David Nicholls writes in the Guardian on the subject of a sense of place in novels. It is of course one of the pleasures, indeed joys, of novels: the creation of a sense of place in which the reader can be immersed - can, in his or her mind's eye, look around and walk with the characters: it's one of the ways in which we can identify with the characters and events of a novel, and in which the characters and events can be made to seem real.
But what do we mean by reality when we are talking about fiction? Nicholls concedes that there are novelists who create a sense of a real place for the reader simply by making places up: writers of fantasy or futuristic fiction, and of historical novels: 'A notepad and camera won't help much if you're trying to conjure up Wolf Hall'. However, he is taxed by the issue of including current real-life places in one's fiction: what if you get the detail wrong? Well, he doesn't exactly spell this out but it can be disaster: if the reader knows more about the place than you do, then the fictional world of the novel, ie the fictional reality, is broken, intruded upon by common-or-garden real-life reality, and you've lost the reader. It's a worry all fiction-writers share when setting events in real-life places they don't know, or don't know intimately. Nicholls reports that he's physically travelled to avoid this problem and more recently has used Google Street View. I've done both of these things, too, but it makes me queasy: I always have the sense that I'm somehow missing the point; it's not only that, as Nicholls admits, one gets a very superficial view of a place this way, but more importantly that there is something wrong, or at least dangerous or diminishing, in so consciously injecting undigested geographic or topographic fact into one's long-digested fictional landscape.
For what is fiction but itself a place of the mind? Fiction isn't a place you go chiefly to find facts; fiction's truth is chiefly emotional, psychological and moral. Yet, in our 'reality'-obsessed culture there does indeed seem to be a tendency to read fiction as fact - witness the rise in confessedly autobiographical novels and the recent, if fading, supremacy of biography over fiction, not to mention the insistence on author profiles and the need to sell a novel on an author's life story - and there does indeed seem to be a current cultural obsession with real-life places in literature. One member of my reading group, who, I think, is pretty representative of many readers who are not particularly literary, especially loves novels about places she knows, and I detect a trend amongst writers towards satisfying this desire for recognition by injecting real-life topographical detail and place-name-checks.
But what about those readers who don't know the place - the street or the cafe - you're name-checking? No same sense of real-life recognition for them. My fellow reading-group member replies that it doesn't matter, it's simply a different experience for the reader who doesn't know the place, but the danger is that that experience will be one of exclusion. As an untravelled working-class teenager reading novels with unexplained or glancing references to upper- or middle-class rituals and foreign locations, I had a sense of exclusion, a sense that others, able to envisage the manners and places and know they were right, were getting more out of the fiction than I was. I could imagine the places but I had a deep sense of not being necessarily right in my imagining; I could look them up in the library, but I hadn't had that recreation of one's own experience that others, reading the same novel, could have.
It's the author's job to create a world with which as many readers as possible will identify, which means either properly recreating a place (which as Nicholls says can be done with a few swift strokes, but needs to be more than just name-checking it) or fictionalising it, which last, as he says, Hardy did so well in the highly fictionalised area he called Wessex. If we don't do this, fiction becomes parochial, fails its potential for universality. And once we do succeed in doing this, though we may wish for various reasons to name a place in a fiction, it is possible not even to do so: if we are writing about a real place, those who know it will not need it named - maybe, as I have discovered with one of my own stories*, they won't even notice it's not named - and those who don't won't be disrupted by that sense of exclusion. If we are fictionalising places - that is, bending the mere facts about them - real-life names, as Nicholls indicates in his discussion of Hardy, become an impediment.
Furthermore, the so-called reality of real-life places is never that certain. My London is not necessarily your London; his village in Dorset is not her village on the very same spot on the real-life map. One's sense of real-life places is individual, imbued with one's own personal experiences and personality, often at one very particular time. If a reader brings to a novel an association with a place that is inappropriate for the novel's atmosphere or theme, then once again you are stymied: so once again, name-checking is not enough; the author must override that association with his or her own mental landscape of the place.
Not so long ago, for a short story I was writing*, I did exactly what Nicholls says he did for his first novel, One Day: I revisited a place I had once lived, in order to write about an experience I had had there. The first shock was that the place had been completely erased, all the old buildings replaced by new ones or empty parkland spaces, and the whole topography erased and realigned in such a way that I didn't even realise at first that it was the place, and when I did felt completely disorientated. This was the place (that's a quote from the story), and yet it wasn't: the real place, the place with meaning for me, and which I wanted to convey in my story, existed only in my memory. My memory would have to be enough. Yet the new space, quotidian and alien, somehow shattered and displaced my very evocative memory. In a desperate bid to hang on to it, I went to a nearby suburb that I had also known well, and which I found unchanged. But here was the second shock: this place, though clearly unchanged, was not how I remembered it, and once again I found my sense of it all threatened. The place I wanted to explore and portray was after all a place of the mind. So the story came to be about precisely that: a protagonist walking with a map that fails to conform either to her memory or, it appears, to the present topography, towards this realisation: that places can only ever, in the ultimate analysis, be places of the mind.
And this is the power of fiction: its universality lies precisely in its capacity to give us landscapes of the mind.
*The first of my own stories referred to here is 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told', first published in The View From Here and reprinted in Best British British Short Stories 2014 (Salt), ed. Nicholas Royle.
The second is 'Looking for the Castle', to be published on 20th June in Unthology 7 (Unthank), ed. Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones. (Pre-order here.)
Both stories will be included in my new collection, Used to Be, to be published in September by Salt.
Showing posts with label The Nature of Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Nature of Fiction. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2015
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Novels about writing.
It's interesting that, as John Dugdale says in today's Guardian Saturday Review, 'literature about literature' is booming. It's not only the novels openly depicting the great writers, of which there has been a spate lately, he says, but fictions depicting more generally the world of writing and writers, such as Hanif Kureishi's recent The Last Word and a forthcoming novel by that wonderful writer Edward St Aubyn about the world of literary prizes. Last year, of course, Nicholas Royle published his much admired novel about the world of University Creative Writing (in which yours truly - or rather an approximation of yours truly - makes a couple of cameo appearances).
I think it's no surprise, and I've never understood the prejudice against it. 'Oh God, novels about writing!' a literary agent once commented to me with a groan - though I don't think he was expressing a personal prejudice, rather a general industry perception at the time of the unsaleability of such books. It was a wrong perception, I think, and one based in a view of writers and the public as Us and Them.
I don't think for a moment the public sees it like that. I remember as a child from an ordinary background avidly reading novels with an eye on the notion of becoming a novelist myself: I didn't feel the least different from the novelist I was reading and his or her world: the greatness of the writing drew me right into his or her psyche, and I identified, not just with the characters, but with the writer, and any novel about writing would have really pressed my button. And how many people, ordinary people, have you heard casually mentioning they could write a novel/wouldn't mind writing a novel one day? Plenty have said it to me: it's usually the first thing they say after they learn I'm a writer - milkmen, shopkeepers, the lot. And what about the plethora of Creative Writing students? Most of the casual commenters won't bother, and aren't even saying it seriously, but it shows that the whole idea of novel-writing is interesting to them and that they certainly haven't written it off as something that excludes them. Apart from that, though, story-telling is hard-wired in us; we're all story-tellers and we all tell stories all the time - to entertain, to promote or save ourselves or others etc etc, in our day-to-day lives. And in turn we are affected by the story-telling of others - the images they have of us, the truths and lies they tell. So many dramas - soaps that people are entirely hooked on - are subtly based on the notion of story-telling as the engine of life, the effects that people can have on each other's lives by the stories they tell about others and themselves. Who could not be interested in that? (And I have to say it's a major theme for me in my writing.) Novel-writing is the dramatic extension of that (and after all, a major storyline of Neighbours once was a character - a very ordinary girl - becoming a novelist): it's the stories we tell set in stone (or paper or Kindle), and how much more dynamic can be the effect of that? Which is why the window cleaner tells me he wants to write a novel. Novels unpicking the effects of published and unpublished stories, as Royle's so cleverly does, can only therefore be interesting to all.
I think it's no surprise, and I've never understood the prejudice against it. 'Oh God, novels about writing!' a literary agent once commented to me with a groan - though I don't think he was expressing a personal prejudice, rather a general industry perception at the time of the unsaleability of such books. It was a wrong perception, I think, and one based in a view of writers and the public as Us and Them.
