An Answer to the Novel’s Detractors
February 21, 2015 2:15 PM Subscribe
"The world exists. Why recreate it?" Adelle Waldman explains why.
She made a good defence for what a novel can do which autobiographical writing cannot.
My favourite novelist, Lois McMaster Bujold, quotes a cop she knew in one of her novels, about how he'd never been called to a domestic violence case in a house filled with books.
While I am sure that there are well-read abusers, her point was that, for most of us, novels - high quality literary or quickly written & quickly read pulp - are excellent ways of learning about the inner lives of other people and of people who are very different from us. Novelists who wrote about people who are very different from themselves have to make that empathetic journey all the more.
As for plot: what is the point of a novel without it? And how utterly turgid and boring it would be.
posted by jb at 3:26 PM on February 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
My favourite novelist, Lois McMaster Bujold, quotes a cop she knew in one of her novels, about how he'd never been called to a domestic violence case in a house filled with books.
While I am sure that there are well-read abusers, her point was that, for most of us, novels - high quality literary or quickly written & quickly read pulp - are excellent ways of learning about the inner lives of other people and of people who are very different from us. Novelists who wrote about people who are very different from themselves have to make that empathetic journey all the more.
As for plot: what is the point of a novel without it? And how utterly turgid and boring it would be.
posted by jb at 3:26 PM on February 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
These books made David Shields’s “Reality Hunger” (2010) seem prescient. An earnest “manifesto” against the traditional novel (which Shields finds “unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless”), “Reality Hunger” galvanized many critics and novelists alike. Shields argued that novels are often flashes of “narrative legerdemain”; he calls for “serious writing,” in which “the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive.”
Yeah, that sounds...super interesting, and not at all embarrassingly, obviously borne of a anti-humanist, human-reductivist cultural moment in which the idea can be respectably asserted that a human consciousness is plausibly akin to a monadic algorithm whose purpose is to "solve being alive," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. This guy sounds like he has the aesthetic sensibilities of a Common Core testing content producer.
posted by clockzero at 3:31 PM on February 21, 2015 [10 favorites]
Yeah, that sounds...super interesting, and not at all embarrassingly, obviously borne of a anti-humanist, human-reductivist cultural moment in which the idea can be respectably asserted that a human consciousness is plausibly akin to a monadic algorithm whose purpose is to "solve being alive," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. This guy sounds like he has the aesthetic sensibilities of a Common Core testing content producer.
posted by clockzero at 3:31 PM on February 21, 2015 [10 favorites]
Concern for the weaknesses of one's preferred art form is healthy and fortifying.
Seems like the way such conversations get started is by fighting with other art forms.
Self-reflection's extra hard post-postmodernism, I guess.
posted by LogicalDash at 4:21 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Seems like the way such conversations get started is by fighting with other art forms.
Self-reflection's extra hard post-postmodernism, I guess.
posted by LogicalDash at 4:21 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
The worlds in my novels don't exist until I create them, actually.
posted by jscalzi at 4:23 PM on February 21, 2015 [19 favorites]
posted by jscalzi at 4:23 PM on February 21, 2015 [19 favorites]
YOUUUUUU CHEATED
posted by LogicalDash at 4:24 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by LogicalDash at 4:24 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
clockzero, that compulsion to make entirely different choices in fiction making speaks to *my* life experience. I haven't found any novelist who explores the world the way I do, and that sucks. I'm saying I haven't picked up a book and thought "oh my god yes" since I was quite young. Conventional narrative bores me to death, I can't help it.
So you don't have to read it but I hope something like what Shields describes exists somewhere for me to find. It would make consciousness just a touch less endlessly lonely.
posted by an animate objects at 4:40 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
So you don't have to read it but I hope something like what Shields describes exists somewhere for me to find. It would make consciousness just a touch less endlessly lonely.
posted by an animate objects at 4:40 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
(clockzero is probably referring to DFW's nonfiction writing, which matches the definition of a lyric essay pretty closely)
posted by LogicalDash at 4:45 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by LogicalDash at 4:45 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Also, I would say Beckett's novels (from his trilogy on at least) might be getting at some of what Shields is talking about.
posted by idiopath at 4:47 PM on February 21, 2015
posted by idiopath at 4:47 PM on February 21, 2015
I haven't found any novelist who explores the world the way I do, and that sucks.
