By emphasizing prose, Shields neuters plot. To read in pursuit of the end, or at least the next, is one way to read, but Shields asserts the meaning of the moment, a narrative of pauses and drifts of dramatic tension (yes, dramatic tension that can occur without plot).

“The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention,” he writes (quoting John D’Agata and Deborah Tall).

On the other hand, novels tend to be written toward conclusions instead of questions.

“The novel goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential,” Shields says. “You can always feel the wheels grinding.”

What fun is it to read such a grind of authorial construction? Somewhere within that grind, you can almost feel an agent or editor looking over the author’s shoulder. The click of a stopwatch that says it’s now time for the reversal, now time for the denouement.

Think simply of most characters in realist novels, who generally operate around one or two contradictions or counterpoints—life represented as relatively neat and tidy in comparison to the many personas and doubling backs and strivings that form most of us.

Shields is after something without so much artifice, which is why he says that memoir and creative nonfiction are the most compelling genres of our age. Life not as it’s represented via authorial filtering, but as it’s lived.

“Not only is life mostly failure, but in one’s failures or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self,” says Shields.

But here’s where I stub my toe with Shields. I don’t buy that the best “fiction” is being written as nonfiction, although I appreciate how he emphasizes the fictionality of nonfiction.

If anything, I feel that we’re living in an age where memoir has become bloated. As Neil Genzlinger put it so perfectly in the “The Problem with Memoirs,” “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.”

I think what Shields is actually getting at is Camus’s thought that writing should be confession. “A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”

To use Franzen as an example again (just because I love picking on him), his novels read with the wheels grinding, the studious craft of storytelling guiding every sentence. But his novels don’t read as anything close to confession. And that’s the problem. To write with a sense of confession brings writer and reader closer to a hungered for reality.

To strive for authenticity is different than striving for what is real—and this is the crux that dooms much realistic fiction. The literal truths (which Franzen aspires to capture in his socioeconomic approach to characterizaiton) aren’t as important as the poetic truths (which, say, Bolano or Kundera aspire to).

“You adulterate the truth as you write,” says Shields.

Forms must change.

“If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.”

And write manifestos. And break forms. And then write manifestos again. Here here.

The death of fiction…one more time

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As much as I loath “death of fiction” articles, I’m compelled by them. I guess it’s the watching a train wreck thing. Except that it’s watching the wreck of the train I’m traveling in.

Damn.

The “death of fiction” is actually a new and thriving genre. By the time fiction actually dies, each and every reputable journal, magazine, and newspaper (and, um, blog and website and wiki and other doodads) will have predicted and analyzed its demise. Roll over Tolstoy, Augusten Burroughs is singing the blues.

Mother Jones just published a keenly insightful reckoning of lit mags, those subsidized tomes that usually make their homes at the nation’s finer universities, and have carried the torch of publishing challenging and emerging authors for a good century or so. The article is penned by Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, who’s seen by parents he meets at his children’s activities as practicing an “arcane craft they assumed was kept alive only by a lost order of nuns in a remote mountain convent or by the Amish in some print shop in Pennsylvania Dutch Country.”

Not only does Genoways provide the mathematical analysis of the doomed (the number of creative writing programs multiplied by the number of graduates each year, etc.–which tallies somewhere in the millions, or it might as well), but he provides an interesting angle into how we got into this vicious circle of storytelling demise (not that it could have been avoided) after commercial mags started dropping fiction.

One would think that the rapid eviction of literature from the pages of commercial magazines would have come as a tremendous boon to lit mags, especially at the schools that have become safe harbors for (and de facto patrons of) writers whose works don’t sell enough to generate an income. You would expect that the loyal readers of established writers would have provided a boost in circulation to these little magazines and that universities would have seen themselves in a new light—not just promoting the enjoyment of literature but promulgating a new era of socially conscious writing in the postcommercial age. But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

I’m not sure if his analysis is entirely true–maybe readers just started watching TV or playing video games or doing drugs or reading blogs by jackasses, present company included. I don’t know.