I don't think for a moment the public sees it like that. I remember as a child from an ordinary background avidly reading novels with an eye on the notion of becoming a novelist myself: I didn't feel the least different from the novelist I was reading and his or her world: the greatness of the writing drew me right into his or her psyche, and I identified, not just with the characters, but with the writer, and any novel about writing would have really pressed my button. And how many people, ordinary people, have you heard casually mentioning they could write a novel/wouldn't mind writing a novel one day? Plenty have said it to me: it's usually the first thing they say after they learn I'm a writer - milkmen, shopkeepers, the lot. And what about the plethora of Creative Writing students? Most of the casual commenters won't bother, and aren't even saying it seriously, but it shows that the whole idea of novel-writing is interesting to them and that they certainly haven't written it off as something that excludes them. Apart from that, though, story-telling is hard-wired in us; we're all story-tellers and we all tell stories all the time - to entertain, to promote or save ourselves or others etc etc, in our day-to-day lives. And in turn we are affected by the story-telling of others - the images they have of us, the truths and lies they tell. So many dramas - soaps that people are entirely hooked on - are subtly based on the notion of story-telling as the engine of life, the effects that people can have on each other's lives by the stories they tell about others and themselves. Who could not be interested in that? (And I have to say it's a major theme for me in my writing.) Novel-writing is the dramatic extension of that (and after all, a major storyline of Neighbours once was a character - a very ordinary girl - becoming a novelist): it's the stories we tell set in stone (or paper or Kindle), and how much more dynamic can be the effect of that? Which is why the window cleaner tells me he wants to write a novel. Novels unpicking the effects of published and unpublished stories, as Royle's so cleverly does, can only therefore be interesting to all.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Austen modernisations, really?
Is there anything that better illustrates literary fiction's contemporary enthralment to the market than HarperCollins' series of Jane Austen modernisations? As John Mullan points out in the Observer, Austen's novels are specifically about the manners, modes and social constructs of the time in which she was writing, all of which have now gone by the board. He outlines them all and shows how Austen's plots hinge on them entirely: the formality of naming which creates the crucial romantic misunderstanding in Sense and Sensibility, the rigid rules of sexual behaviour which, adhered to or breached, can create commitments and misunderstandings that would never happen now (Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility), the unbreakable trap that marriage was, the fact that a single woman had lost her chance of it by the age of 27, and so on...
I suppose people will object that it's the characters that can be replicated, that the interest is in seeing those same characters negotiate a different set of social circumstances. But this is to subscribe to a pretty naive concept of 'character' and, more crucially, of what a novel is. Most of us, I guess, have been told that we are like a certain older relative, that we share their character, and many of have us felt that indeed we are and do, and in that sense we can see character as something that is passed down through families, determined by our genes, and therefore given and constant. But we are not in fact those older relatives: we may share certain personality traits but we are also formed by the different things that happen to us and the different society in which we live. Change the circumstances and you change the way a person is going to a behave, and thus in turn their character. And what is a novel - that most social of forms - but a depiction of the way people behave (action) when a certain set of social circumstances is applied to them?
A novel and its characters, as I discussed in a previous post, are also, supremely, constructs of language: to change the language of a novel - an essential part of the project in any modernisation - is to destroy its soul. And as Mullan points out, when the Marianne of Austen's Sense and Sensibility is finally driven to swear it is a most dramatic moment, but Joanna Trollope has her 'using the F-word on page 6, so when things turn really bad what extreme words does she have left?' Swearing means something different nowadays: it doesn't indicate the same thing about situations or characters, and the fact that Trollope's Marianne swears does not make her the same character as Austen's.
I really can't see what's actually being replicated here. Except for one thing: the lovely glow that a best-selling classic lights in the heart and a publisher's bank balance.
I suppose people will object that it's the characters that can be replicated, that the interest is in seeing those same characters negotiate a different set of social circumstances. But this is to subscribe to a pretty naive concept of 'character' and, more crucially, of what a novel is. Most of us, I guess, have been told that we are like a certain older relative, that we share their character, and many of have us felt that indeed we are and do, and in that sense we can see character as something that is passed down through families, determined by our genes, and therefore given and constant. But we are not in fact those older relatives: we may share certain personality traits but we are also formed by the different things that happen to us and the different society in which we live. Change the circumstances and you change the way a person is going to a behave, and thus in turn their character. And what is a novel - that most social of forms - but a depiction of the way people behave (action) when a certain set of social circumstances is applied to them?
A novel and its characters, as I discussed in a previous post, are also, supremely, constructs of language: to change the language of a novel - an essential part of the project in any modernisation - is to destroy its soul. And as Mullan points out, when the Marianne of Austen's Sense and Sensibility is finally driven to swear it is a most dramatic moment, but Joanna Trollope has her 'using the F-word on page 6, so when things turn really bad what extreme words does she have left?' Swearing means something different nowadays: it doesn't indicate the same thing about situations or characters, and the fact that Trollope's Marianne swears does not make her the same character as Austen's.
I really can't see what's actually being replicated here. Except for one thing: the lovely glow that a best-selling classic lights in the heart and a publisher's bank balance.
Saturday, August 03, 2013
Novel as language
In today's Guardian Review Zadie Smith writes:
Yet always we are asked the question, 'What is your novel about?' and we are always expected to come up with some more concrete answer than the above, to refer merely to the story, or a political or moral theme, as though these are the be-all and end-all of any piece of fiction, when in fact they are common currency, and could be replicated any number of times. The real, defining and unique aspect of any novel is the voice or voices. And yet we do, don't we, we answer in the way we're expected, like dogs on hind legs? It takes a particular level of fame and status to be able to answer as Smith has done (although I'm daring to agree with her here, and wait wincing for the chop), for most of us are in thrall to the marketing machine that grinds along on those clattery superficial and ever-replicable cogs. Answering in the way we are expected, we feel afterwards that we have sold our work short.
And does it affect how we write? As it happens for me, a couple of days ago someone writing a PhD contacted me about one of my very early stories, and commented that I was doing something unusual and interesting with language. I was flattered, but my blood ran cold. For I consciously stopped writing quite in the way I did then. Mostly I think it's a good thing, that my work became more accessible, but it did make me wonder: have I simply been deflected, possible wrongly, by a sense of what's no longer linguistically acceptable in a dumbed-down literary marketplace?
What's this novel [her latest, NW] about? My books don't seem to me to be about anything other than the people in them and the sentences used to construct them.And my reaction is Exactly! That's exactly how I feel about my own work, and I bet loads of other writers feel this too. A novel (or a story) is a construct, a construct of language, and the literary novel is above all about language: it's perhaps the defining characteristic of the kind of fiction we call 'literary'. Characters are supreme constructs, manifest not only in the narration (language) that conjures them, but in their dialogue (language), which is where people most self-consciously, and on a day-to-day level, construct reality about the world and themselves. None of it's real, but, as Smith (a wizz at dialogue) indicates, what we're engaged in is nevertheless a search for reality, the reality of the world that language constructs.
Yet always we are asked the question, 'What is your novel about?' and we are always expected to come up with some more concrete answer than the above, to refer merely to the story, or a political or moral theme, as though these are the be-all and end-all of any piece of fiction, when in fact they are common currency, and could be replicated any number of times. The real, defining and unique aspect of any novel is the voice or voices. And yet we do, don't we, we answer in the way we're expected, like dogs on hind legs? It takes a particular level of fame and status to be able to answer as Smith has done (although I'm daring to agree with her here, and wait wincing for the chop), for most of us are in thrall to the marketing machine that grinds along on those clattery superficial and ever-replicable cogs. Answering in the way we are expected, we feel afterwards that we have sold our work short.
And does it affect how we write? As it happens for me, a couple of days ago someone writing a PhD contacted me about one of my very early stories, and commented that I was doing something unusual and interesting with language. I was flattered, but my blood ran cold. For I consciously stopped writing quite in the way I did then. Mostly I think it's a good thing, that my work became more accessible, but it did make me wonder: have I simply been deflected, possible wrongly, by a sense of what's no longer linguistically acceptable in a dumbed-down literary marketplace?
Sunday, March 17, 2013
The underlying pattern
I'm pretty averse to Rules for Writing (OK, I know there are basic rules, but I hate the way they get fetishised and lead to the samey-ness that often dominates lit mags and short story prize lists and the kind of literary tyranny that results), but I like, as I think most writers will, this article on story archetypes by John Yorke, from his book on the subject which comes out next month. It's descriptive rather than rule-making, with a nice eye on both the excitement of subverting the archetype he describes and the endless mutability of the underlying pattern:
It seems impossible to understand how, with only eight notes in an octave, we don't simply run out of music. But just as tones give rise to semi-tones and time signatures, tempo and style alter content, so we start to see that a simple pattern contains within it the possibility of endless permutations. Feed in a different kind of flaw; reward or punish the characters in a variety of ways; and you create a different kind of story.
Monday, March 11, 2013
What do we know, and what should novels tell us?
Radical disagreement in our reading group about a revisiting of a wartime Nazi crime, A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex.