Time for an AskMeFi?
posted by mr. digits at 4:48 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Time for an AskMeFi?
posted by mr. digits at 4:48 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
His nonfiction does, LogicalDash, I would agree; but I also think his fiction is certainly recognizably describable as "active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive."
posted by clockzero at 4:49 PM on February 21, 2015
posted by clockzero at 4:49 PM on February 21, 2015
That's a good essay and defense of the novel.
It's telling, though, that she quotes Tolstoy so much (my favorite novelist) because, as she herself acknowledges, the very best novels profoundly refute Shields but the vast majority of novels validate his critique, very much including contemporary literary fiction.
I mean, my love affair with Tolstoy is all about the things that Waldman illustrates, such as the deep complexity of his characters even though they are also familiar and comprehensible, that they are like real people we know and, in my opinion, quite distinct from most characters in novels who are, frankly, like characters in novels. That the progression of the narrative through these characters' lives is also real in a way that isn't the case in so many novels.
Tolstoy was profoundly successful because while he had Ideas, he also had extreme empathy and holding both these abstracted and extremely specific views simultaneously is at the heart of what works in his books. Her example passages illustrate this clearly, where there's both a recognizable type to Oblonsky but also a profound specificity. Which, you know, is what it's like to know real people.
It's extremely difficult to achieve this. It's very rare and it's not clear to me at all that it's valid to defend the novel on the basis of something that it only very rarely manages to accomplish.
Generally, I read a whole bunch of genre even though I've read many of the classics and do also read some serious contemporary literature. And so this is frustrating for me because I really do think that genre and contemporary literary fiction simply don't merit this defense, it really doesn't apply to them. Waldman sort of admits this; she's sort of just defending the novel from universal dismissal, as if Shields or someone else could force the rest of us to never write or read novels ever again. But of course that's not going to happen and what will actually happen is that very, very few novels that deserve Waldman's defense will be written while a great many novels that deserve Shields's critique will be written, and so what are we left with?
The thing is, I can't really take Shields's criticism seriously even when restricted to the domain of popular fiction and contemporary literature because, first of all, I agree strongly with clockzero's mockery. If it's true that novelists get it wrong the way that Shields says they get it wrong -- which I think is largely the case -- I think Shields is also getting it badly wrong. This is also something that Waldman touches upon, but basically I think that Shields's representation of truth is at least as much a lie as are most novels. I think I recoil almost viscerally from the presentation of the truth of the world via the lyric essay because its pretense of the emphasis of authoritative subjectivity is in its own way all-consuming and an appropriation.
The difficult truth of the matter is that while it's true that we tell ourselves stories, that this forms the essential practice of our worldly comprehension, those stories are almost completely distorting lies. Because they make sense. The theory of mind which powers our consciousness is essentially teleological -- we comprehend the world in terms of explaining actions by discerning goals. We do this because in the proximate sense, this accurately describes how other people behave. In the short term, people do the things they do because they want or need something. Mostly we have to deal with other people because humans are social animals, we evolved a cognition centered around a teleological theory of mind of others because imagining the goals that other people are attempting is a pretty effective pragma for predicting their actions. In the short and medium terms.
Since this is the foundation of our cognition, it's how we think about everything. Even though it's exquisitely important and fundamental that evolution isn't teleological, there are no "goals", it's basically impossible for even evolutionary biologists to talk about evolution while completely avoiding teleological language.
Everything we think we know is a story or a component of a story, and those stories all have "plots", and the people in those stories have goals. Effect follows cause and, as people so metaphysically like to assert, things happen for a reason.
But even if you do believe in that sort of metaphysics, the difficult truth of actual lived life is that so much of our actual experience doesn't really follow that pattern. I can usually explain why someone got up and walked into the other room, and I can therefore predict their subsequent actions, but sometimes I can't and, more to the point, as we expand the time horizon people's actions become less and less explicable. And as we examine people's characters and thoughts and their (and our own) evolution of self over time, we also find less and less predictability in terms of specifics and more often than we like to believe, even in generalities. I think that the nature of someone's personality when they are sixty-five as predicted from when they were twenty is very often precisely like the lack of realism in Hollywood movies when they use makeup or CGI to dramatically age people into their elderly selves. You end up with results that aren't realistic at all -- you get an excess of wrinkles, but no changes in facial shape, you get inevitable gray hair and age spots. In short, you get all the most memorable and distinct markers of old age, but of course when you look at comparison of 20 and 65 year olds, you don't see anything close to that regularity of intense age markers. Sometimes, but often not.
