Once upon a time, a theoretically inclined graduate student at USC remarked that she had “gone beyond fiction.” Hardheaded gentlemen restrict their reading to biographies and history. Gio and Mike burn through fiction like a Los Angeles wildfire. In my desultory way I move through both fiction and nonfiction; yet with fiction I often find myself impatient with passages of description and realist trappings. My question for our little group is “What accounts for the renunciation of fiction by those who feel they’ve moved “beyond” stories and by those who find that they “learn” nothing from works without roots in facts?” I have always been fascinated by this question but it became pressing after hearing a brief interview with DeLillo who said that he felt a writerly demand to do Falling Man , implying that fiction necessarily brings something to the event unobtainable elsewhere. what accounts for the antagonism….who wins?
23
Jun
07
Well, this deserves a lot more careful attention and reflection. But I’ll forge ahead with some careless thinking:
–While I’m startled when I hear others–like that grad student you mentioned–disparage or simply disregard fiction, I’m even more startled by how contemptuous I seem to feel about the person thereafter. If someone says they don’t like horror, or Laurel & Hardy, I may think “too bad for you” but I accept the distinctions in discernment and appreciation and move along. (Thus also making space for my own gut dismissals of opera, high modernist fiction, and continental metaphysics.) But you say you don’t like to read fiction? What the hell’s wrong with you? Do you like breathing, eating, fornicating? Fiction’s on the same short list of necessary human activities, for me, and I think a hard question might be: why does it mean so much to me?
There are lots of escapist answers — a fairly neurosis-inducing childhood, a lack of strong social connections with my peers until later in life, etc.
But it was never a simple escapism. I remember getting a copy of _The Exorcist_ while very young, and it was horrifying, and I couldn’t wait to find more experiences just like it. (I’ve raved elsewhere about my pleasure in the escapist fictions of no escape.) And while I was resistant to any thing aimed at being “good for me,” I was pretty open to my own experiments–by mistake I was sent Philip Roth’s _The Ghost Writer_ instead of Peter Straub’s _Ghost Story_, and I read it, and I found it confusing and enervating and I read it twice. And I think that’s getting at something key: I like making sense, the act of interpreting, the problem of interpreting as much or more than conclusions, climaxes, resolution, answers.
And sharpening my thinking through the “pointless” (fiction’s lack of practical objectives) made the purposive all that much easier. The more fiction I read, the more likely I was to read non-fiction, too, and my reading practices were not entirely dissimilar.
So, I’m rambling along–and still not anywhere near answers–but the primary problem seems to be “what does fiction give us?” and not just why do people resist it.
–But that resistance is probably tied to purpose. That’s probably an obvious answer, but one certainly relevant in an era of “professionalization” in all levels of education. If I had a penny for every time I have had to define the utility of English as a discipline to students (or for students’ parents), I’d own an even larger number of books from the substantive profits.
–Another element of resistance would, I think, be the uncertainty or ambiguity tied to that purposelessness. One of my great pleasures in fiction is the lack of sure answers, and yet I’m told that the tension of not-knowing is not what others focus on. Or–gasp!–even enjoy. But I think this can tie to concerns about self and ego, as well; the aforementioned grad student was sure she had nothing more to learn from fictions, and–whether insecurity masquerading as arrogance or plain old arrogance–there was no reason to diverge from her own already-determined sense of her self and what mattered.
–Maybe this is where I’ll end, with an abstraction building on that last point: some discuss the way you can leave your self, or experience how others experience the world, through the prism of narrative (and particularly narrative fiction). Many privilege this empathic work of fiction. But I tend to think that empathy is not solely or merely produced through mimetic reading, through accounts of “otherness” in characters and setting. I think fiction is an engagement with otherness–an immersion in language, patterning akin to breaking from one’s own consciousness (as patterned emotionally and linguistically and culturally). And speaking obliquely, he sneakily posts the comment to see what comes next.
i started writing a response to michael’s post but i got stumped. i just don’t know why i like fiction so much. you’d think i would have figured it out, since fiction is such a huge part of my life (books, films, stories told around the fire while roasting marshmallows, etc.) and i’m a relentless self-interrogating-and-answering person; but no, i haven’t.
i certainly do not look for escape in fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with that). i look for a specific kind of pleasure, and that pleasure is so good that i keep coming back for more. that pleasure it engaging rather than escapist, but i can’t say much more about it.
i consume many fewer novels than mike and jeff (the true wildfires!) because i’m a very slow reader. i have to sound the words out in my mind. often i read the same sentence or paragraph five or six times. i read like i have reading OCD, except it’s not compulsive. i could read differently but then i wouldn’t get pleasure out of it. i used to be able to read anywhere, but now i need to be lying down, so that somewhat restricts my reading. like my cat, i like to combine pleasures. have you noticed how cats like to eat or scratch their scratch-posts at the same time as they are petted? i need to read lying down, with no one around bothering me, and with a large swath of time in front of me. consequently, i read mostly at night, well into the night.