Thursday, August 02, 2012
Was Aristotle right?
Another article by Oliver Burkeman on our fascination with horror, in which he seriously entertains new findings by Eric Wilson 'from conversations with psychologists' that it stems not from feelings of power/relief (there but for the grace of god) or sadistic excitement or any of the other conventional explanations, but from a desire to empathise. He cites horror films and people rubber-necking at car crashes - and personally, in these cases I'm not in the slightest convinced - but then moves on to consider tragedy in literature and art:
Recently, researchers at Ohio State University investigated another psychological eccentricity, not unrelated to morbid curiosity: the enjoyment we derive from sad films. On the face of it, this makes little sense. But their work – which involved having 361 people watch Atonement, interrupting them at several points to administer questionnaires – revealed that the film triggered thoughts about the viewers' own relationships. It stimulated empathy, "reinforcing pro-social values". Gratitude for good relationships was part of it, but more generally it just felt stirring to focus on what mattered. We crave meaning and connection, it seems, far more than cheeriness. Neither tearjerkers nor morbid sights offer the latter – but they do offer the former.I don't think there is a relationship here with morbid curiosity, but I do agree that tragedy works in this way - Aristotle's catharsis: it really is more of a question of identification by the reader/viewer. Which means the current emphasis on the 'heartwarming' and 'entertainment' is short-changing us sadly.
Friday, July 27, 2012
What do we mean by 'literary'?
In the week when this year's Booker judging panel chooses a wideranging longlist, biased towards the off-beat but nevertheless embracing the apparently traditional farce of Michael Frayn's Skios, Daniel Green alerts me on Facebook to an article on The New Inquiry blog in which Rob Horning denounces the term 'literary'. It might seem from this last that Horning is taking a similar liberal approach to that of the Booker judges, but - although I find the real thrust of his argument hard to tease out - his position seems, on the contrary, partisan.
He doesn't like the term 'literary', he begins by saying. My initial reaction is to agree (although I often find myself using the term). My reasons are these: while 'literary' can refer to a wide range of kinds of writing, from plain if heightened realism and the well-turned familiar to the wildly experimental and dissonantly innovative, it is too often taken as conjuring up the latter, against which there is a general prejudice. Any use of the term can cause people to assume with no other foundation, and often wrongly, that a book will be too difficult, or unenjoyable, or elitist, and put them off. 'Literary', in consequence, is too often used nowadays as a term of denigration. Secondly, this usage of the term is arbitrary, since forms that are unfamiliar when they first appear - non-linear narrative, for instance - can become familiar (and thus lose their 'difficulty') over time.
Initially, Horning appears to be saying exactly this last. He says that although we think the term defines 'particular formal characteristics', it doesn't really, since what is considered literary changes over time. But here his argument takes a different course, and his article turns out to be based on the assumption that, far from being used as a term of denigration, 'the literary' is a term still embraced as a positive accolade.
The reason for changes in notions of what is literary, he says, is that the literary is a matter of fashion. And the fashions are dictated (not by external factors in society, as I'd contend) but by a 'gate-keeping' literary community intent on 'asserting social power'. It's used, he declares, as 'an alibi for the status aspirations of the people who use it, who want to control its meaning'. 'The literary is what literary people say it is, which is what makes them literary people.'
It's the snobbery of the literary he's objecting to. There's something in this, of course: I remember feeling as child that maybe I could never be the writer I wanted to be, as those novels considered literary - ie given acclaim by reviewers - were set in worlds about which I knew nothing (except from books), middle-class drawing rooms peopled by doctors and lawyers or Bohemian artists. And when my novel The Birth Machine was first published it was hard to get it taken seriously as literature/art rather than propaganda because of its subject matter. It's certainly true that there are changing prejudices around what we consider literary. But it's the use of the term we are apparently talking about, and Horning seems at this point to overlook the fact that 'literary' has in recent years become a term of abuse, that publishers and agents are drawing their hands away from novels in any danger of being considered 'literary' as from hot bricks, and authors have been turning to familiar genres as the only way of surviving. I'm not sure that professing a 'literary' identity has recently given authors much power, social or literary.
Not that Horning purports to be talking about authors. 'The literary never really refers to books but to readers', he says. The point is that 'literary works flatter audiences... lets them pat themselves on the back by rejecting pleasure'. Well, there can't be many readers wanting to be flattered and patted on the back this way if publishers' enthrallment to the market is anything to go by, or if there are, the industry is mistaken and neglecting them sadly. And here we come up against a glaring inconsistency in Horning's argument. To Horning, it seems, 'the literary' does after all mean a specific 'formal characteristic' that is apparently unchanging. He began by asserting that the literary is not the same as the good, that 'any overlap may be entirely coincidental', but here he joins the ranks of those who use the term as an insult and equates the literary with the bad: 'The literary,' he says, 'never lets you forget how literary you are by reading it', implying not only that it always has a certain self-consciousness of tone but that this tone is directed towards nothing but flattering the reader's vanity (and so the author is implicated after all). This doggedly overlooks the possibility that prose designed to defamiliarise can have worthier aims: to draw readers' attention to certain truths about language, story-telling or life (see, for instance, my reading group discussion of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat). But then Horning has covered that base: 'Such goals are nonsensical, impossible,' he asserts, but in any case, since the literary is a matter merely of fashion decreed by an elite interested only in their own status, literary fiction is unfit to point to the truth. As a result, he says, literary books are never a force for social change and are only ever transient in significance.
Well, I don't know where George Orwell's novels, for instance, or nineteenth-century literary classics come into this. The example he chooses to prove his point is John Updike's Couples. I thoroughly enjoyed his hatchet-job on Updike's overblown prose, but can't agree that the fact that this is how it now seems is simply the result of 'the need for evolving sumptuary laws of culture to fix people in what seems to be their place' rather than wider changes in our social attitudes and consequent changes in the way we use language.
It turns out, though, that Horning isn't ignoring the current state of the market and its effect on so-called literary fiction, but for him it's another illustration of the way that literary fiction is lost up its own upturned nose: those he sees as claiming the badge of the literary he sees also as using the current marketing situation for 'just another mystification of the capitalist value form that orients production not toward generating more material wealth but generating distinction. It justifies poverty amid plenty on the basis of effort directed at shadows — in this case the alleged superiority of some socially coded type of language use'. For me this comes too close to blaming the victim, and his savage description of what he calls the newest literary moves towards endorsement of popular prejudiced and narrow conceptions of the literary: 'arid avant-gardism, formal difficulty for its own sake, genre experimentation, or really anything that the right readers can tell themselves is powerful and new and thus enjoy their own perceptiveness'.
Towards the end of the article, however, there's a change of tone, and Horning becomes almost wistful: 'I used to think you could salvage the term literary by ignoring its marketing usage and reserving it at least personally for those unique artifacts that appear perfect in themselves.' And he ends with what I take as self-irony: 'The reader who purports to be beyond the literary may be the most literary of all, claiming the perfectly camouflaged cultural capital whose value therefore can’t be questioned.' Which makes it all the more mystifying to me that he has expended so much effort in attacking a straw man.
He doesn't like the term 'literary', he begins by saying. My initial reaction is to agree (although I often find myself using the term). My reasons are these: while 'literary' can refer to a wide range of kinds of writing, from plain if heightened realism and the well-turned familiar to the wildly experimental and dissonantly innovative, it is too often taken as conjuring up the latter, against which there is a general prejudice. Any use of the term can cause people to assume with no other foundation, and often wrongly, that a book will be too difficult, or unenjoyable, or elitist, and put them off. 'Literary', in consequence, is too often used nowadays as a term of denigration. Secondly, this usage of the term is arbitrary, since forms that are unfamiliar when they first appear - non-linear narrative, for instance - can become familiar (and thus lose their 'difficulty') over time.
Initially, Horning appears to be saying exactly this last. He says that although we think the term defines 'particular formal characteristics', it doesn't really, since what is considered literary changes over time. But here his argument takes a different course, and his article turns out to be based on the assumption that, far from being used as a term of denigration, 'the literary' is a term still embraced as a positive accolade.
The reason for changes in notions of what is literary, he says, is that the literary is a matter of fashion. And the fashions are dictated (not by external factors in society, as I'd contend) but by a 'gate-keeping' literary community intent on 'asserting social power'. It's used, he declares, as 'an alibi for the status aspirations of the people who use it, who want to control its meaning'. 'The literary is what literary people say it is, which is what makes them literary people.'