The stories we tell about people and the events of their lives are exactly like this. They're synthetic and irrealistic. They reflect how we explain reality to ourselves, even as they are examples of our attempt to explain reality to ourselves. Tolstoy is wonderfully successful in how he combines what are, in the end, satisfying stories with characters and plots that are weirdly lifelike in how they aren't clockwork models of our expectations of how other people work and how life proceeds. That's a real accomplishment because, again, the nature of our stories is in some deep and important sense that we're lying to ourselves and so realism, all by itself, won't actually work in a novel. And, anyway, realism is available to us right there in reality, all around us every day. It's not as if the lessons of realism aren't available to us in the most immediate sense. Art isn't reality, it's something related to reality. Tolstoy and other great novelists actually achieve what the novel truly is attempting to do -- get as close as possible in the context of narrative to something that tells us something true about real life. He walks a razor's edge between the artifice of story and the description of reality.
The thing is, the pretense of non-fiction lyric essays and autobiography and the like are no less the product of this essential mendacity of storytelling. They work just as hard at telling teleological stories about comprehensible people, when that just isn't actual reality. Except that they have the added veneer of claiming to be "true". I don't see that this proposed replacement to the novel actually answers its typical failures, just recapitulates them in a different guise.
But where does that leave all the non-great novels? Well, you know, after a lifetime of reading the great works and thousands of genre novels, as well as enjoying great and not-great art in other media, I am just not very interested in judging popular novels within this context. I don't think that contemporary literature ought to be judged within this context, either, except that it has pretenses of being the same sort of thing as this idealized novel. But it's not, and genre fiction certainly isn't, so while I think writers are well served to think about this stuff and work harder where they recognize weaknesses, in general I think it's better to just let these works be what they are and judge them (and write them) according to that standard. Which, really, also applies to Shields's program and every other literary niche.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:00 PM on February 21, 2015 [18 favorites]
It's telling, though, that she quotes Tolstoy so much (my favorite novelist) because, as she herself acknowledges, the very best novels profoundly refute Shields but the vast majority of novels validate his critique, very much including contemporary literary fiction.
I mean, my love affair with Tolstoy is all about the things that Waldman illustrates, such as the deep complexity of his characters even though they are also familiar and comprehensible, that they are like real people we know and, in my opinion, quite distinct from most characters in novels who are, frankly, like characters in novels. That the progression of the narrative through these characters' lives is also real in a way that isn't the case in so many novels.
Tolstoy was profoundly successful because while he had Ideas, he also had extreme empathy and holding both these abstracted and extremely specific views simultaneously is at the heart of what works in his books. Her example passages illustrate this clearly, where there's both a recognizable type to Oblonsky but also a profound specificity. Which, you know, is what it's like to know real people.
It's extremely difficult to achieve this. It's very rare and it's not clear to me at all that it's valid to defend the novel on the basis of something that it only very rarely manages to accomplish.
Generally, I read a whole bunch of genre even though I've read many of the classics and do also read some serious contemporary literature. And so this is frustrating for me because I really do think that genre and contemporary literary fiction simply don't merit this defense, it really doesn't apply to them. Waldman sort of admits this; she's sort of just defending the novel from universal dismissal, as if Shields or someone else could force the rest of us to never write or read novels ever again. But of course that's not going to happen and what will actually happen is that very, very few novels that deserve Waldman's defense will be written while a great many novels that deserve Shields's critique will be written, and so what are we left with?
The thing is, I can't really take Shields's criticism seriously even when restricted to the domain of popular fiction and contemporary literature because, first of all, I agree strongly with clockzero's mockery. If it's true that novelists get it wrong the way that Shields says they get it wrong -- which I think is largely the case -- I think Shields is also getting it badly wrong. This is also something that Waldman touches upon, but basically I think that Shields's representation of truth is at least as much a lie as are most novels. I think I recoil almost viscerally from the presentation of the truth of the world via the lyric essay because its pretense of the emphasis of authoritative subjectivity is in its own way all-consuming and an appropriation.
