Am I in trouble with the jazz police?

Mr. Lennon at Ward Six objects, mildly, to Zadie Smith's latest:

I think that her argument is based upon a false dichotomy. "The two novels are antipodal," she writes, "indeed one is the strong refusal of the other." And yes, these books appear very different. But they are not responses to one another, and they are not opposites. They're two very different personal reactions to a cultural moment, and there is room in the world for both of them, along with the thousands of other books that have been written about that same moment. There are not two paths for the novel. The paths for the novel are infinite.

I don't mean to take Smith to task; in fact, her review is superb, when it hews to the works themselves, their strengths and failings. What I am suggesting is dead (not, I assure you, declaring) is the notion of postmodernism as a discrete area of artistic endeavor. I'm suggesting that maybe it's time to stop betting the house on postmodernism, and admit to ourselves once and for all that it is merely a quality inherent to narrative--indeed, to artistic expression.

I think this is a wise, clear-headed take on the situation, and would that more people see it this way, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I'm in the "The paths for the novel are infinite" camp, of course, and I imagine most novelists worth their salt would agree, regardless of aesthetic preference.

But tell it to the hardass realists. I mean, theirs is the mindset that tried to run David Wallace out of grad school in the mid 80's for not hewing to the tradition closely enough.

And Smith herself was all but labeled immoral by James Wood for the crime of her debut novel:

Recent novels — veritable relics of St. Vitus — by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, and others, have featured a great rock musician who, when born, began immediately to play air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese, and two clocks having a conversation (Pynchon); a nun called Sister Edgar who is obsessed with germs and who may be a reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover, and a conceptual artist painting retired B-52 bombers in the New Mexico desert (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec called the Wheelchair Assassins, and a film so compelling that anyone who sees it dies (Foster Wallace). Zadie Smith's novel features, among other things: a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN), an animal-rights group called FATE, a Jewish scientist who is genetically engineering a mouse, a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1907; a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992; and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time.

This is not magical realism. It is hysterical realism. Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality — the usual charge against botched realism — but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up.

Looking about, however, it's hard to argue with Philip Roth, is it not? ("It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination...etc.")

You can rail all you like against talking dogs and Les Assassins en Fauteuils Roulants, but "reality" is always going to do you one better, and shamelessly so. We live in a time when the Insane Clown Posse can spawn a religion! Men are pregnant! And our public intellectuals can publish stuff like this without fear of being institutionalized:

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.

The world as we know it--and have always known it--is begging us to consider all modes, all possibilities and impossibilities, and make of them what we will. It's merely the tremendous self-regard of certain camps that keeps them from participating in this bounty, and thus the appearance of pomo as schismatic--or even as a meaningful classification--follows. (Which is partially what Smith is getting at, I think, when she pokes at the myth of "the self is a bottomless pool." There's more than a little madness in thinking the answer lies in a mode as tightly prescripted as Realism.)

So hug a hardass realist today! Then, run over his feet with your wheelchair.

Comments

[J. Robert Lennon]

Good post, Rake. One thing I'd like to add...it's interesting to note how often realism is declared kaput. The reason this keeps being proven wrong is not that realism, in its purest form, is so robust. Nothing, in its purest form, is ever very robust. It's that "realism" is always permitted to devour all manner of stylistic and narrative invention, and still feel real to us. Of course we're going to roll our eyes when writers lean too heavily on the bizarre or gimmcky, that same way we roll them when stories unfold with the dull predictability of an afterschool special. Pure anything offends our sensibilities, because all experience is layered, and complex, and peculiar, and hallucinatory.

Wait--men are pregnant?

[Rake]

Which, I guess I should hasten to add, goes to prove that we're not talking about discrete modes at all, but "realism" in total, where "realism" is not necessarily defined by its stock lyrical descriptions of the landscape & weather or soul-delving close third person narratives (or what have you).

Re: pregnant men: Yes. I was debating on the use of scare quotes for "men," because that doesn't seem to quite cover it. Regardless:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/13/pregnant-man-expecting-se_n_143587.html

[Mark]

When we say "realism," don't we mean the kind of story/novel that can be most readily discussed/taught in a classroom setting, and which therefore most MFA students learn to write adequately, saturating the market with competently arranged narratives? I speak from experience, not to gripe.

That story/novel works like this: start with a character who is troubled but a little more interesting or noble or spunky or well-spoken than an actual human in his/her circumstances would likely be. This character's place in the wider culture should be such that well-educated Americans, especially New Yorkers, are able to sympathize with (read: want to be, if only temporarily) him/her. The writer should employ events that are set in motion and/or augmented by the character's own choices, and that along the way reveal the character to be charmingly (if disturbingly) complex. At the end of the story the character should either a) be dead b) be forever changed or c) realize some enduring truth about him/herself and preferably also about some topical social issue.