It's the snobbery of the literary he's objecting to. There's something in this, of course: I remember feeling as child that maybe I could never be the writer I wanted to be, as those novels considered literary - ie given acclaim by reviewers - were set in worlds about which I knew nothing (except from books), middle-class drawing rooms peopled by doctors and lawyers or Bohemian artists. And when my novel The Birth Machine was first published it was hard to get it taken seriously as literature/art rather than propaganda because of its subject matter. It's certainly true that there are changing prejudices around what we consider literary. But it's the use of the term we are apparently talking about, and Horning seems at this point to overlook the fact that 'literary' has in recent years become a term of abuse, that publishers and agents are drawing their hands away from novels in any danger of being considered 'literary' as from hot bricks, and authors have been turning to familiar genres as the only way of surviving. I'm not sure that professing a 'literary' identity has recently given authors much power, social or literary.
Not that Horning purports to be talking about authors. 'The literary never really refers to books but to readers', he says. The point is that 'literary works flatter audiences... lets them pat themselves on the back by rejecting pleasure'. Well, there can't be many readers wanting to be flattered and patted on the back this way if publishers' enthrallment to the market is anything to go by, or if there are, the industry is mistaken and neglecting them sadly. And here we come up against a glaring inconsistency in Horning's argument. To Horning, it seems, 'the literary' does after all mean a specific 'formal characteristic' that is apparently unchanging. He began by asserting that the literary is not the same as the good, that 'any overlap may be entirely coincidental', but here he joins the ranks of those who use the term as an insult and equates the literary with the bad: 'The literary,' he says, 'never lets you forget how literary you are by reading it', implying not only that it always has a certain self-consciousness of tone but that this tone is directed towards nothing but flattering the reader's vanity (and so the author is implicated after all). This doggedly overlooks the possibility that prose designed to defamiliarise can have worthier aims: to draw readers' attention to certain truths about language, story-telling or life (see, for instance, my reading group discussion of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat). But then Horning has covered that base: 'Such goals are nonsensical, impossible,' he asserts, but in any case, since the literary is a matter merely of fashion decreed by an elite interested only in their own status, literary fiction is unfit to point to the truth. As a result, he says, literary books are never a force for social change and are only ever transient in significance.
Well, I don't know where George Orwell's novels, for instance, or nineteenth-century literary classics come into this. The example he chooses to prove his point is John Updike's Couples. I thoroughly enjoyed his hatchet-job on Updike's overblown prose, but can't agree that the fact that this is how it now seems is simply the result of 'the need for evolving sumptuary laws of culture to fix people in what seems to be their place' rather than wider changes in our social attitudes and consequent changes in the way we use language.
It turns out, though, that Horning isn't ignoring the current state of the market and its effect on so-called literary fiction, but for him it's another illustration of the way that literary fiction is lost up its own upturned nose: those he sees as claiming the badge of the literary he sees also as using the current marketing situation for 'just another mystification of the capitalist value form that orients production not toward generating more material wealth but generating distinction. It justifies poverty amid plenty on the basis of effort directed at shadows — in this case the alleged superiority of some socially coded type of language use'. For me this comes too close to blaming the victim, and his savage description of what he calls the newest literary moves towards endorsement of popular prejudiced and narrow conceptions of the literary: 'arid avant-gardism, formal difficulty for its own sake, genre experimentation, or really anything that the right readers can tell themselves is powerful and new and thus enjoy their own perceptiveness'.
Towards the end of the article, however, there's a change of tone, and Horning becomes almost wistful: 'I used to think you could salvage the term literary by ignoring its marketing usage and reserving it at least personally for those unique artifacts that appear perfect in themselves.' And he ends with what I take as self-irony: 'The reader who purports to be beyond the literary may be the most literary of all, claiming the perfectly camouflaged cultural capital whose value therefore can’t be questioned.' Which makes it all the more mystifying to me that he has expended so much effort in attacking a straw man.
Monday, February 27, 2012
The stories and the stars
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Guest post: Novelist Anthony McCarten
I am delighted to host today a guest post by prizewinning New Zealand novelist, playwright and filmmaker Anthony McCarten, whose new novel, Brilliance, will come from Alma Books in March. (See below the article for his biography.) Brilliance is a fascinating exploration of the Faustian bargain struck by Thomas Edison, inventor of electric light, with 'the world's banker', J P Morgan, a moment which McCarten sees as 'a point of embarkation for the modern world' with its powerful corporations and bankers 'greater than governments', and answering Occupy Movement. Interestingly, McCarten provides an Author's Note concerning the fictional treatment of a factual subject, similar to that in Andrew Miller's Pure which was discussed recently by Robert McCrum. Picking up on a phrase in my own post (below) on the matter, 'fast and loose', McCarten argues here that, rather than the 'loss of heart' McCrum sees in such Author Notes, they offer something quite other:
FAST AND LOOSE
Fast and Loose: sounds like a cricket term for a ball badly bowled. It derives, actually, from a medieval cheating game, where something seemingly stuck 'fast' becomes, in an apparent act of magic, 'loose.'
Fast and Loose: how often the term is now used by writers to warn the reader or viewer to be prepared for a healthy disregard for historical fact in the story they are about to read or witness.
And the reason we need such a term? Because of the inbuilt tendency of life to not ever quite conform to a well-told story, hence the temptation for the writer to extemporize, to play, to invent, to
conflate, to even falsify events and finally, by an act of apparent magic, apply the angled cricket bat of fancy to the hard, straight ball of fact, sending it rushing on some surprisingly new trajectory.
New: the critical word here. Newness. To introduce the unforeseen into the foreseeable. To surprise. To take what we know, or think we know, and present in a fresh way. To make the wise, unwise. To make the learned ignorant. When applied to historical fiction the writer wishes to get away with murder, and be praised for it.
Fast and Loose: sounds like a cricket term for a ball badly bowled. It derives, actually, from a medieval cheating game, where something seemingly stuck 'fast' becomes, in an apparent act of magic, 'loose.'
Fast and Loose: how often the term is now used by writers to warn the reader or viewer to be prepared for a healthy disregard for historical fact in the story they are about to read or witness.
And the reason we need such a term? Because of the inbuilt tendency of life to not ever quite conform to a well-told story, hence the temptation for the writer to extemporize, to play, to invent, to
conflate, to even falsify events and finally, by an act of apparent magic, apply the angled cricket bat of fancy to the hard, straight ball of fact, sending it rushing on some surprisingly new trajectory.
New: the critical word here. Newness. To introduce the unforeseen into the foreseeable. To surprise. To take what we know, or think we know, and present in a fresh way. To make the wise, unwise. To make the learned ignorant. When applied to historical fiction the writer wishes to get away with murder, and be praised for it.
But praise is not always forthcoming. Should the writer take too many liberties with famous facts
then await the backlash. In anticipation of this backlash "The Authors Note" is born. In this half-page apologia, the author readies the reader for quite a bit of fastness and more than a smattering of looseness.
I wrote such a note for my new, upcoming novel, "Brilliance" which does small injury to virtuous fact as it pertains to the lives of J.P.Morgan and Thomas Edison. Fortunately both men are dead — no small detail, as writers (and their lawyers) meddling with the lives of living entities will tell you — and so they cannot admonish or sue me for setting them in rooms they never entered, spoke lines they could never speak, committed crimes for which the evidence is only circumstantial at best. In his piece in the Observer, Robert McCrum, suggested that the Author's Note seemed proof of a lack of inventive gumption in modern literature. Why the need to explain, to apologize for anything? Wasn't literature's charter to invent, at all costs, to take no prisoners while doing so? Only wimps feel the need to explain. Publish and be slammed.
then await the backlash. In anticipation of this backlash "The Authors Note" is born. In this half-page apologia, the author readies the reader for quite a bit of fastness and more than a smattering of looseness.
I wrote such a note for my new, upcoming novel, "Brilliance" which does small injury to virtuous fact as it pertains to the lives of J.P.Morgan and Thomas Edison. Fortunately both men are dead — no small detail, as writers (and their lawyers) meddling with the lives of living entities will tell you — and so they cannot admonish or sue me for setting them in rooms they never entered, spoke lines they could never speak, committed crimes for which the evidence is only circumstantial at best. In his piece in the Observer, Robert McCrum, suggested that the Author's Note seemed proof of a lack of inventive gumption in modern literature. Why the need to explain, to apologize for anything? Wasn't literature's charter to invent, at all costs, to take no prisoners while doing so? Only wimps feel the need to explain. Publish and be slammed.