I remember reading that fiction was the number one reason people bought magazines in the ’20s (hence paychecks of $3,000 to $5,000 for a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerad), but now it’s the last reason anyone would buy a magazine–which is why even magazines with a literary heritage have quit publishing fiction.

Genoways lists several lit journals that have been around for ages (e.g., TriQuarterly, which never accepted one of my real world stories), but are losing their skin to the axe swipes of budget cuts (who’s going to notice, or care, when the journals disappear is the argument of the administration). So, he says, like newspapers, lit journals have to think fast–go out there and get an audience.Now, dammit!!

So, in short, game over.

Still, this odd game of fiction persists–whether in online form or other rogue ways. Although the 822 MFA programs in the nation are like guppies on Viagra breeding out of control, they represent and produce a hungry reading and writing public.

To tell the truth, I read a lot of books–short story collections, poetry, novels, literary criticism, etc.–but I never really read literary journals, despite buying them regularly. There was always something a bit unappealing about them.They were often just overly serious tomes, prohibiting by design. Obdurately opaque. Of the tower, not the street.

Maybe, as Genoways writes, I just never saw myself in them even though I, like every writer I know, submits to them.

Maybe this is a good chance to revisit some of the Bay Area’s lit mags. ZZZYVAA, Fourteen Hills, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, to mention the obvious ones. And, oh yeah, The Three Penny Review and Narrative. Gosh, it suddenly doesn’t feel like ficiton is dying. It feels like it’s everywhere. Just check out this list of Bay Area lit orgs, publishers, magazines, etc.

Lionel Trilling: Fiction and Politics

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Every fiction writer or critic has to eventually face the question, “Why write?”

Fiction, whether great or mediocre or downright bad, might be nothing more than entertainment for many, or a trophy on a book shelf for others (how many people read Infinite Jest is something I want to know).

And how many novels do we need, anyway? Couldn’t there be a 20 year hiatus, or perhaps strict limitations on how many novels should be published each year? What would happen in such a case?

Perhaps nothing, but I just read an article on Lionel Trilling in the New Yorker that provided a good riposte to anyone who poses such questions.

The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.

The word variousness is key here. Perhaps no research can make a connection between reading and writing and the kind of conscience that holds possibility, complexity, and difficulty in a single thought, but this is the value I like to ascribe to writing and reading.

It’s at once political, as Trilling notes, but something more: a matter of the soul. And the two are one.

People’s political opinions may be rigid; they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to float up out of some mixture of sentiment, custom, moral aspiration, and aesthetic pleasingness. Trilling’s point was that this does not make those opinions any less potent politically. On the contrary, it’s the unexamined attitudes and assumptions—things that people take to be merely matters of manners or taste, and nothing so consequential as political positions—that need critical attention. “Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” as Trilling put it, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.”

Trilling thought that people’s literary preferences tell us something about their conception of what he called “the sentiment of being”: about the kind of people they wish to be and about the way they wish others to be—that is, about their morality and their politics.

Trilling’s viewpoint borders on using literary preferences not only as a window to the soul, but as a window to psychology and politics.

Which begs the question, why is Robert Jordan both Barack Obama and John McCain’s favorite literary hero? Here’s an essay in The New York Times to ponder.

And speaking of variousness, here’s Trilling and Nabokov discussing Lolita:

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop: A Love Affair of Letters

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I used to love to write letters.

I think letters were my genre. I wrote better letters than I wrote short stories or poems or novels or scripts or journal entries.

I thought of my friendships through letters. I dashed to the mailbox each day with anticipation. I wrote letters that passed through days and weeks–full of confessions, observations, pretensions, aspirations.