The difficult truth of the matter is that while it's true that we tell ourselves stories, that this forms the essential practice of our worldly comprehension, those stories are almost completely distorting lies. Because they make sense. The theory of mind which powers our consciousness is essentially teleological -- we comprehend the world in terms of explaining actions by discerning goals. We do this because in the proximate sense, this accurately describes how other people behave. In the short term, people do the things they do because they want or need something. Mostly we have to deal with other people because humans are social animals, we evolved a cognition centered around a teleological theory of mind of others because imagining the goals that other people are attempting is a pretty effective pragma for predicting their actions. In the short and medium terms.
Since this is the foundation of our cognition, it's how we think about everything. Even though it's exquisitely important and fundamental that evolution isn't teleological, there are no "goals", it's basically impossible for even evolutionary biologists to talk about evolution while completely avoiding teleological language.
Everything we think we know is a story or a component of a story, and those stories all have "plots", and the people in those stories have goals. Effect follows cause and, as people so metaphysically like to assert, things happen for a reason.
But even if you do believe in that sort of metaphysics, the difficult truth of actual lived life is that so much of our actual experience doesn't really follow that pattern. I can usually explain why someone got up and walked into the other room, and I can therefore predict their subsequent actions, but sometimes I can't and, more to the point, as we expand the time horizon people's actions become less and less explicable. And as we examine people's characters and thoughts and their (and our own) evolution of self over time, we also find less and less predictability in terms of specifics and more often than we like to believe, even in generalities. I think that the nature of someone's personality when they are sixty-five as predicted from when they were twenty is very often precisely like the lack of realism in Hollywood movies when they use makeup or CGI to dramatically age people into their elderly selves. You end up with results that aren't realistic at all -- you get an excess of wrinkles, but no changes in facial shape, you get inevitable gray hair and age spots. In short, you get all the most memorable and distinct markers of old age, but of course when you look at comparison of 20 and 65 year olds, you don't see anything close to that regularity of intense age markers. Sometimes, but often not.
The stories we tell about people and the events of their lives are exactly like this. They're synthetic and irrealistic. They reflect how we explain reality to ourselves, even as they are examples of our attempt to explain reality to ourselves. Tolstoy is wonderfully successful in how he combines what are, in the end, satisfying stories with characters and plots that are weirdly lifelike in how they aren't clockwork models of our expectations of how other people work and how life proceeds. That's a real accomplishment because, again, the nature of our stories is in some deep and important sense that we're lying to ourselves and so realism, all by itself, won't actually work in a novel. And, anyway, realism is available to us right there in reality, all around us every day. It's not as if the lessons of realism aren't available to us in the most immediate sense. Art isn't reality, it's something related to reality. Tolstoy and other great novelists actually achieve what the novel truly is attempting to do -- get as close as possible in the context of narrative to something that tells us something true about real life. He walks a razor's edge between the artifice of story and the description of reality.
The thing is, the pretense of non-fiction lyric essays and autobiography and the like are no less the product of this essential mendacity of storytelling. They work just as hard at telling teleological stories about comprehensible people, when that just isn't actual reality. Except that they have the added veneer of claiming to be "true". I don't see that this proposed replacement to the novel actually answers its typical failures, just recapitulates them in a different guise.
But where does that leave all the non-great novels? Well, you know, after a lifetime of reading the great works and thousands of genre novels, as well as enjoying great and not-great art in other media, I am just not very interested in judging popular novels within this context. I don't think that contemporary literature ought to be judged within this context, either, except that it has pretenses of being the same sort of thing as this idealized novel. But it's not, and genre fiction certainly isn't, so while I think writers are well served to think about this stuff and work harder where they recognize weaknesses, in general I think it's better to just let these works be what they are and judge them (and write them) according to that standard. Which, really, also applies to Shields's program and every other literary niche.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:00 PM on February 21, 2015 [18 favorites]
It's extremely difficult to achieve this. It's very rare and it's not clear to me at all that it's valid to defend the novel on the basis of something that it only very rarely manages to accomplish.
What art form is defensible?
posted by LogicalDash at 5:26 PM on February 21, 2015
What art form is defensible?
posted by LogicalDash at 5:26 PM on February 21, 2015
Seems like the way such conversations get started is by fighting with other art forms.
More like dissing one side to keep the imagined competition from succeeding.
We all know that ruse; no need to repurpose it for the sake of peddling one method at the expense of another.