I have a slight problem with this. If you've ever, as a writer, had to face your audience, at a Q&A session, after a reading or the screening of the film adaption of a story based on historical record, then you'd realise that everyone simply wants to know where the facts end and where the fiction begins. "Mr McCarten, can I ask... how much of this story is true?" It's as if the audience has put on hold their emotional reaction until confirmation is delivered that the key scenes that moved them — the key ones, the ones that depict the hero taking up a knife and stabbing, or opening the vault to steal millions, or sending the telegram that will alter the world — whether they actually happened. If they did, then the reader/viewer is all yours: you have a devotee at once. But if you reply, as on occasions I have had to do, "Well, I have played slightly fast and loose with that bit" the moan in the crowd is pronounced and prolonged, I can assure you. The gumption is not lacking in the writer, I would claim, but in the reader. To address their lack of gumption - for the writer has already proved his licentious credentials by writing of the unhistorical historical in the first place - the Author's Note tries to embolden the reader. It's not an apologia, it's an analeptic. I argue here that the Author's Note is a courtesy to the reader, no more, and that Mr McCrum is bowling something of a wide ball, and I plead for the referee to raise a judicious finger and award one meagre run to the lonely batter.
Anthony McCarten.
Anthony McCarten’s novels have been
translated into fourteen languages. His collection
of short stories, A Modest Apocalypse, was shortlisted for the Heinemann Reed
Fiction Award in 1991. Death of a Superhero won the 2008 Austrian Youth Literature Prize
and was a finalist for the German Youth Literature Prize. He has published five
novels to date and also written numerous stage plays, including co-writing the
world-wide success Ladies Night, which won the prestigious Molière prize, the
Meilleure Pièce Comique in 2001. While most of his novels have been turned into
successful feature films by other film-makers, McCarten directed Show of
Hands himself, as
well as his adaption of his stage-play, Via Satellite.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Imagining reality
Robert McCrum considers an issue that this blog has touched on more than once: the troubling need in our contemporary cultural climate for fiction to pass itself off as 'authentic' - increasingly in terms of factual authenticity. He quotes from the author's note in Andrew Miller's Costa-winning Pure: 'This is a work of imagination, a work that combines the actual with the invented' and notes the 'queasiness' of this apparent sense of the need for a defence of the novelist's right to invent, imagine and play fast and loose with historical and social fact. As McCrum says, 'When the novel was young and confident, inventiveness was its raison d'etre. Not now.' David Edgar's recent piece in The Guardian made reference to the extent to which this trend has affected radio drama even more strongly, with its proliferation of factually-based plays about well-known events or disasters or incidents in the lives of famous people. And of course we needn't mention the dreary ubiquity of 'reality' TV shows.
It's interesting. On the one hand we have this over-dependence on the comfort of 'fact', and on the other the fantasy worlds of Harry Potter and virtual gaming. What we can't seem to deal with is the inventive re-imagining of our recognisably real world that makes us look at it differently and uncovers truths we may not have previously noticed. This, ironically, is not an embracing of reality but a withdrawal from it.
It's interesting. On the one hand we have this over-dependence on the comfort of 'fact', and on the other the fantasy worlds of Harry Potter and virtual gaming. What we can't seem to deal with is the inventive re-imagining of our recognisably real world that makes us look at it differently and uncovers truths we may not have previously noticed. This, ironically, is not an embracing of reality but a withdrawal from it.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Too simple for words?
Interesting juxtaposition in today's Guardian.
First, there's a very interesting four-page interview with Umberto Eco by Stephen Moss. The great semiotician opines that ' "you [ie the author] are not responsible for perverse readings of your book" ' which might seem like poststructuralist orthodoxy - a text is what the reader/cultural context makes of it, etc - but it's obvious that he thinks his books are misunderstood by what he calls "weak readers". He feels that books are best judged 10 years after publication after reading and re-reading [my italics], an interesting comment in the light of our current quick-fix literary culture, and the way that books drop right out of the public consciousness if they don't have an instant hit. He isn't precious about the film of The Name of the Rose; he is tickled by the fact that a girl went into a bookshop and saw it and said "Oh, they have already made a book out of it [ie the film]." He has a iPad for travelling, but he doesn't think that printed books will die, and puts it nicely: "Not just Peter Pan but my Peter Pan". Above all, he explains the huge success of the erudite The Name of the Rose, which just goes on and on selling, by the fact that "It's only publishers and journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged."
Then there's a piece by Laura Barnett on the fact that this year the Christmas literary market is awash with 'women's fiction' about Christmas. As Barnett points out, Dickens wrote Christmas books, but one has to doubt that these books will still be being read, like A Christmas Carol, 170 years after publication (leave alone in Eco's 10-year time frame), since the quote from Hodder and Stoughton editor Isobel Akenhead makes pretty clear that the thematic push is intended as ephemeral, and the books are being sold as ephemeral commodities: "It makes sense to publish for Christmas – that's the one time of year that doesn't seem to have been affected by the general drop-off in sales of women's fiction. In supermarkets, these books cost little more than a Paperchase Christmas card; people often seem to buy two of them, one for themselves and one for their mother, sister or friend. That doesn't happen at any other time of year." So they're bought like Christmas cards, for the rituals of Christmas (which we all know can be a chore, but hey, we've got to do it), and like Christmas cards, they are a cause of brief delight before being thrown away.
Of course, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with reading purely for entertainment. But it's interesting that Isobel Akenhead says that sales of 'women's fiction' have dropped off generally. Are we simply talking comparative numbers in a market that is nevertheless a major source of income for publishers, or can Eco be right about people wanting other kinds of literature, too?
First, there's a very interesting four-page interview with Umberto Eco by Stephen Moss. The great semiotician opines that ' "you [ie the author] are not responsible for perverse readings of your book" ' which might seem like poststructuralist orthodoxy - a text is what the reader/cultural context makes of it, etc - but it's obvious that he thinks his books are misunderstood by what he calls "weak readers". He feels that books are best judged 10 years after publication after reading and re-reading [my italics], an interesting comment in the light of our current quick-fix literary culture, and the way that books drop right out of the public consciousness if they don't have an instant hit. He isn't precious about the film of The Name of the Rose; he is tickled by the fact that a girl went into a bookshop and saw it and said "Oh, they have already made a book out of it [ie the film]." He has a iPad for travelling, but he doesn't think that printed books will die, and puts it nicely: "Not just Peter Pan but my Peter Pan". Above all, he explains the huge success of the erudite The Name of the Rose, which just goes on and on selling, by the fact that "It's only publishers and journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged."
Then there's a piece by Laura Barnett on the fact that this year the Christmas literary market is awash with 'women's fiction' about Christmas. As Barnett points out, Dickens wrote Christmas books, but one has to doubt that these books will still be being read, like A Christmas Carol, 170 years after publication (leave alone in Eco's 10-year time frame), since the quote from Hodder and Stoughton editor Isobel Akenhead makes pretty clear that the thematic push is intended as ephemeral, and the books are being sold as ephemeral commodities: "It makes sense to publish for Christmas – that's the one time of year that doesn't seem to have been affected by the general drop-off in sales of women's fiction. In supermarkets, these books cost little more than a Paperchase Christmas card; people often seem to buy two of them, one for themselves and one for their mother, sister or friend. That doesn't happen at any other time of year." So they're bought like Christmas cards, for the rituals of Christmas (which we all know can be a chore, but hey, we've got to do it), and like Christmas cards, they are a cause of brief delight before being thrown away.
Of course, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with reading purely for entertainment. But it's interesting that Isobel Akenhead says that sales of 'women's fiction' have dropped off generally. Are we simply talking comparative numbers in a market that is nevertheless a major source of income for publishers, or can Eco be right about people wanting other kinds of literature, too?
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The uselessness of novels?
It looks like a Guardian conspiracy to stir up a controversy. Here's the ever-clever Zoe Williams commissioned to write an article claiming to have given up reading novels because it's irresponsible (or that's the impression given by the sub-editors of the print and online versions respectively) when the political and economic facts of the world need our attention and understanding. And there's Viv Groskop on Twitter disagreeing and claiming that it's in fiction you find the truth. Still, if it focuses attention on the issues, so much the better.
'When the news is so apocalyptic, and there is so much to understand,' Williams says, '...it feels more than frivolous to read about made-up people. It feels unpatriotic. Or, to put it another way, it is like watching the telly when you have homework.'
Hm. Well, that reference to patriotism makes me think from the outset she ain't so serious or committed to her argument. There is indeed an urgent truth in her declaration that we need to engage more, through reading, with the political issues of our day. She quotes from John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, the nonfiction book he wrote as a result of research for his forthcoming novel, Capital. He sums up the way we have become politically-intellectually disenfranchised : 'We'd all rather be in the back seat of the car, with our parents in the front, driving. But now we've woken up doing 90.'