But I no longer write letters. I’d actually feel a bit foolish writing a letter these days, especially the sort of literary letter I used to write. I suppose I’d feel foolish because all of my friends are on email (or Facebook or Twitter!), and they wouldn’t respond to my letter with a letter. They might not respond at all, in fact–unless I emailed them.

I’ve wondered for a while whether the advent of email would spell the demise of collections of letters between authors or lovers or great leaders–and all of the interesting insights they provide.

After reading the New York Times review of Words in Air, the letters that Robert Lowell and Elizabeth, I think the answer is yes. Email just doesn’t quite encourage the kind of luxurious indulgence in self and relation to another like a letter does. There’s something about the process of writing a letter, sending it, and waiting for a response–the time and geography of it all–that creates a dramatic tension. And then there is the pen on the paper, the personality of a letter, the pauses between thoughts and sentences, the need to express more than just a passing thought.

Words in Air presents 30 years of correspondence conducted across continents and oceans as their poetry drove them together and their lives kept them apart. What a lovely premise for a friendship of letters–except that their letters also formed a peculiar love affair, a lively collaboration, a critical treatise, a comfort.

“I think I must write entirely for you,” Lowell wrote to her. (Somehow, I think the phrase, “I think I must email entirely for you,” seems less poingnant)

Eight years before he died, he wrote, “I seem to spend my life missing you!”

William Logan writes, “Their admiration even made them light fingered — they borrowed ideas or images the way a neighbor might steal a cup of sugar. Lowell was especially tempted by this lure of the forbidden, using one of Bishop’s dreams in a heartbreaking poem about their might-have-been affair, or rewriting in verse one of her short stories. They were literary friends in all the usual ways, providing practical advice (the forever dithery and procrastinating Bishop proved surprisingly pragmatic), trading blurbs, logrolling as shamelessly as pork-bellied senators (Lowell was adept at dropping the quiet word on her behalf). There was a refined lack of jealousy between them — that particular vice never found purchase, though in letters to friends they could afford the occasional peevish remark about each other. “

Sure, it could have all happened online. Except that it wouldn’t have, or it would have all transpired differently–with the cursory comments, the tiny jousts and flirts and ha ha’s that define email, perhaps even the occasional emoticon, links, tired jokes and YouTube clips.

I’m sure there will be fascinating collections of email, especially since email is so easily archived. Still, something will be different.

James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime

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“An opaline vision of Americans in France.”
“Lyricizes the flesh and France with the same ardent intensity.”

“A voyeur of the imagination.”

I snatched the above phrases from a 1967 New York Times book review of A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter’s unabashed and poetic erotic novel.

Because I’m quite taken with Salter—by the impressionistic sweep of his sentences, by his sharp, yet lovely descriptions—I expected more than just an erotic novel and was surprised when it stayed on that plane.

Not that it wasn’t enjoyable as such.

As the review in the Times put it, “Salter celebrates the rites of erotic innovation and understands their literary uses. He creates a small, flaming world of sensualism inhabited by Dean and Anne-Marie, and invaded by the imagination of the narrator. We enter it. We feel it. It has the force of a hundred repressed fantasies.”

The key phrases here are “invaded by the imagination of the narrator” and “a hundred repressed fantasies.”

Most critics I’ve read take this story at the level of realism without taking into account the narrator’s point of view. The events recounted in the novel are imagined by the narrator, after all, and in doing so he effectively becomes neutered by his own tale—a man who can’t score, but loves to imagine his new best friend, Philip Dean, who “comes like a bull,” having sex time after time as if he’s just stepped out of Penthouse Forum, his gal Anne-Marie worshipping his penis as if it were a shrine—as only this repressed narrator could.

In fact, the narrator has surrendered his life to Dean in a sense. “I am only the servant of life. He is an inhabitant,” he says. “I breathe to the rhythm of his life which is stronger than mine.”

