The Present of Fiction
It might not be much of a crisis, but there is a crisis in fiction. And that’s how it should be. I am very impressed by RM Berry’s brief history of the novel in the essay The Present of Fiction on the arcanely-designed Electronic Book Review site. Berry says that “unlike the older arts, the novel appeared modern from birth” and that its “powers of illusion became its deepest subject, a continual effort to demonstrate fidelity by unmasking its pretension, acknowledging its limits. And for a time this seemed enough. By the end of the 19th century, the novel’s critique of narrative was in the main complete, making every narrator, if not essentially unreliable, then essentially a reader.”
If I have understood, the point is then made that Modernist suspicion of the novel (as represented here by a Gertrude Stein story) was always present to the novel anyway. I’m not sure about this thesis, but let’s leave that for now because Berry then goes on to discuss several modern � perhaps postmodern � novels, and that’s far more interesting. The first two (Alex Shakar’s The Savage Girl and Curtis White’s Requiem) represent the loss of present in the modern world: its constant deferral in the former novel, and the death of it in the latter. Berry says despite accusations of unreadability, they all “carry forward into the twenty-first century the novel’s tradition of self-critique, now deepened, continuously revealing the complicity of our ways of writing and reading in the outrages that provoke us to write and read.” Such as the apparent loss of a meaningful present.
The latter part of the essay discusses remarks made by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, and relates them to the novels. In them, just as in the Philosophical Investigations, “a ghostly presence seems continually to insinuate itself between us and the subject matter, competing for our attention, distorting or complicating our vision, displacing what’s to come with something always already there.” I find this particularly stirring. What is this presence? Berry doesn’t say. But what is said is that this presence necessitates “ever greater efforts of repression, even to the extreme of creating a fraudulent culture” because “fiction in the present never manages to tell us much of anything we don’t already know too intimately to tolerate being told it.” The essay ends with a reiteration of the bind this places us in. Its complexity is worth facing.
And talking of a fraudulent culture, I was reading this week’s TLS, and a review of Mark Poirier’s Unsung Heroes of American Industry, a collection of stories. The reviewer says despite the evident talent on display, if there is a criticism to be made “it would be better aimed at the creative-writing industry in America”, those that “churn out scores of young short-fiction writers � capable of writing concise stories about dissatisfaction and alienation in the Carver/Cheever mode.” Quite. Perhaps regime change is required to disarm them of these Writers of Mediocrity and Derivativeness.
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- Berry the question of literature
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