This whole forced dichotomy is artificial anyway and fake fights only bring fake arguments, fake knowledge and fake insights and we certainly have a glut of fake in the marketplace of ideas these days.
Creative endeavours take their inspiration from all sorts of things. I have written stories straight from my dreams, and have characters based on concepts such as love, truth, transformation, the Hoffding Step and even my Supreme Empress of the Universe Barbie doll. Stories can be maps and equations; so to make assumptions of any sort doesn't bring any new pearl of wisdom to the table.
This whole "mine is better than yours" or "mine is better than all those people hundreds of years before me who built the path I took in order to slam it" is not productive to the literary discourse and by taking the bait to defend the traditional novel isn't helpful to it, either. If you can make yours look good only by pretending someone else's is somehow defective and inferior, then yours may not be all that great in the first place.
Being an author is a wonderful thing because it is about thriving in anarchy and when you realize thatvwhen anything goes there is no competition, then you have truly arrived and not one second before. It is great to experiment and even great to go it old school, too. There is no right answer as to format, a good author can tell riveting stories with any format, confine, or liberty.
I have told epistolary stories, traditional stories and had a novel where every chapter was a self-contained short story. The world can never have enough stories because the world is a living, never-ending story machine. No one needs to pretend theirs is the superior method of storytelling. There is always room for another fable without knocking anyone else's...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 5:35 PM on February 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
More like dissing one side to keep the imagined competition from succeeding.
We all know that ruse; no need to repurpose it for the sake of peddling one method at the expense of another.
This whole forced dichotomy is artificial anyway and fake fights only bring fake arguments, fake knowledge and fake insights and we certainly have a glut of fake in the marketplace of ideas these days.
Creative endeavours take their inspiration from all sorts of things. I have written stories straight from my dreams, and have characters based on concepts such as love, truth, transformation, the Hoffding Step and even my Supreme Empress of the Universe Barbie doll. Stories can be maps and equations; so to make assumptions of any sort doesn't bring any new pearl of wisdom to the table.
This whole "mine is better than yours" or "mine is better than all those people hundreds of years before me who built the path I took in order to slam it" is not productive to the literary discourse and by taking the bait to defend the traditional novel isn't helpful to it, either. If you can make yours look good only by pretending someone else's is somehow defective and inferior, then yours may not be all that great in the first place.
Being an author is a wonderful thing because it is about thriving in anarchy and when you realize thatvwhen anything goes there is no competition, then you have truly arrived and not one second before. It is great to experiment and even great to go it old school, too. There is no right answer as to format, a good author can tell riveting stories with any format, confine, or liberty.
I have told epistolary stories, traditional stories and had a novel where every chapter was a self-contained short story. The world can never have enough stories because the world is a living, never-ending story machine. No one needs to pretend theirs is the superior method of storytelling. There is always room for another fable without knocking anyone else's...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 5:35 PM on February 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
Oddly, one famous quote about activism is probably even better at explaining the motivation to create fictional worlds:
"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
But that still doesn't explain why Marvel Comics has so damn many 'universes'.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:39 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
But that still doesn't explain why Marvel Comics has so damn many 'universes'.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:39 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
One problem I find with much of speculative fiction, especially the kind in comic books, is that they find it easier to indulge in power fantasies, for a cheap thrill. I get the sense that the perspective and experience that leads to these sort of fantasies is much harder to convey, but would lead to a story that is much more interesting.
posted by idiopath at 7:02 PM on February 21, 2015
posted by idiopath at 7:02 PM on February 21, 2015
If it's true that novelists get it wrong the way that Shields says they get it wrong -- which I think is largely the case -- I think Shields is also getting it badly wrong.
"A strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
- Lao-Tze
posted by flabdablet at 10:11 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
"A strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
- Lao-Tze
posted by flabdablet at 10:11 PM on February 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
What we have here is a defence of the cognitive/educational values of literature, against a charge of its cognitive triviality. This is not a new debate (see for instance, Book X of the Republic).
Worries about the cognitive value of literature reflect a wider trend for justifying the arts. See for instance this article on why visual art in the 20th century became ugly.
Of course, truth/understanding is one of several possible values. There's also beauty, originality, expressive potency, morality, craftsmanship... What I'm curious about is why cognitive value has become so prominent. Why is it not justification enough just to be pleasurable to read? Perhaps it has something to do with the success of science and technology?
posted by leibniz at 1:17 AM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
Worries about the cognitive value of literature reflect a wider trend for justifying the arts. See for instance this article on why visual art in the 20th century became ugly.