But it turns out that Williams' argument concerning novels is subtler than would at first seem. She appears in the end not to be talking about the novel per se but chiefly to be complaining that contemporary novels, rather than engaging with the issues of the day, are backward looking, 're-sit[ing] your large themes in the past, where they are more attractive and less political.' This needs unpacking. Is it a bad thing to make an issue more attractive to contemplate? Or is she right in her implication that the veneer of the past stops us seeing or caring about the modern parallels, so that any novel doing this lacks political dynamism? But as Faber editorial director Hannah Griffiths, whom she quotes, says: 'You'd have to write a very ambitious contemporary novel, because they take so long to come out'. It's not only that, though: as we've discussed on this blog before, the time is in the digesting of issues: as we've noted before, most nineteenth-century novels that we now think of as addressing the hot issues of the day were written restrospectively.
Of course, though, Williams is using this as fuel for her argument that novels are beside the point in our urgent search for an understanding of our contemporary world, and in any case she quotes Damien Barr, who runs the Shoreditch House Literary Salon, as accusing contemporary novels of failing to engage with big/political issues in any form whatever: 'There is this false idea that fiction has no particular stance because it is made up, as a result of which it doesn't have to be informed, and it doesn't have to inform. I think we desperately need to be informed about our times, and our history, and our human condition, and at the moment, the novel is really only good for the latter.'
But who ever said that because a novel is 'made up', it shouldn't have a particular stance? And when did a good novel never inform us, provide a searing insight? Ah, but what are we talking about here, of course, are things like the understanding of economics, the things about which we've become intellectually disenfranchised. And novels just aren't cutting it in that regard, they are - tut tut - only telling us about the human condition! There is something, though, I'd say, in what Williams quotes Lanchester as saying: 'In general, the literary novel has turned slightly too far away from the things that press on people. It is an utterly bizarre place to have ended up, but if the subject of a novel is too interesting, that's not literary enough.'
It is at the end of the article that Williams' true attitude to fiction emerges, an appreciation of its power:
'When the news is so apocalyptic, and there is so much to understand,' Williams says, '...it feels more than frivolous to read about made-up people. It feels unpatriotic. Or, to put it another way, it is like watching the telly when you have homework.'
Hm. Well, that reference to patriotism makes me think from the outset she ain't so serious or committed to her argument. There is indeed an urgent truth in her declaration that we need to engage more, through reading, with the political issues of our day. She quotes from John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, the nonfiction book he wrote as a result of research for his forthcoming novel, Capital. He sums up the way we have become politically-intellectually disenfranchised : 'We'd all rather be in the back seat of the car, with our parents in the front, driving. But now we've woken up doing 90.'
But it turns out that Williams' argument concerning novels is subtler than would at first seem. She appears in the end not to be talking about the novel per se but chiefly to be complaining that contemporary novels, rather than engaging with the issues of the day, are backward looking, 're-sit[ing] your large themes in the past, where they are more attractive and less political.' This needs unpacking. Is it a bad thing to make an issue more attractive to contemplate? Or is she right in her implication that the veneer of the past stops us seeing or caring about the modern parallels, so that any novel doing this lacks political dynamism? But as Faber editorial director Hannah Griffiths, whom she quotes, says: 'You'd have to write a very ambitious contemporary novel, because they take so long to come out'. It's not only that, though: as we've discussed on this blog before, the time is in the digesting of issues: as we've noted before, most nineteenth-century novels that we now think of as addressing the hot issues of the day were written restrospectively.
Of course, though, Williams is using this as fuel for her argument that novels are beside the point in our urgent search for an understanding of our contemporary world, and in any case she quotes Damien Barr, who runs the Shoreditch House Literary Salon, as accusing contemporary novels of failing to engage with big/political issues in any form whatever: 'There is this false idea that fiction has no particular stance because it is made up, as a result of which it doesn't have to be informed, and it doesn't have to inform. I think we desperately need to be informed about our times, and our history, and our human condition, and at the moment, the novel is really only good for the latter.'
But who ever said that because a novel is 'made up', it shouldn't have a particular stance? And when did a good novel never inform us, provide a searing insight? Ah, but what are we talking about here, of course, are things like the understanding of economics, the things about which we've become intellectually disenfranchised. And novels just aren't cutting it in that regard, they are - tut tut - only telling us about the human condition! There is something, though, I'd say, in what Williams quotes Lanchester as saying: 'In general, the literary novel has turned slightly too far away from the things that press on people. It is an utterly bizarre place to have ended up, but if the subject of a novel is too interesting, that's not literary enough.'
It is at the end of the article that Williams' true attitude to fiction emerges, an appreciation of its power:
A novel that does take on big contemporary questions, even if it then hinges on an understanding of complex warfare, or politics, or industry, or finance, if it can do that and not be boring, not be full of what science fiction calls the "tell me, Professor" moments, that will be more use to you, probably, than any amount of explication delivered in factual, readable, lay terms. "If I've learnt anything real," Griffiths concludes, "I've learnt it through fiction."Assuring us that Lanchester's novel does just this, Williams tells us: 'That's when you fully comprehend something, when you can see its face.'
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Loglines and fiction
This week Robert McCrum is onto something that, as regular readers here will know, has been causing me to gnash my teeth for a while. He quotes a prominent US literary agent: 'A new novel should be summarised in a single sentence, and should stop dinner conversation for at least 10 minutes', and goes on to point out that his own favourite novels, Heart of Darkness and Portrait of a Lady, wouldn't stand that test.
Of course not: the province of the novel is complexity and subtlety, which can never be represented in a single sentence or 'log-line' as it's known in the film industry. The province of the novel is the human psyche and the human heart, yet the second part of this agent's stricture - the ability to stop dinner-party conversations - leads one away from the subtleties of that to mere sensation, the single, striking, if possible unusual but readily graspable (and if possible sensational) idea, the marketer's 'High Concept' which in artistic or philosophical terms is anything but conceptually high.
I don't quite agree with McCrum's apparent implication that any novel that is summed up in this way is necessarily shallow - 'flatpack fiction' as he calls it: it's quite possible of course to concentrate in marketing on the more sensational aspects of a novel and gloss over the more subtle characteristics - a kind of misrepresentation of expedience that the cultural recession must be forcing marketers into. Of the non-winning Booker shortlistees, whose books he characterises as 'flatpack', the one that I've read, Jane Rogers' The Testament of Jessie Lamb, is billed chiefly as science fiction about biological terrorism, but also, and more importantly, it's a study of the power relations between parents and teenage children. [Edited in: whoops, sorry, that's my mistake: The Testament of J L was not shortlisted, but longlisted.]
However, it must also be true that this marketing philosophy is affecting the kinds of books that get published, that novels will be chosen for publication on 'concept' rather than content, and sold that way. So in turn people are sold, and buy, a ready-made idea rather than a text with which to engage on an exploratory and interactive level. And if you don't expect the book to yield more than the idea you've bought - if the physical (or digital) book is merely its symbol, why bother to actually read it, or at any rate to read it with any critical intelligence? It's the ultimate commodification.
I see it everywhere: it filters down to the non-commercial areas of literature. There's always, in my view, been a problem with short-story competitions: it's bound to be easier to catch the eye of a judge trawling through hundreds of stories with a striking, rather than the most artistically apt, first sentence. But the problem seems to be getting worse: now that short-story competitions have proliferated, and have become a chief way to get noticed in the short-story world, zombies and spooks and quirky Murakami-style aberrations abound, often without much thematic meaning that I can see beyond those sensationalist 'concepts'.
And the effect goes deeper - into the psyches of writers, and this feeds back into our culture. McCrum sees this as 'the desperate conditions in which the contemporary writer must operate'. I thank him for that insight, and can vouch for its accuracy: now when I conceive a short story or a novel I find myself immediately thinking: but would it stand any chance in this cultural situation? Could I give it a good log-line? And if I feel that I can't - that it's too subtle and complex - I wonder whether I should write it at all.
Of course not: the province of the novel is complexity and subtlety, which can never be represented in a single sentence or 'log-line' as it's known in the film industry. The province of the novel is the human psyche and the human heart, yet the second part of this agent's stricture - the ability to stop dinner-party conversations - leads one away from the subtleties of that to mere sensation, the single, striking, if possible unusual but readily graspable (and if possible sensational) idea, the marketer's 'High Concept' which in artistic or philosophical terms is anything but conceptually high.
I don't quite agree with McCrum's apparent implication that any novel that is summed up in this way is necessarily shallow - 'flatpack fiction' as he calls it: it's quite possible of course to concentrate in marketing on the more sensational aspects of a novel and gloss over the more subtle characteristics - a kind of misrepresentation of expedience that the cultural recession must be forcing marketers into. Of the non-winning Booker shortlistees, whose books he characterises as 'flatpack', the one that I've read, Jane Rogers' The Testament of Jessie Lamb, is billed chiefly as science fiction about biological terrorism, but also, and more importantly, it's a study of the power relations between parents and teenage children. [Edited in: whoops, sorry, that's my mistake: The Testament of J L was not shortlisted, but longlisted.]