I don’t think Salter meant this to be a homoerotic tale, but it can certainly be interpreted that way. The narrator masks his graphic imaginings by weakly claiming a sexual obsession with Anne-Marie, but any good heterosexual man’s sexual obsessions would turn into fantasies starring himself rather than his best friend.

…hero worship as a lifestyle as a fecund, creative way to live…

So Salter either made a narrative choice that fails on one level, obfuscating the purpose of the sexual reveries, or perhaps he wanted the narrator to have a dual purpose–even a bisexual purpose. For the reveries aren’t entirely focused on the hero worship of Dean—no, Anne-Marie is objectified in such a way that would make any good collegiate feminist cringe. She’s woman defined as sexual vessel. Salter cloaks her in a mystical sort of language that seems to give her power, but is animalistic in the end. She has the clarity of impulses, but not of thought: She “understands effortlessly. Life is all quite clear to her. She is one with it. She moves in it like a fish, never wondering if it has a bottom, shores, worlds about it.”

Just as Anne-Marie is present as a character only to be fucked, Dean is present mainly to fuck, although he’s festooned with a bit more characterization (he’s a born operator, a natural in nearly everything he does, too good for Yale so he had to drop out, effortlessly charming, and when not with Anne-Marie, driving the narrator speedily around France in a stylish sports car—yes, he’s more stereotype than character, that perfect, rich, handsome, decadent, young American abroad).

“Vaincre ou Mourir” a sign reads at the narrator’s house–a saying that looms over the novel. Dean is the character who will vanquish, and hence live, at least in the narrator’s view, if only because he has to live through another. “One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess.”

The narrator then doesn’t need to vanquish in order to live, but imagine and create to live. It might be a life once removed from real life, but I’m not sure if it’s any less powerful. One could easily argue that the narrator’s vivid imaginings might be more powerful, more lively than Dean’s life itself.

The Times review claims that the narrator plays only a functional role, and that’s true, but in the carrying out of that function, lacking any memorable characterization, you can’t help but wonder why this fellow spends his day imagining his best friend in bed. Isn’t there a movie in town? A pornographic magazine to buy?

The narrator might be a sad sack, but with his (Salter’s) imagination, it is forgiveable that he neglects to look at the movie listings, for this novel is one hell of a sexual romp, and Salter is too good of a writer not to deliver sentences and paragraphs that are painterly, moody, erudite, and arresting.

This world lacks a God, and other than the necessity to earn the money to drink France’s good wine and pay for fine hotels, the idea of work seems quite distant and ridiculous in light of a night with Anne-Marie–a night draped in the rich, sensual possibilities of France.

And Salter is a fantastic erotic writer, if only because he’s a lover of surfaces and a natural sensualist. “Painterly” is the kind of description that gets tossed around easily, but it deeply and intrinsically applies to Salter’s prose. The pleasure of reading him is not found in the usual reasons one appreciates a novel–plot movements, the polyphonous nature of the world, the texture of tense points and counterpoints–but in the moments he presents, which are often as seductive and pregnant as a lover’s caress.

That’s why this book can be both a dirty book and a beautiful book. That’s why Salter can commit the crimes he wants to.

The Future of the Future of Fiction

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I wonder if someone should write a book of criticisim on the plethora of articles that have appeared in the last few years on the future of fiction (Slate has published the latest piece). The future of fiction just might rely on these future-of-fiction pieces, which usually combine doses of eschatological alarmism with breathy eulogies and condescension of anything truly new.

It’s too bad that all of the good writing out there has to suffer from the ongoing simmer of editors trying to create an inferno of the novel’s demise–or trying to raise the novel from its supposed ashes.

