Where Fiction and News Collide
Steve Gilliard has an excellent essay on Hunter S. Thompson, alternative journalism (blogs), and the state of modern American fiction:
The worst thing to ever happen to writing was the writing program. Because it allowed people to focus on the trivia in their lives. The greatness of Heller and Mailer escapes these mindless twits nattering about their cheating dads and pill popping moms.
...
It is masturbation in print for the most part, and irrelevant. You would hardly know that men are hunting men in the mountains of Afghanistan and dodging roadside bombs in Iraq. The world of the vital has escaped our fiction, to be replaced by the world of the trivial and self-involved. Why? Because that is what drives the writing program, those who write well about themselves, but without the real introspection needed to be honest.
He goes on to link Thompson's brand of outlaw writing to the current crop of outcasts that run the blogosphere (God, I hate that word!) - they are the inheritors of the rude pursuit of truth at the expense of popularity or political success. As mush as I enjoy reading them, I won't get quite so misty-eyed about the wide array of political bloggers shouting to their cults of personality from their keyboards and sniping people they disagree with to satisfy their own sense of moral or intellectual superiority. But I get the appeal.
No, I'm more interested in the "fiction as navel-gazing" meme he's got going on here. Having sat through or listened to the resultant offal from various creative writing courses, I've long known that 90% of what the average person writes is absolute crap. Creative writing simply lowers the bar for printability. Self-delusional hero fantasy? Print it! Social revenge drama? They'll love it! Wonderments about the rich inner lives of your pets? Satirical gold! Items that would normally remain in the private sketch pad dungeons of professional writers become shared whole-cloth fiction pieces with minimal editing. It's the root of the self-publishing industry that the Nielsen Haydens are always daggering.
Even forgiving the amateurs that have wheedled their way into the professional publishing world, unapologetic about the badness of their work, Gilliard's main point is that our good fiction is also pointless and banal, because that is what the market hungers for. I believe that it is pointless to bemoan the state of modern aesthetics as hollow, because people have been doing that since they invented aesthetics in the first place, but there is clearly a sickness of self-congratulatory crap in a lot of modern writing. One look at the soulless makeshift rafts afloat on the fantasy sea makes that pretty clear.
I'm not a budding professional writer. I have no plans to make money from anything I write, and I'll be lucky if any work of mine ends up in the hands of a decent editor. Most of my work will never be polished, never carefully examined or even read by a large number of people. This forum on blogspot is probably the closest I'll get to publication. But I'm not so desperate for recognition or blase about my own literary importance to think that I can just post here whatever drivel spills off the page. I have, you might say, some standards.
Last week I wrote a great tragic little piece called "The Naked Heart on the Sidewalk." It's a thoughtful, emotional examination of life in the suburban business world. It features a poor soul despondent over the lack of truth and warmth in his personal life. It's a commentary on the hollow lottery of meeting someone nice and building relationships in an increasingly narrow social circle. It's absolute drippingly bittersweet horseshit derived from my inability to get a fucking date for the weekend. No one will see it, not because it's too personal to share, but because it is an utter and complete waste of anyone else's time. It's called practice writing, and no one needs to see it.
Thoughtful reading should be about more than just getting your weekly dose of escapism, genre fiction, and wankery. It should allow you to explore worlds and lives outside of your personal comforts and expectations. That means good writers have a responsibility (beyond making sales) to tell stories of a larger world, to examine human events honestly with an eye turned outward. As much as certain politcial persuasions may dislike it, we depend on our educated, thoughtful and articulate "chattering class" to provide the moral secular compass of our society. When that compass is absent or hard to find, where do we gravitate? To the howling cachophany of empty opinion that is today's Internet.
If you think that's elitism, here is my counter-argument.
2 comments:
An interesting post, Erik, and I note with some wry amusement your statement that fiction should be about more than escapism on a blog of this name and wherein you label writers as escapism artists.
I neither agree with you nor disagree with you, because fiction is a hydra. It's a multiheaded beast. Ambitious fiction, of course, should disturb us. It should throw us off our game. It should make us think. But sometimes our lives demand the comfort and security of the familiar. Great fiction, I feel, comes somewhere in between.
Properly phrased, I think fiction is an argument for change. The reason that the fiction of the creative writing program set rings so hollow for you (and it does for me, too) is, I suspect, in large part because there's no argument for change, there's no motion. You could say the same about Robert Jordan's fantasy. They're an exercise in portraiture and, like portraits, they present a straightforward picture of the way things are. But the good fiction, like good painting (and even good portraits - say, the Mona Lisa) shows us motion.
(I feel, incidentally, the same way about regency novels. Jane Austin and Virginia Wolfe and the like.)
None of this is to say that a writer needs to go into his fiction with the sense that he's about to write the Great American Novel (tm). But... well, let me quote Neil Gaiman, who said it very well indeed in the introduction to Confession, the third Astro City collection: "The magic trick upon which all good fiction depends... [is] this: There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean."
If every writer took that into account, even the most patent escapism would provide for a better world, here and now.
I know it sounds contradictory, but I make no claim to continuity of opinion. :) In any case, I'm not railing against escapist fantasy, I'm depressed by the sickening warmed-over banality of 90% of the escapist fantasy out there. I've read 3 sci-fi books in the past 2 months, all of which descended into trite archetypes and incessant character introspection. It does not need to be confrontational to be good, but it should rarely be narcissistic.
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