i don’t like to finish books quickly, because finishing a book usually devastates me. when i’m cranky and miserable simon asks, “are you between books?” and i often am. a good book can lift me out of depression and a bad book can plunge me into it. when i read a bad book i can’t stop reading it, not because of some allegiance to completeness, but because i’m afraid the next will be bad, too, and then what? i’ll be lost. i’ll lose faith in books. i’ll never find a good one again. life will lose meaning. i want my previous book back.
i don’t reread books, ever. i rarely re-watch films.
i don’t read for the story but for the language. i mostly read in english. i read in italian only when i am in italy. i don’t mind reading in translation, though i prefer original languages.
i hardly ever read nonfiction for pleasure, and when i do it must provide the same pleasure as fiction, i.e. fabulous language. i like reading writers’ autobiographies. i read poetry and plays, but it’s not the same as novels. i need novels.
the only way i can think about the specific pleasure i get from reading is in terms of nourishment. i’m the only person i know who enjoys talking about books constantly (you guys might be like that too, but you don’t live close enough that we can have dinner and talk about books, damn ya).
this blog has helped me tremendously in widening my reading experience. i am reading a bit faster and a bit less anxiously. i don’t worry about a book’s being perfect because i now know that even if it isn’t i can write about it here so it won’t have been a desolate, disappointing time. before, i read only to get the exquisite pleasure i get from books. now i read to discuss books with you all, too. being free from the dictatorship of the perfect reading pleasure is a relief. there was no alternative before, because i read in perfect isolation and my pleasure was all there was to it.
unlike mike, i don’t find it strange that people should not like fiction, because i find me strange. i’m a book fanatic.
but i do find it strange when people make a theoretical stance of being “beyond” fiction. did she explain what she meant?
I love fiction and should probably be reading more histories and biographies (though I find books about current events to be deadly; I spend enough time on the internet following the daily grind of who did what to whom for whom and at the expense of whoever), but I love to read novels simply for entertainment and diversion and the pleasures of a good story well told. I just read this novel, A Good and Happy Child, which is a smart, literary, pychological horror story about the demonic possession of an eleven year old boy (imagine Flannery O’Connor or Padgett Powell rewriting The Exorcist). It was great (and will make a great summer movie in 2009 I’m told)! And I’m reading my daughter the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and I’m rivited (she’s off to grandmas for the next three weeks and I’m feeling the kind of withdrawl that only an alethiometer could measure. And I read the third installment in John Burdett’s crime series set in Thailand, Bangkok Haunts and I truly enjoyed that. Being beyond fiction sounds exactly like the kind of thing a graduate student would say (just make sure s/he doesn’t mention such perfidious heresy on the job market; such a statement strikes me as pretentious at best).
i read bangkok eight but the same friend who recommended it to me warned me off the sequels. i loved bangkok eight.
Yes, Michael, it’s a great question you ask. And, I’d like to suggest, one that should be considered along with similar questions about our consumptions of other art works. Why do we listen to music, or look at paintings? And must there be one answer to cover all arts, or might we do each for a different reason? Or, most likely, each for a variety of different reasons.
It’s funny, I was just thinking the other day about the issue of ‘abusing’ art works. For example, you put a late quartet by Beethoven on the CD player and start doing the housework. Sometimes, when you vacuum, you lose part of it. When you get to a bit you like, and the phone goes, you put it on pause and come back to it later. THere’s a clear feeling, to me, that you are not listening ‘properly’, but what is it to listen properly? And what would analogues of this vignette be for other art forms? Here was one idea I had. A person loves Harlequin romances and reads them compulsively on the train to work each morning. He becomes totally involved in them and lost to the world. One day, he finds a book on the seat next to him, with its covers ripped off. He starts to read it and gets exactly the same pleasure as from the Harlequin romances. It turns out to be “Pride and Prejudice.” I can’t help feeling, at a gut level, that there’s something wrong with reading Jane Austen for that kind of pleasure, but when I think about it, I can’t really see what it could be.
I feel, in my own case, that I have to fight the impulse to insist that there’s a single right way to experience art, or a single answer to questions like “why do we read?” or “what’s wrong with saying one is ‘beyond’ fiction?” It would be interesting to know whether this person abjured the enjoyment of music and painting as well.
I’m going to put motivations in that grad student’s head, but I think my imagined rationale might tie to some of the points raised by Simsby: music and painting or other art forms (performance art was mentioned many times) would have been okay if not well-loved. The problem with fiction, far as I could tell, was its status as a set of conventions too closely aligned with mass cultural appreciation. Even Jane Austen would be tied to a canonicity which would make it suspect. Theory, or people pulling scarves out of their asses on stage, was seen as subversive of dominant cultural values. So fiction was feared as a tool of homogeneity, or hegemony, or (ho hum) more commonplace ennui.
