The Responsibility to Understand the Nature of Fiction

Some things have to keep being said (as I keep saying). I was as shocked as today's letter writers to the Guardian by the misunderstandings about the nature of fiction displayed thus in Saturday's leader about Monica Ali's Brick Lane:

The artists are responding to a public hunger for some insights into British-Bangladeshi life. They are providing reportage from an under-reported community. There is a price for that, and it comes in treating one's subjects with greater care than if they were made up.

As I have said before in greater detail with reference to this novel, the idea that the subject of a novel is ever 'not made up' would be laughable if it were not coming from the pens and laptops of supposed intellectuals and literary experts.

As I said then: once real people and real places and real events get forged in the fire of fiction, you can't tell what's left of the reality, it simply doesn't relate to 'reality' in the way Greer, and the Muslim protestors, assume. ...Novels can't be divided up into the reality bits and the imagination bits, it's just one big meld, and the only real 'reality' of a novel is the author's psyche, and if it's a good or great novel it will have the reality of emotional truth.

Which Reality?

It has struck me before, and it strikes me now, that Germaine Greer doesn't understand the nature of novels, Professor of Literature though she may be (and I think I'm right that I once read her as saying she doesn't like novels much, which fits.)

In Saturday's Guardian she made her promised riposte to last week's criticisms of her stance over the Brick Lane furore.

"Perhaps [Natasha] Walter doesn't understand how disturbing it is to have
gobbets of your life sampled, digested and dished back up to you in recognisable form."

She goes on to tell us how others have represented her in books, in particular her ex-husband and also David Plante in Difficult Women, and how freaked out she felt. Well, I read the David Plante book, and a specious bit of nastiness it was too, but for God's sake, Germaine, it wasn't a novel! She seems to be making no distinction on this level between this book and the one by her ex-husband, which was indeed a novel, and interestingly, it seems she was far more upset by the latter (even given the fact that, as she implies, she was young then and not yet hardened.)

Well, The Bitch too has had a novel written about her, and she too knows how it feels, and therefore, like Greer, how certain people in Brick Lane might feel. God, what a nitwit that woman in that novel was! And what a sly, self-seeking cow, the way she did the dirty on the wonderful, sensitive, generous yet tortured hero (my ex's vision of himself). God, did I feel defiled, picked over, used, abused, you name it - and the effects were physical, I really did feel voo-dooed and possessed, my identity stolen, I was a trembling wreck and stopped eating for weeks.

But what did The Bitch do about it in the end? She wrote her own novel about the whole episode - ha! Wrote it like it was - yeah! - with a tough and feisty heroine (me) and a right bastard of a manipulative anti-hero. And The Bitch's novel got published - ha!- which the ex's didn't.

How's that for revenge?

Thing is, not long after publication, The Bitch and the partner she had now went into a bar and saw a mutual friend. We walked over, and he stood, looking rather stiff. 'Ive just read your novel,' he told me, and then turned to my partner, his fist clenching. 'You bastard!' he told him.
'It's not us!' we cried, laughing. But he didn't smile, and he was clearly never afterwards convinced.

See? Once real people and real places and real events get forged in the fire of fiction, you can't tell what's left of the reality, it simply doesn't relate to 'reality' in the way Greer, and the Muslim protestors, assume. 'Writers should beware of hanging the carcass of their imaginations around the necks of real people,' she says, but it ain't like that, novels can't be divided up into the reality bits and the imagination bits, it's just one big meld, and the only real 'reality' of a novel is the author's psyche, and if it's a good or great novel it will have the reality of emotional truth.

Greer seems to acknowledge this to some extent when she asks, 'Why did Monica Ali's book have to be called Brick Lane?' seeming to imply that she should have given it some other, fictional name. But the Brick Lane of the novel is the Brick Lane of a novelist's mind and claiming to be nothing else, and the trouble only comes when people fail to read it in this way.

And there is a regrettable tendency nowadays to read novels for fact. Quite apart from the cult of the Author as Personality and the consequent hunger to see connections between authors' books and their lives, there is a tendency to value those novels which provide 'information' and lists. Zadie Smith in a recent literary dispute with, I think, the critic James Wood, insisted that 'there is a beauty in information for its own sake [in novels]' - or words to that effect, and claimed it was something which only her generation appreciates. Grow up, Zadie: the beauty of information in novels depends on what you do with it, and the emotional truth you uncover in the process.