Of course, truth/understanding is one of several possible values. There's also beauty, originality, expressive potency, morality, craftsmanship... What I'm curious about is why cognitive value has become so prominent. Why is it not justification enough just to be pleasurable to read? Perhaps it has something to do with the success of science and technology?
posted by leibniz at 1:17 AM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
I liked this article quite a bit. I'm not sure why some people are criticizing it as setting up an artificial conflict between novels and whatever hyper realist fiction on the other - she seems pretty happy to admit that most novels suffer from the flaws of which their detractors accuse them. At the same time, she does a good job of enumerating some of the very valuable things that the form of a novel allows. I don't feel she's trying to claim that the 'other side' is wrong, just that maybe it isn't totally right either.
posted by Alex404 at 3:45 AM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Alex404 at 3:45 AM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]
It seems to me that the novels of Terry Pratchett constitute a both a much better critique of the novel as a form, and a much better defense of it.
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:58 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:58 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
"The world exists. Why recreate it?"
Because in the sense that this sentence means, the world does not exist.
posted by penduluum at 5:51 AM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
Because in the sense that this sentence means, the world does not exist.
posted by penduluum at 5:51 AM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
What annoys me the most about this article is that it makes certain assumptions about the purpose of the novel—assumptions which I disagree strongly with. (I'm copping to my own subjectivity here, you will please note.) Specifically, it is assumed that the purpose of a novel is to deliver insight into the human condition, and that popular entertainment is actually illegitimate and something to look down on.
I call bullshit.
While fiction can be used to deliver insight into the human condition, that's not all it can be used for. Specifically, it can be used as a vehicle for exploring what-ifs—notionally, the human condition in circumstances to which we do not have any access. Both Shields and Waldman seem to be completely blind to the fantastic, and therefore insist that the sole function of fiction must be to accurately depict reality: it's like looking at a road and seeing a broad strip of concrete traversed by wheeled vehicles, rather than an architectural construct that is used by human beings for various purposes (some of which don't involve wheels at all).
Oh, and this type of analysis is ultimately toxic because in addition to being blind to the fantastic it regards fiction's role as popular entertainment with thinly-veiled contempt. This is extremely dangerous: when an art form stops being entertaining it stops attracting new consumers, and shortly thereafter it stops innovating as its practitioners are locked into an increasingly arid, formalized set of acceptable classical structures by the exigencies of climbing an academic career ladder rather than participating in a living cultural phenomenon. It's still possible for such an art form to create works of great value, but they become fewer and fewer as time passes: death and mummification ensue.
posted by cstross at 6:35 AM on February 22, 2015 [5 favorites]
I call bullshit.
While fiction can be used to deliver insight into the human condition, that's not all it can be used for. Specifically, it can be used as a vehicle for exploring what-ifs—notionally, the human condition in circumstances to which we do not have any access. Both Shields and Waldman seem to be completely blind to the fantastic, and therefore insist that the sole function of fiction must be to accurately depict reality: it's like looking at a road and seeing a broad strip of concrete traversed by wheeled vehicles, rather than an architectural construct that is used by human beings for various purposes (some of which don't involve wheels at all).
Oh, and this type of analysis is ultimately toxic because in addition to being blind to the fantastic it regards fiction's role as popular entertainment with thinly-veiled contempt. This is extremely dangerous: when an art form stops being entertaining it stops attracting new consumers, and shortly thereafter it stops innovating as its practitioners are locked into an increasingly arid, formalized set of acceptable classical structures by the exigencies of climbing an academic career ladder rather than participating in a living cultural phenomenon. It's still possible for such an art form to create works of great value, but they become fewer and fewer as time passes: death and mummification ensue.
posted by cstross at 6:35 AM on February 22, 2015 [5 favorites]
I liked this article quite a bit. I'm not sure why some people are criticizing it as setting up an artificial conflict between novels and whatever hyper realist fiction on the other - she seems pretty happy to admit that most novels suffer from the flaws of which their detractors accuse them.
This. Also it's worth noting that Waldman herself writes fairly conventional stories* about young people dating in Brooklyn. She's not an experimentalist (as she admits in the essay) or some kind of hyperrealist pioneer. I don't think this piece is so much an argument as a consideration.
