I was surfing through old book reviews and came across a widely repeated quote from James Wood (in a review of The Corrections) describing contemporary American fiction:
“Curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.”
There must be more ways to know human beings than through straightforward realistic depictions of them in action. Perhaps the curry recipes and trombone sonics and drug markets are telling us something about the fictional human being who has selected and arrayed them.
Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel
And I think a rapid cycyling through of information — history of strip cartoons, Detroit drug market, and this blog — very much mirrors my existence, and if arranged in the right way, can give insight as to how to manage my life.
I will admit, though, that my favorite postmodern novels marry a buckshot approach to dispensing information with a healthy dose of a recognizable human. Frenetic information can’t carry the novel without a human at its core. An example: House of Leaves manages to be playful with textual arrangement, narrative, narrators, yet it provoked in me a deep emotional reaction when one of the (very real, fully imagined) characters is lost.
Wood is ultimately right that’s it’s more important for books to know humans than it is to know eclectic things; I just maintain that it’s possible to get to know humans through eclectic things.
3 comments
I don’t know if this is related because once ontological and metaphysical start being thrown around my brain shuts down … despite having taken a number of philosophy courses, of which I’ve gone back and read my papers and been like, “Ahh .. how in the H did I know that crap as a 19 year old because it makes bat sh** sense to me nowadays.”
Anyways, Bookfox, I like experimental fiction to a certain extent, but it’s always, like you say, in relation to a very human, recognizable element that keeps the narrative together. I think that’s my beef with meta-fictions and really wacky experimental crap. I end up reading it for its cleverness, but then nothing, I mean, NOTHING, is carried with me afterwards. Perhaps a very basic impression that something wild and crazy happened, like I explored a fun house full of someone else’s idea of zaniness, but that seems to be it.
This will probably be simplifying it too much, but it seems the higher the concept the lower the takeaway. What you and Mr. Woods and Kundera call human existence, I just call good story, I guess. Once that’s lost to all the bedazzled razamatazz of mind-bending structure and style, I sort go Keanu Reeves on it and just go, “Whoa.”
Speaking of which … this might help explain what I’m talking about … Good narrative, good story with the human ontological, metaphysical elements (or whatever) are like Matrix I. Though full of cool stylings and flashy leather and big guns, it’s got a great story. Compare, then, with the sequels. Goddamit. Bigger guns. Shinier leather. Way-cooler stylings. But, Jesus, what the hell was that about?
One more thing to think about. So I was listening to NPR or some other pretentiousy precious thing and they were interviewing Mitchell about De Zoet — eesh, let me try to find a transcript here so I don’t muck this up — [20 minutes later, but 0 minutes in Internets time, you lucky dogs you …] Ah ha!. Here it is. It was NPR! So we get Mitchell right after Terry Gross went on about how she liked avant garde music in her youth as if it had something to do with what they were talking about. Then she asks Mitchell about how, when he was younger, he was more experimental (to which he agrees), but then he goes on to say that he feels like he’s maturing, getting older, what have you, and then he says:
“… And you also realize that structure, originality and innovation is not actually a story. They’re useful ingredients for art but it’s not art itself. Not really. You might be able to admire it, but you certainly can’t fall in love with it as a piece of music or as a piece of narrative.
Yeah, you go back in a way to older, more traditional forms. You also come to accept that actually, Shakespeare cleaned everything up. There’s no new turf after him, really. All the postmodern themes, the play-within-the-play, metafiction, it’s already been done in the 17th century. You can’t win. But art isn’t the what. Art is the how. Lowell said this really well: If you try to write about the universe, you’ll end up staring at the bricks at the bottom of your garden. But if you start with those bricks, you may well end up writing something new about the universe.
Start with the people. People are why I fall in love with a book. If you start there, then you can kind of allow ideas and maybe allow innovation and a new structure to sort of grow organically from these stem cells of people. But I think you need to start with the people and how they interact, which is your plot.”
Alright. Good post, Book Fox.
I think this is why I fell in love with Paul Auster’s work in college, because he was doing things with fiction that I’d never seen before and it made me think about existence in a new way.
Great post.
@Mark
I love the bricks and the universe idea.
Thanks for the compliments and back at you: thanks for the nice comment.
@Alli
I need to go back to Auster’s New York trilogy. I reviewed his latest (Sunset Park) and it was terrible. There were some sections I was astonished made it past an editor (bad expositional dialogue worthy of a B&N writers group workshop). Still, I want to give him another chance.