Consider this snippet of Walter Kirn’s “correspondence” (well-paid, faux correspondence, that is) to Gary Shteyngart in Slate:

“Can written narratives represent this world? Can they convey what it feels like to inhabit it? The movies, of course, have given up trying. The best they can do in order to travel the hidden channels through which fate conducts itself these days is cut back and forth between shots of people on phones or show someone typing on a keyboard and then display what’s appearing on the monitor. Novelists, with their access to the invisible, ought to be positioned to do better. How, though? I have a suspicion—that’s all it is now—that the answer lies in the form’s origins. I’m thinking of epistolary novels such as Richardson’s Clarissa. That was the revolutionary mode once, when novels broke out of being mere prose ‘romances’ and started to grapple with subjectivity. It’s also when they discovered the modern fact that we communicate in stylized bursts and through specific technologies. That’s truer than ever now. E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They’re still all letters, basically, and they’ve come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.”

Let me see what I think of that? Um, duh. How to represent a world dominated by email, text messaging, and Internet connections? Through text itself! Just like an epistolary novel!! Ta da!

Walter has a way of writing over-the-top, self-important prose. It’s a good trait to have if you’re going to write articles like this.

I must note that this series is wittily called “The Novel, 2.0” to riff smartly on the phrase Web 2.0. The problem is that Web 2.0 actually means something in terms of new spaces created by new technologies. This is only a headline meant to make readers think that the novel is also being transported into new terrains that are beyond the page.

As Kirn’s observation reveals, however, the novel isn’t 2.0. It goes back and forth between a variety of techniques (e.g., the epistolary novel becomes new again). The elements of a story stay somewhat the same even as the world around us changes.

That’s what is quite beautiful about the novel, and human existence itself. Despite the hype of technology, we still live and love and die in ways that are similar to our distant ancestors. Shakespeare could just as easily write a good tragedy about George Bush or Bill Clinton as he did Macbeth or Richard II. Hubris happens now, even if it happens on Rep. Mark Foley’s cell phone screen.

I do take comfort that magazines will pay big $ for this sort of debate for all of eternity. I can’t wait until Web 3.0–hence Novel 3.0–with the hope that Slate will come looking for my sorry ass.

That said, it is nice to know that Slate cares about fiction to dedicate a week of commentary to it. It’s always nice to know that somebody cares.

Nelson Algren

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When I was getting my Masters in Creative Writing at San Franciso State, I approached the chair of the department, Frances Mayes, for what I thought would be a perfunctory signature on a form allowing me to do my thesis on Nelson Algren.

I had always admired Algren’s gritty grotesques, and I especially wanted to analyze how he unflinchingly represented a part of America that few authors bothered with: the beastly condition of America’s underclass. Algren was essentially the last working class author. Algren’s fame peaked just as Joseph McCarthy began black balling artists who had a socialist conscience, and the idea of writing challenging social realist novels never gained traction again.

After Algren something changed in American literature. Yes, writers still wrote and write about the street, and with a certain bravado, realism, and beauty, whether it’s Jack Kerouac, Seth Morgan, Jim Carrol, or Charles Bukowski. But all of these authors were more interested in something else than the feeling of inescapable injustice. They might have writen about a needle going into a vein, but they didn’t convey its horror, its sole pleasure in a jaundiced day, a moment of relief just barely able to wipe out the knowledge that there is no relief. In their work, there was always an element of fun or holiness in doing drugs. With Algren, in a book like The Man with the Golden Arm, the pain was the main thing, and the pain was symptomatic of a far greater societal pain.

Of course Algren wasn’t a social realist as much as he was a poet. He was a gambler in life, and a gambler as a writer. Political earnestnesss didn’t suit him; it was the meaning of life that mattered.

The Man with the Golden Arm won the first National Book Award, but Frances Mayes wouldn’t sign the form. I asked her why. “Well, he’s a bad writer,” she said.

It’s nice to see Algren getting his due in a recent article in Salon. One thing I know is that he’d never write cheap travel books pretending to be literary adventures. And if he wrote one that became a popular success, he wouldn’t start writing cheap and diluted sequels for more money–and he wouldn’t allow Diane Lane to play his characte in a movie! Whether he was a good or bad writer, at least he wrote and lived from the heart.