The reason Greer and the protestors and I and my ex (I heard he had a breakdown after my novel was published) were all so freaked is this: novels are not fact or 'information', but they are more powerful than either because they deal in emotional reality. My ex's novel told not the truth about me but the truth about what he wanted to do to me emotionally as our relationship was deteriorating, and my novel did the same in turn. I knew even as I was writing mine that I was doing him an injustice, but I knew too that the couple I was conjuring were not us but a symbol of my notion of a certain state of affairs between men and women. One has only to compare the two books to understand how little fiction is about factual reality, however much it may seem to be (and however even the author or his or her lovers and friends think it is), and how beside the point it is therefore to blame a novelist for getting the facts wrong.

If everyone understood this, then there wouldn't be people seeing Brick Lane as so dangerous or discrediting. While you can understand the Muslim protestors making this category error, it is a great shame that Germaine Greer, who ought to know better, is endorsing them.

People need to take a leaf from the book of The Bitch's stylish and gracious and sporting mother: she blithely refuses to recognise that any of the depictions of mothers in my work are her (even when I think I've skewered her with cruel accuracy).

Snoozing while Nothing Much Happens

So the protest came to nothing much, according to the Guardian - just '60 or 70 older men' (vexed about leeches, perhaps) - and no book was burnt, and Salman Rushdie, having rolled his sleeves up, now declares that the whole thing was blown out of proportion by the media. Natasha Walter argues that the view of the campaigners did not represent the views of the larger Brick Lane Bengali community, and makes the most important point that the media need to take more care as to whom they choose as spokespersons for diverse and varied communities. A 'damp squib' is how Rushdie describes yesterday's protest, but even damp squibs have been lit by someone...

Snoozing While Books Burn

Today apparently people in London are marching to burn a book, but there's been no mention of it in any TV or radio bulletin I've heard today and I can find none in The Observer, not even on the Books Pages. I can see that people might feel that the situation in Lebanon pushes other things out (though not, it seems, a full-page article about a 'movie starlet'), but why is there no discussion there about the potential links, or otherwise, between these two things? (As there is on the web: see Baroque in Hackney's riveting Saturday post.)

If it's disinterest, it's mistaken, but you suspect it's something much worse: fear of inflaming things through discussion, which, as we all know, is the prime tool of any totalitarian state.

As for the literary pages, it confirms the view that they are moribund and lazy and operating nowadays merely as a function of publishing's publicity machine. And if the excuse is that these pages are prepared in advance, well, that simply proves the point.

Books and Literary Heavyweights on Fire

Apparently there's no leech in Brick Lane anyway. Oh, the joy, the horror of people who judge books without reading them! And oh, the joy and downright terror when two great jesters of English Letters weigh in on the fray: on the pages of the Guardian, the long-standing fight between Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer is being renewed over the issue. Rushdie accuses Greer of simply supporting the campaigners, but her argument in Monday's article was more characteristically opaque than that. 'It hurts to be misrepresented, but there is no representation without misrepresentation,' she says, seeming to slap the campaigners' hands to make them see sense. But then she concludes: 'Bangaldeshi Britons would be better off not reading Brick Lane or seeing the film.' Really, Germaine? Isn't part of the problem the fact that many of them haven't?

Greer is sneering at Ali, Rushdie says. 'As I well remember,' he writes in his letter today, 'she has done this before,' and reminds us about her refusal to support him over the assult against The Satanic Verses. 'She went on to describe me as a "megalomaniac"', he tells us somewhat unnecessarily, before getting back to focus on Ali and the matter in hand.

There are serious issues here, of course, but what are they? It would be hard now to remain involved in this debate without reading this book. Community activists have confirmed that tomorrow a rally will go ahead and copies of the book will be burned. Yet you can't help but suspect that it's publicity for the book and the film which will be fanned.

Curries and Books

It's happening again - people threatening to burn copies of a book, this time Monica Ali's Brick Lane. So what does it mean? That books matter? I wonder. In fact, it's only now that a film comes to made of the book that the protest has taken off and the threat made. 'If [Monica Ali] has the right to freedom of speech,' says Abdus Salique, the lead campaigner, 'we have the right to burn books.' Hm. 'We are protecting our community's dignity and respect,' he says, and what, asks Mohammed Tahir Ali, a trustee of Shadwell Garden Mosque, will the episode in the book, where he says a leech drops from a Bangladeshi woman's hair into a Brick Lane restaurant curry pot, 'do to our businesses?'

Nothing, Mr Ali, as far as I'm concerned. I never got past the very good beginning of Brick Lane, after which I thought it deteriorated rapidly (so I'd never have known about the leech), and far too many of my acquaintances were put off from even trying by the media hype surrounding publication. Besides, we like our curries too damn much.