Secondary concerns: 1. Representations of the character's inner world are called for, but these must be neatly bound (the story should not actually be about consciousness) so as to relate directly to events. 2. The events themselves must be the sort of events that happen at regular intervals in most American towns, up to and including murder. 3. A special category is reserved for war/plague/natural disaster, in which all of the above standards must be nevertheless met.

I sound sarcastic (sorry), but I really think this is the monolith in the middle of the American literary landscape right now, and we would be better off calling it something besides realism. I think the movies are to blame as much as the MFA system, since the above template is easily adapted into an indie script with a chance of crossing over and being an Oscar contender, thus allowing the writer to avoid getting a teaching job. I think Alice Munro ignores these standards as readily as Don DeLillo does, so it's not a question of who attempts to create an illusion of the real and who wants to play with distortions of the real. It's a question of creating satsifying illusions, illusions that do not need to mobilize formulas such as the above. It does not matter where the illusions fall on the domestic ritual/wheelchair assassin spectrum.

I think that at this moment in time, the above template is operating in so many brains that it becomes hard to see who, among emerging writers, is a Don D. or an Alice M. Especially an Alice M., because her stories lack the wheelchair assassins that let us know that we are reading something unconventional.

[Rake]

Well, yes.

It also helps if the character has an axe and a frozen sea handy.

JRL's point--and let me just note that there are now three UM MFA grads in this comment thread--if I understand it correctly is that the antipodal argument indulged in by Ms. Zadie Smith (real/not real) is null and void, given that "the real encompasses the imaginary, and not the other way around"--i.e., we're talking about a unified whole, not discrete modes or strategies.

(Which takes me back to that Barthelme quote that I love, brought into my life and yours by Padgett Powell, about how everyone is giving true/real accounts of their own minds in fiction.)

Now, I wouldn't put it as JRL does, exactly, because I'm with you: we shouldn't be calling it "realism," because that indulges in ridiculous authenticity claims (for "fiction," god help us) and provides a cudgel for those who lack imagination to beat down idiosyncratic narratives.

Wood did take a hack at a new term, "free indirect style," before backsliding into "realism," or so I hear. A solution, that is not.

[Rake]

Further: Let's kill all the polemicists.

[J. Robert Lennon]

Yeah, I'm familiar with the kind of novel the Rake is talking about, and have written a couple myself. Tales of bourgeois self-actualization. They can be good, but this is definitely the primary conduit of contemporary mediocrity.

I do suppose I'm indulging in a bit of wishful thinking by daring to let "realism" gather up everything else into its big furry arms--nobody's ever going to go along with that. I just despair at the apparent need to call anything anything.

BTW, I quite like Wood's "free indirect style," and I don't think he uses it to mean the "realism" we're discussing here. Rather, he is talking about the technique of allowing the third person voice to take on the quality of the character whose mind it's lodged in. I'm actually very relieved to have a term for this--it replaces paragraphs of sputtering in my fiction classes.

[Mark]

I'm all for not calling anything anything. Is Thomas Bernhard a realist? My guess is that he'd argue he's more truthful than Balzac. Gertrude Stein? Her insistence on finding truth in language while refusing to speculate about the subconscious mind was probably an attempt (among other things) at being more rigorously true to reality than, say, Joyce, who himself is primarily thought of in connection with a "realistic" depiction of consciousness that is openly artificial. I guess I'm just saying what you guys have already said. Yeah, Traver, that Barthelme quote. And Barthelme's work itself is so anarchic as to point out the descriptive insufficiency of all existing categories. People who demand in advance a "realistic" or "postmodern" stance are generally demonstrating that they can't or don't want to think beyond existing conventions.

[Lloyd Mintern]

Has anyone read the French author Jules Romains lately; his novel from 1914, THE DEATH OF A NOBODY, does an end-run on all stories of first person narration. The story of the aftereffects on others of a man who dies on page 11. His masterpiece MEN OF GOOD WILL abolishes all narrators by employing a group consciousness point of view. Critics only select what fit their own juvenile ideas, thus creating a sub-genre on their own, apparently ruled by envy.

[r m ellis]

Three already? And I haven't even commented yet.

What you call Realist, Mark, I've been calling "the literary fiction genre." It's as formulaic as any genre writing, maybe even more so. It's no good.

[Mark]

I didn't meant to suggest that it should be called Realist, Rhian. I like your term better. I think that many people who sneer at "realism" wrongly assume that any story without talking dogs or whatever is the product of that same genre formula.