However, it must also be true that this marketing philosophy is affecting the kinds of books that get published, that novels will be chosen for publication on 'concept' rather than content, and sold that way. So in turn people are sold, and buy, a ready-made idea rather than a text with which to engage on an exploratory and interactive level. And if you don't expect the book to yield more than the idea you've bought - if the physical (or digital) book is merely its symbol, why bother to actually read it, or at any rate to read it with any critical intelligence? It's the ultimate commodification.
I see it everywhere: it filters down to the non-commercial areas of literature. There's always, in my view, been a problem with short-story competitions: it's bound to be easier to catch the eye of a judge trawling through hundreds of stories with a striking, rather than the most artistically apt, first sentence. But the problem seems to be getting worse: now that short-story competitions have proliferated, and have become a chief way to get noticed in the short-story world, zombies and spooks and quirky Murakami-style aberrations abound, often without much thematic meaning that I can see beyond those sensationalist 'concepts'.
And the effect goes deeper - into the psyches of writers, and this feeds back into our culture. McCrum sees this as 'the desperate conditions in which the contemporary writer must operate'. I thank him for that insight, and can vouch for its accuracy: now when I conceive a short story or a novel I find myself immediately thinking: but would it stand any chance in this cultural situation? Could I give it a good log-line? And if I feel that I can't - that it's too subtle and complex - I wonder whether I should write it at all.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
The Real Thing
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Guest post: (What's the Story) Fiction as Art?
Today I'm delighted to host Mike French, Senior Editor of The View from Here, and author of the daringly unusual novel The Ascent of Isaac Steward, with a guest post continuing yesterday's theme of innovation versus convention.
(What's the Story) Fiction as Art?
“Works of art often tell stories. Artists can present narrative in many ways—by using a series of images representing moments in a story, or by selecting a central moment to stand for the whole story. These lessons will build students' awareness of how stories can be told visually and how artists use color, line, gesture, composition, and symbolism to tell a story. Students will interpret and create narratives based upon a work of art and apply what they have learned to create works of art that tell a story.” The J. Paul Getty Museum
People are usually happy with the concept of a painting telling a story that can be interrupted in a number of ways and accept that a quick glance isn’t enough – you have to stand in front of it for a while whilst you personalise the meaning. So why then do we struggle when a novel works in the same way, when the writer uses words to paint images directly into a reader’s head to tell a story in a way that needs time to sit within their mind?
You can fall in love with a piece of music even if you don’t fully understand the lyrics – and again this seems acceptable, yet again when fiction does the same often people are left floundering, not sure what to think unless they understand everything. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a song that picked me out of my day in wonder and then thought …. Nar, nice tune and it jump started my emotions but I don’t understand all the lines, so no. Even Oasis’ massively successful album (What’s the story) Morning Glory? had fans arguing over if that meant a nice sunny day in Manchester or morning erections.
Poetry doesn’t seem to encounter this thirst for instant recognition and complete comprehension. So I’m left puzzling, what’s the story with fiction as art?
I wonder if our western mindset demanding everything make sense on an intellectual level twinned with our pace of life means we have little patience for things that require time to appreciate. We read in bed in snatches when we’re tired, we read on the train. We read in the spaces in our lives and therefore we require a quick injection, a brief escape from reality and when we do have time to unwind we switch on the TV.
So what’s the solution for writers when their fiction aspires to be art? I think for me it’s not worrying about it. People change, cultures change and if we pander to the culture we find ourselves in, then how do we effectively communicate to it in a way that helps brings about that change? Today’s challenge being demonstrating beauty and the frailty of humanity in a way that doesn’t wrap itself up as a two minute pop noodle cash cow.
And fiction I think suffers more than other art forms in this respect. Poems tend to be short, songs ask only for a few minutes of your time, even a painting feels quite good about itself if you spend five minutes in front of it. But o the novel. Maybe your days are numbered and in a hundred years’ time the relation between short stories and novels will flip with the publishers. A novel you say? Well there’s little appetite for novels, short stories are where the money is, easily digested on your Kindle. But a novel, nobody reads novels these days.
Maybe we need art galleries with books in. Set the ambience, where time slows down and you allow yourself time to read without feeling guilty that you should be doing something else. O yes they’re called libraries aren’t they – are there any left?
Mike is the owner and senior editor of The View From Here literary magazine, he also enjoys painting, watching Formula 1, eating Ben & Jerry's icecream and listening to Noah and the Whale. His second novel, Blue Friday is now completed and he is starting work on his third novel. For the last ten years Mike has been a “home dad” after giving up his job in optical engineering to look after the kids full time – much of his first novel, The Ascent of Isaac Steward was written during their afternoon naps! The Ascent of Isaac Steward is available at Amazon. Visit Mike's Blog.
(What's the Story) Fiction as Art?
“Works of art often tell stories. Artists can present narrative in many ways—by using a series of images representing moments in a story, or by selecting a central moment to stand for the whole story. These lessons will build students' awareness of how stories can be told visually and how artists use color, line, gesture, composition, and symbolism to tell a story. Students will interpret and create narratives based upon a work of art and apply what they have learned to create works of art that tell a story.” The J. Paul Getty Museum People are usually happy with the concept of a painting telling a story that can be interrupted in a number of ways and accept that a quick glance isn’t enough – you have to stand in front of it for a while whilst you personalise the meaning. So why then do we struggle when a novel works in the same way, when the writer uses words to paint images directly into a reader’s head to tell a story in a way that needs time to sit within their mind?
You can fall in love with a piece of music even if you don’t fully understand the lyrics – and again this seems acceptable, yet again when fiction does the same often people are left floundering, not sure what to think unless they understand everything. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a song that picked me out of my day in wonder and then thought …. Nar, nice tune and it jump started my emotions but I don’t understand all the lines, so no. Even Oasis’ massively successful album (What’s the story) Morning Glory? had fans arguing over if that meant a nice sunny day in Manchester or morning erections.
Poetry doesn’t seem to encounter this thirst for instant recognition and complete comprehension. So I’m left puzzling, what’s the story with fiction as art?
I wonder if our western mindset demanding everything make sense on an intellectual level twinned with our pace of life means we have little patience for things that require time to appreciate. We read in bed in snatches when we’re tired, we read on the train. We read in the spaces in our lives and therefore we require a quick injection, a brief escape from reality and when we do have time to unwind we switch on the TV.
So what’s the solution for writers when their fiction aspires to be art? I think for me it’s not worrying about it. People change, cultures change and if we pander to the culture we find ourselves in, then how do we effectively communicate to it in a way that helps brings about that change? Today’s challenge being demonstrating beauty and the frailty of humanity in a way that doesn’t wrap itself up as a two minute pop noodle cash cow.
And fiction I think suffers more than other art forms in this respect. Poems tend to be short, songs ask only for a few minutes of your time, even a painting feels quite good about itself if you spend five minutes in front of it. But o the novel. Maybe your days are numbered and in a hundred years’ time the relation between short stories and novels will flip with the publishers. A novel you say? Well there’s little appetite for novels, short stories are where the money is, easily digested on your Kindle. But a novel, nobody reads novels these days.
Maybe we need art galleries with books in. Set the ambience, where time slows down and you allow yourself time to read without feeling guilty that you should be doing something else. O yes they’re called libraries aren’t they – are there any left?
Mike is the owner and senior editor of The View From Here literary magazine, he also enjoys painting, watching Formula 1, eating Ben & Jerry's icecream and listening to Noah and the Whale. His second novel, Blue Friday is now completed and he is starting work on his third novel. For the last ten years Mike has been a “home dad” after giving up his job in optical engineering to look after the kids full time – much of his first novel, The Ascent of Isaac Steward was written during their afternoon naps! The Ascent of Isaac Steward is available at Amazon. Visit Mike's Blog.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Self doubt
Some people seem to think Will Self had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote an article appearing in Saturday's Guardian in which he compares the novel to the musical symphony and concludes that music has moved on from modernism in a way the novel hasn't.
Maybe it was his joking intention (with our backs turned on innovation, we too much want 'cosy certainties'), but it took me two reads before I could begin to grasp his argument, and I'm still not sure I can. As commenter JohnNewport1 says,
And while I am taken by Self's assessment that both forms, the novel and the symphony, seek to 'simultaneously enact the most complete possible world-in-words or world in notes, while also actualising the creative personality itself', in many other ways we're just not comparing like with like, as other commenters point out. Seems to me that the verbal nature of novels creates a cognitive relationship between the work and the reader fundamentally different from the relationship between music and the listener (although Self labours the point that music shares the novel's 'struggle for a narrative voice'). We can let music wash over us, we can receive it emotionally without feeling the simultaneous need to understand it intellectually. Furthermore, the novel is hitched to commercialism in a way that contemporary music (I think) isn't. As Marion Miller points out in the Guardian comments, it is publishers, rather than authors, who determine which kinds of novels reach the light of day, and inevitably they respond to this readerly need for clarity.