*Not a criticism. I thought her novel was pretty funny.
posted by thivaia at 6:38 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
This. Also it's worth noting that Waldman herself writes fairly conventional stories* about young people dating in Brooklyn. She's not an experimentalist (as she admits in the essay) or some kind of hyperrealist pioneer. I don't think this piece is so much an argument as a consideration.
*Not a criticism. I thought her novel was pretty funny.
posted by thivaia at 6:38 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
Oh, and this type of analysis is ultimately toxic because in addition to being blind to the fantastic it regards fiction's role as popular entertainment with thinly-veiled contempt.
I found it reasonably clear that the article was a volley in a debate between two genres, the literary novel and the lyric essay, neither of which commonly use sensawunda in their worldbuilding, and in which plain sense-of-wonder is regarded as more of a byproduct of good writing than its intended effect.
There are surely lots of critics in this area who regard their work as somehow beyond genre; to whom genre conventions not their own (because theirs don't count) are crutches that only those paperback writers over there need to use. TFA takes a potshot at those jerks here:
About most novels, Shields is certainly right; even most “literary novels” are undoubtedly nothing more than a means of entertainment suited to the pretensions of a certain type of reader, with little that is meaningful to say about the human condition.
If the analysis holds popular entertainment in contempt, I think it is rather more veiled than you're letting on.
posted by LogicalDash at 7:29 AM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]
therefore insist that the sole function of fiction must be to accurately depict reality: it's like looking at a road and seeing a broad strip of concrete traversed by wheeled vehicles, rather than an architectural construct that is used by human beings for various purposes (some of which don't involve wheels at all).
I'm not sure the lines quite break down this way. True accuracy is accuracy to emotion and to spirit, not to detail, and as such may need to become fantastical to be more accurate -- if accurately evoking or depicting a state of wonder. And accuracy, inasmuch as it evokes a sense of recognition in the reader, and, if it is deeply artful, a sense of recognizing something which was never previously recognized but was always felt at some level, is, I would argue, the most entertaining thing of all.
I think the aridity you're talking about comes not from accuracy but from false notions of what good style is -- the kind propagated by MFA programs, for example.
posted by shivohum at 10:24 AM on February 22, 2015
I'm not sure the lines quite break down this way. True accuracy is accuracy to emotion and to spirit, not to detail, and as such may need to become fantastical to be more accurate -- if accurately evoking or depicting a state of wonder. And accuracy, inasmuch as it evokes a sense of recognition in the reader, and, if it is deeply artful, a sense of recognizing something which was never previously recognized but was always felt at some level, is, I would argue, the most entertaining thing of all.
I think the aridity you're talking about comes not from accuracy but from false notions of what good style is -- the kind propagated by MFA programs, for example.
posted by shivohum at 10:24 AM on February 22, 2015
"Specifically, it is assumed that the purpose of a novel is to deliver insight into the human condition, and that popular entertainment is actually illegitimate and something to look down on."
You're inferring that wrongly, I think. Waldman's piece exist within a context that constrains the argument within the boundaries of understanding the novel in terms of these noble aesthetics. I don't know that she sees entertainment as valueless or beyond defense -- I don't think that's really on the radar here.
And I also don't think that the notions of "realism" that are invoked in this discussion have much at all to do with the context in which realism is in opposition to the fantastical. In this context, I think that Waldman would allow for the fantastical to include the true things she thinks the novel reveals. I don't think that Shields would agree to this, because he disallows fiction entirely, apparently.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:55 PM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
You're inferring that wrongly, I think. Waldman's piece exist within a context that constrains the argument within the boundaries of understanding the novel in terms of these noble aesthetics. I don't know that she sees entertainment as valueless or beyond defense -- I don't think that's really on the radar here.
And I also don't think that the notions of "realism" that are invoked in this discussion have much at all to do with the context in which realism is in opposition to the fantastical. In this context, I think that Waldman would allow for the fantastical to include the true things she thinks the novel reveals. I don't think that Shields would agree to this, because he disallows fiction entirely, apparently.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:55 PM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
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For some writers, they are always selling a story rather than telling one and they have no off button. If you want to tell it the traditional way, good for you. If you want to tell it a different way, good for you. Just tell a story, please and stop trying to sell me on it...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 2:34 PM on February 21, 2015 [3 favorites]