Living by Fiction Read Free

may happen that in the works of some few writers, the narrative itself cannot be located. Events occur without discernible meaning; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” What if the world’s history itself, and the eventsof our own lives in it, were as jerked, arbitrary, and fundamentally incoherent as is the sequence of episodes in some contemporary fictions? It is, these writers may say; they are.

The Egg in the Cage
    I would like to pause here to talk about artistic integrity. Distinctions of value need to be made among contemporary modernist works, as among all works, and I think they can be made most pointedly here, where technique fades into meaning and raises the issue of integrity.
    Interestingly enough, contemporary modernist fiction, unlike traditional fiction, has no junk genres. Like poetry so long as it is serious, fiction, so long as it is witty, is almost always assumed to be literature. Well, then, it has already passed the qualifying rounds and must go on to the finals: Does it have meaning? For any art, including an art of surface, must do more than dazzle. Is this art in the service of idea? And it is right here that some contemporary modernist fiction can claim, Yes, it does mean; it recreates in all its detail the meaninglessness of the modern world. And I cry foul. When is a work “about” meaninglessness and when is it simply meaningless?
    Clearly the shattering of what we feel as the rondure of experience (or of what, according to this theory, we who were born after 1911 have never felt as the rondure of experience), and the distant and ironic examination of the resultant fragments, serve, in Robbe-Grillet’s terms, “to exile the world to the life of its own surface”—and, by extension, to express our sense of exile on that surface. If meaning is contextual, and it is, then the collapse of ordered Western society and its inherited values followingWorld War I cannot be overstressed; when we lost our context, we lost our meaning. We became, all of us in the West, more impoverished and in one sense more ignorant than pygmies, who, like the hedgehog, know one great thing: in this case, why they are here. We no longer know why we are here—if, indeed, we are to believe that large segments of European society ever did. At any rate, our contemporary questioning of why we are here finds a fitting objective correlative in the worst of the new fictions, whose artistic recreation of our anomie, confusion, and meaninglessness elicits from us the new question, Why am I reading this?
    We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work’s integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures toward stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama—suicide, rape, murder, incest—or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.
    As in the realm of feeling, so in the realm of intellect. Naming your characters Aristotle and Plato is not going to make their relationship interesting unless you make itso on the page; having your character shoot himself in the end does not mean that anyone has learned anything; and setting your novel in Buchenwald does not give it moral significance. Now: may a work of art borrow meaning by being itself