Sims’ analogue–the Harlequin reader tricked into enjoying Jane Austen–resembles my (now contestable, probably reconfigured) memories of how I came to read Roth’s _Ghost Writer_; certainly I didn’t read it like a ghost story, but I just as certainly didn’t read it with a sense of its ineluctable difference in kind or quality. Nonetheless, in engaging with its particularities (in form, concern, focus), I started to become a new kind of reader. Engaging with any text can be a kind of rote appreciation–where we know how to respond to romances or Beethoven or “Die Hard,” and avoid/sidestep any textual disruptions to allow our remembered, learned pleasures free rein. I.e., I could read a ghost story knowing so much about ghost stories that I see not “this text” but relish this genre. I could put it down, read five books at a time, vacuum in between pages.
But there is a certain way (or are many ways) of reading that reconstruct my sense of form, genre, pleasure. I am not just reenacting my remembered pleasures and engaging with the text insofar as it reproduces such conventions. Instead, I’m on the lookout for–in fact keen to discover–a new way of reading each time, particular to each work.
Now, my argument would be that there is NEVER a new way of reading, and I have elsewhere had no truck with the notion of the work’s particularity. Similarly, I do not believe there is ever completely a form of reading that is mere conventional consumption. Both ends of the continuum are sort of fictions, emphasizing (I believe) elements crucial to reading — reading is never merely generic, and consumption is never able to completely repress textual ambiguities, nor is reading ever sui generis, absolutely birthing the New.
Blah blah di blah.
Mike,
I liked your attempt at a rationale for that (poor) grad student’s remark. One of the things it suggested to me was that literature is that one of the arts in which the distinction between high- and low-brow is most obscured. After all, there’s plenty of ‘conventions too closely aligned with mass cultural appreciation’ associated with music. But we all know that’s just pop music. So we allow ourselves that as a confessedly guilty pleasure (and after all, we don’t really spend time on it, it’s just on in the car, etc.), we valorize’real’ high-brow music but in fact ignore it with the plea that we don’t get it. (Of course, I’m simplifying. The ‘high-brow’ ‘low-brow’ distinction works within both pop and classical styles. Vivaldi isn’t really any better than Mariah Carey. I don’t know who the Boulez’s of the pop world are. And jazz, of course, is elevated as a style all on its own, and hence we fail to observe the fact that some jazz – I’m not just talking Kenny G., is actually pretty awful and pappy itsef. It’s as if we think all jazz must good, as such.) Perhaps ditto with visual art.
But in fiction we cannot perform that division so neatly. So all fiction becomes tainted with the ‘homogeneity-inducing’ quality of the low-brow and the ’serious person’ (that grad student) feels OK rejecting the whole package.
I’m often taken with Walter Pater’s claim that all arts aspire to the condition of music. One wants to say (absurdly) that literature ought to be read despite its content, and not because of it. And there’s nothing that stands to art music in the way that non-fiction stands to fiction/literature. That makes literature unique among the arts, and very hard to understand as a result. Does that mean that Michael’s original question “why read?” is, after all, quite different from the analogous questions “why listen to music?”, etc.? I just don’t know.
This is all very rambling. Apologies.
I think the first time you truly listen (and I mean listen) to that Beethoven symphony (or Joanna Newsom or The Mountain Goats or Sufjan Stevens or The Magnetic Fields or The Violent Femmes) you pay attention, you get caught up in the rhythms, the melodic motifs, the propulsive beat, the pop energy, the lyrics, the emotion. And maybe that kind of listening happens on numerous occasions. But eventually you will vacuum through it or walk out the door to talk to a neighbor or be willing to actually turn your car off and just park. And yeah, if Being There pops up on cable, I may watch for five or ten minutes and then walk away because I’ve sat with rapt attention to every detail of that film many, many times. Reading seems to be somehow different. I enjoy rereading a favorite novel but I must admit I do it rarely because there is always something new I want to read. One’s first experience with a work of art is, perhaps, the authentic experience while subsequent returns to said work will eventually be compromised in one way or another, right? I remember seeing Van Gogh’s Starry Night for the first time, amazed by its size (it was so small) and the textures of the paint as applied to the canvas (not to mention the visible areas of the canvas untouched by paint) and the vigorous brush strokes. The experience was something akin to a sensory explosion (and I had seen this painting reproduced since before I was born). Subsequent trips to MOMA, however, and I walk by and smile, maybe linger but move on to something I didn’t see the last time. Isn’t that the way with all new phenomena?
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Gio, I thought the second Bangkok novel was a bit over the top but I really enjoyed version 3.0 (and it too is over the top but I still enjoyed it).
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