We refuse to be each other
A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own. And I don't care if that consciousness chooses to spend its time in drawing rooms or in internet networks, I don't care if it uses a corner of a Dorito as its hero, or the charming eldest daughter of a bourgeois family I don't care if it refuses to use the letter 'e' or crosses five continents and two thousand pages.
What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives. And the great joy of fiction is the variety of this process: Austen's prose will make you attentive in a different way and to different things than Wharton's. The dream Philip Roth wishes to wake us from still counts as sleep if Pynchon is the dream-catcher.A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you. It can also force you to concede the radical otherness lurking within things that appear most familiar. This is why the talented reader understands George Saunders to be as much a realist as Tolstoy, Henry James as much an experimentalist as George Perec.Great styles represent the interface of "world" and "I", and the very notion of such an interface being different in kind and quality from your own is where the power of fiction resides.Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry- we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian: the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.
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Copyright 2009
Next Post: 'The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Review)', to be published on Thursday 29th October at 11:59pm (GMT)
I like that final idea and one of my favourite writers is Haruki Murakami... and here in Mexico City the world does indeed turn Murikamian..
ReplyDeleteps I left you a message on my blog about the chapingo joke... but now I am intrigued - is there a phrase in Cuban Spanish akin to "chapingo tu madre"??!!
I love this idea...I've never thought of writing in this way...hmmmm...I wonder how my "bubble gum on the beach" novel fits into this...
ReplyDeletemuch love
I believe it's Zadie Smith's birthday today -- that's what Garrison Keillor's poetry website told me. Thank you, once again, for a great post. I love her very generous interpretation of great novels as I find tiresome the debate about them. It reminds me, a bit, of Faulkner's great speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize, when he spoke of writing of the soul, not the glands. I have to look that up and make sure I'm accurate...
ReplyDeleteAnd I realize that this post goes up on London time, not Pacific, California time so her birthday was yesterday, the 27th of October.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, this piece is a call to arms and all that! Wouldn't we just follow her to the end of the earth? Well, I would.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love the pairing 'talented reader'...a sneaky little observation but a good one. The world of books needs talented readers and writers.
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"A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you."
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly why I've had a lifelong love affair with novels. Their authors have been travel agents, counselors, priests, philosophers, iconoclasts, fantasists who, perhaps because of their disparate talents and viewpoints, always enhanced my life's pilgrimmage. Thank you, Cuban, for another great post.
"Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry- we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it."
ReplyDeleteSadly, so much of mass market fiction falls into Zadie's category of bad writing. I think she captures well that it is not a technical failure but a dirth of originality and provocation. This was the best section yet.
Thanks for sharing the series with us!
Many thanks for your kind comments. I, too, agree with you that fiction writers are better positioned to capture the zeitgeist of their own social and political environment. The fact that it's not reality as we know it doesn't mean that it's not grounded on reality. Recently chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was at a Q&A organised by The Guardian where she admitted that many people had first found out about the Biafran war through her novel 'Half a Yellow Sun'.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for responsible readers, hahaha! There's a nice surprise in store in next part of the one after, can't remember now.
Thanks for your feedback.
Greetings from London.
So good of you to challenge us...I like to be startled by good fiction, as if I'm stroking perfect silk from the most gifted silkworm. The humanity must be recognizable(to me), and then the engine of the individual writer ignites the story..yes please tell me a story! And don't be like anyone else, so that there is only one Cormac McCarthy, Umberto Eco, Mary Shelley..endless list..thank God for the spark!!
ReplyDeleteWhat makes a good writer could also be what makes a good reader. Interesting insights. Thanks for sharing, Cuban.
ReplyDeleteThat first sentence says it all. All the best novels I've read DO take me away to another world. Otherwise what would be the point of reading?
ReplyDelete"But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision." Yes. I step into a mind-altering experience of the highest degree if what I'm reading is that good. But submitting to the vision of the writer, to me, also means that I enter the psyche of the writer - that I see inside their soul through their words. There is no more pleasurable voyeuristic experience, in my opinion. Thanks again for sharing these, Cuban! Have a great remainder of the week!!!
ReplyDeleteNevine
Hey Cuban - I would have loved to have attended that talk by Adichie - what a privilege... I have started teaching Purple Hibiscus to my sicth form students last year and it worked really well - I would have also admitted to first learning about the Biafran War from her novel - as a child growing up if we didn't eat what was on our plate we were told it would be sent to Biafra - I thought it was part of Ethiopia until I read Half of a Yellow Sun - did she say there was another novel coming soon??
ReplyDelete"But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision."
ReplyDeleteI think the above sums it up. There is no magic place or formula.
Thanks for your kind comments. And yes, happy (belated) birthday, Zadie Smith!
ReplyDeleteGreetings from London.
Excellent, excellent, excellent.
ReplyDeleteand I have seen it argued that reading good fiction, espcially if it uses multiple viewpoints, can actually change our character, by teaching us to believe in the validity of multiple viewpoints: to, as it were, really believe in other people as beings different from ourselves. Guess that's what she means with all the language about the interface.
Love the musical sword in the toilet.