However, there is a fundamental pulse in Self's article I do respond to. Because of the increased commercialism of literary production, this need for clarity appears to have tipped over into the need for 'cosy certainties'. As a writer I've always specifically wanted to avoid the cosy certainties, but as a former schoolteacher I've always felt the need to woo readers, to allow them to feel comfortable in the world of my writing, and indeed get them on my side, before pushing them on further than they may have expected. But as I've said before, this challenge is now all the greater.
Dan Holloway points out in the Guardian comments that the visual arts are crucially missing from Self's discussion, and it so happens that tomorrow a guest post on this blog by Mike French, Senior Editor of The View From Here, will address this issue of innovation and indeed make reference to the visual arts.
Maybe it was his joking intention (with our backs turned on innovation, we too much want 'cosy certainties'), but it took me two reads before I could begin to grasp his argument, and I'm still not sure I can. As commenter JohnNewport1 says,
He's rubbishing Franzen for not pushing back the boundaries even further than Joyce but instead returning to a pre-modernist view of the novel; but at the same time he admits that Joyce is now unreadable. He laments the way that novelists have not pursued innovation with the same fervour as modern composers of symphonies; yet he also suggests that composers gave up on symphonies altogether not long after Joyce's Ulyses came out.Self claims that while we've given up on Ulysses, 'concert-goers still crowd out auditoria to listen raptly to ['postmodernist' Mahler]', and I'm thinking, Hang on: most of the people I know who go to music halls much prefer Beethoven and Mozart. And actually, I don't know as many people who go to concert halls as who have read Ulysses (or at least say they have)! Do sales of Ulysses really pale in comparison with the numbers of people going to Mahler concerts?
And while I am taken by Self's assessment that both forms, the novel and the symphony, seek to 'simultaneously enact the most complete possible world-in-words or world in notes, while also actualising the creative personality itself', in many other ways we're just not comparing like with like, as other commenters point out. Seems to me that the verbal nature of novels creates a cognitive relationship between the work and the reader fundamentally different from the relationship between music and the listener (although Self labours the point that music shares the novel's 'struggle for a narrative voice'). We can let music wash over us, we can receive it emotionally without feeling the simultaneous need to understand it intellectually. Furthermore, the novel is hitched to commercialism in a way that contemporary music (I think) isn't. As Marion Miller points out in the Guardian comments, it is publishers, rather than authors, who determine which kinds of novels reach the light of day, and inevitably they respond to this readerly need for clarity.
However, there is a fundamental pulse in Self's article I do respond to. Because of the increased commercialism of literary production, this need for clarity appears to have tipped over into the need for 'cosy certainties'. As a writer I've always specifically wanted to avoid the cosy certainties, but as a former schoolteacher I've always felt the need to woo readers, to allow them to feel comfortable in the world of my writing, and indeed get them on my side, before pushing them on further than they may have expected. But as I've said before, this challenge is now all the greater.
Dan Holloway points out in the Guardian comments that the visual arts are crucially missing from Self's discussion, and it so happens that tomorrow a guest post on this blog by Mike French, Senior Editor of The View From Here, will address this issue of innovation and indeed make reference to the visual arts.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Fiction and class
I quite like some of what William Nicholson has to say in yesterday's Guardian on the issue of class and fiction. There is now a prejudice against middle-class characters and settings in novels, he says, and his anatomisation of how this came about seems to me about right:
What I don't like is the way that he feels bound to align himself with any particular 'class'. If the proper pursuit of novels is our common humanity (which I think it is) then we need to be able to get away, in the discussion of fiction, from even thinking in these terms.
Personally, I'm always pretty open-mouthed whenever someone manages to do that, identify with a particular class - but then in Wales, where I come from, we've never been so class conscious. As I think I may have said before, in my immediate Welsh forebears there are women in service and farm labourers with sisters and brothers who were schoolteachers, church ministers, and businessmen. So I've always felt pretty much connected to several levels of society, and it took me until the age of ten or so to realise that people thought of them as levels. I was stunned when one reviewer called one of my early short stories, based on my own background, a depiction of a 'working-class childhood'. The class of the characters simply hadn't been an issue for me (the issue of the story was actually religious prejudice), but here, it seemed, was a reviewer for whom class was the main issue; he was reading the story through a prism of class consciousness. And then, ironically, some people, feminists, complained, in precisely the way Nicholson describes, about the 'middle-class' viewpoint and milieu of my novel The Birth Machine: I had a definite feeling that had my protagonist been a 'working-class' woman, rather than a doctor's wife, then these educated (middle-class!) feminists would have been much more sympathetic to her predicament, and to me as a novelist.
A hundred years or so ago the language of idealism changed. As Christianity fractured, the imagination of those who wanted to make a better world was seized by a new idealism: socialism. In this new understanding of society the working class had virtue and was the future; the middle class had power and was the past. Bourgeois values came to be seen as vices. The middle-class consumers of art and literature gradually found themselves cast in negative terms, as exploitative, parasitic and reactionary.As 'one of those' middle-class people and a novelist, he finds this troubling, and points out rightly that the proper pursuit of fiction is to see the humanity in all of us, not just a certain section of society, and he gives us the wonderful sentence: 'Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.'
What I don't like is the way that he feels bound to align himself with any particular 'class'. If the proper pursuit of novels is our common humanity (which I think it is) then we need to be able to get away, in the discussion of fiction, from even thinking in these terms.
Personally, I'm always pretty open-mouthed whenever someone manages to do that, identify with a particular class - but then in Wales, where I come from, we've never been so class conscious. As I think I may have said before, in my immediate Welsh forebears there are women in service and farm labourers with sisters and brothers who were schoolteachers, church ministers, and businessmen. So I've always felt pretty much connected to several levels of society, and it took me until the age of ten or so to realise that people thought of them as levels. I was stunned when one reviewer called one of my early short stories, based on my own background, a depiction of a 'working-class childhood'. The class of the characters simply hadn't been an issue for me (the issue of the story was actually religious prejudice), but here, it seemed, was a reviewer for whom class was the main issue; he was reading the story through a prism of class consciousness. And then, ironically, some people, feminists, complained, in precisely the way Nicholson describes, about the 'middle-class' viewpoint and milieu of my novel The Birth Machine: I had a definite feeling that had my protagonist been a 'working-class' woman, rather than a doctor's wife, then these educated (middle-class!) feminists would have been much more sympathetic to her predicament, and to me as a novelist.
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Psychology will do your head in
Authors beware.
Having spent a good deal of the summer up a mountain in Wales and away from decent internet (which explains the recent intermittent nature of this blog), I'm here again for a week for family reasons. Last night, sheltering from the wild weather in the pub, I got talking to a holidaying Canadian couple doing likewise. They were educated, thoughtful - in early middle age - and we soon got onto the subject of their national authors. Inevitably I mentioned Margaret Atwood. The woman said, 'Oh no, I don't like Margaret Atwood at all! Oh no, no. What I like is a good story, and Margaret Atwood's books all take place inside people heads!' And she put her hands up to her head in a gesture not just of illustration but despair.
So, authors, remember: keep out of those damn heads. Emotion? Perspective? Point of view? The idea that the way a story unfolds depends on the insides of characters' heads? Who damn well cares? Ditch all that difficult stuff and stick to a simple notion of plot.
Having spent a good deal of the summer up a mountain in Wales and away from decent internet (which explains the recent intermittent nature of this blog), I'm here again for a week for family reasons. Last night, sheltering from the wild weather in the pub, I got talking to a holidaying Canadian couple doing likewise. They were educated, thoughtful - in early middle age - and we soon got onto the subject of their national authors. Inevitably I mentioned Margaret Atwood. The woman said, 'Oh no, I don't like Margaret Atwood at all! Oh no, no. What I like is a good story, and Margaret Atwood's books all take place inside people heads!' And she put her hands up to her head in a gesture not just of illustration but despair.
So, authors, remember: keep out of those damn heads. Emotion? Perspective? Point of view? The idea that the way a story unfolds depends on the insides of characters' heads? Who damn well cares? Ditch all that difficult stuff and stick to a simple notion of plot.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Good of the Novel?
There's a discussion on the topic on the Faber blog, to which I was very kindly asked to contribute. In Part 1 Richard T Kelly, editor of Faber Finds and agent Clare Alexander contribute their views, and in Part 2 I have my say along with two other bloggers, Paperback Reader and Juxtabook. Do go on over and contribute your own views.
Cross-posted with Elizabeth Baines
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