With so much that's truly troubling going on in the world, a fiction writer wonders whether fiction is relevant. The news changes day-to-day, but stories take weeks or months to write, then weeks or months more to be published. A novel can take years to write and years to get to the finish line. By contrast, South Park, a show which takes hundreds of people to produce, managed to get an episode about the Trump election out about a week after it happened.
I realize that writing isn't an either-or thing. I can write stories and take a break now and then to write about events of the day, sometimes on this blog. I've done that now and again, although I try not to give into temptation too often to take on subjects other than writing.
The news is a mix of impending war and a president who won't take the political slam dunk of just saying neo-Nazis are bad. (Or he will say it, but add that there are lots of other bad people, too.) What the fuck is the point of the story I'm trying to write about the girl who falls in love with a performer at a Renaissance festival?
This is a question I've answered for myself before. But that answer sometimes seems kind of weak when compared to the urgencies of the time. Yes, there will always be news headlines that scream to take our attention away, and if we always paid heed to them, nobody would ever create art. But in a world where information moves so fast, it just feels like fiction writing is a slow answer. If my novel were picked up for publication today, even the next season of Rick and Morty would probably make it out before the book did.
There are responses to this, of course. Fiction can focus on that which is timeless, which would fill a niche in a world that is always thinking only of the last 24 hours. But it's hard for me to see that fiction is doing this effectively. Here's a tough question for those who would defend the relevance of fiction: when is the last time you can think of that a short story or novel figured prominently in public discourse?
The last "public discourse" book I remember was Dan Brown's thing about the Mona Lisa being Jesus' granddaughter (I may have gotten that wrong...). And the Hunger Games, which is, from what I understand, something of an improvement. But I don't think that's a problem.
ReplyDeleteI think movies and tv shows have been more on the front lines of generating public discourse - but those are written, too, by writers turning ideas into words. And some come directly from books.
I'm not sure books have ever been in the public discourse beyond a small subset of self-selected seekers. But that's the spark, and it's vital. That's how ideas - for good and evil - become norms. If good people stop writing books that inspire goodness, trust me, bad people will NOT stop writing books that inspire badness. Is that a better option?
I don't know how closely you follow the news - the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities just resigned en masse in protest over the CVille reaction. I wouldn't have even read the resignation memo, but it was pointed out to me it was written as an anagram - the firsts letters of each paragraph spelled out, "RESIST". Writing is a beautiful thing, even when it's refusing to write.
If you think writing fiction is useless, I don't want to know what you think about writing obscure blog posts about fiction falls on the scale; I'll admit, it feels pretty impotent. I dealt with my low-motivation in my "Why Bother" post introducing Pushcart 2017, and quoted San Francisco artist/teacher Jenny Odell's statement to her students:
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I may have mentioned before that I and other artists I know were unsure of what to do with ourselves after the election. We felt like what we were doing was trivial and meaningless compared to more direct political action. But in thinking about this incident, the reactions to it, and the larger situation it points to, I’ve come back around. As you leave this class, I want you to consider that making art and consuming art are in themselves political acts. By caring about art, you are taking a stand for everything in this world that is *not* obvious, that is nuanced, that is poetic, that is not “productive” in the sad, mechanistic way we now think about productivity, that imagines something different. You are holding open a space that is always under threat of being shut down. (Jenny Odell)
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We are in the middle of the craziest absurdist post-post-modernist dystopian novel ever conceived. It's like one of those dinner theatre murder mystery things except with real dead people, and there's no exit. Every second of every day is a new writing prompt. It's true that nobody can concentrate on any one second for long enough to read anything longer than 140 characters. And that may be the point of this whole dog-and-pony show: confuse and distract people while you pick their pockets and blame it on brown people. Our job is to not let this happen, or at least, leave a record of what happened for the future.
If you can't write - pay attention! Take notes on what's happening, on how people are reacting, on little anecdotes. Write them down. When you can write, you'll have more material than you ever dreamed.
I read a quote, years ago, in a trivial book about a guy studying to be a doctor: "Light your corner." Write your sparks. You may never know if they burst into flame, but if you don't write them, you know they won't.
By a work of literature figuring prominently in public discourse, I had more Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Jungle in mind than just a book that people are talking about. I meant literature that itself drove discourse in the political realm. I wasn't clear.
ReplyDeleteIf literature is worth anything, then the lonely business of blogging about it seems to me pretty valuable. The downside of books compared to TV these days is the lack of community around books. You can find someone to talk Game of Thrones anywhere. Finding someone to talk Pushcart is hard. You provide that. There are more books than there are people talking about them, so you're filling the more critical niche.
Novels and stories can be a more effective way to explore ideas than simple dispassionate prose. Would you prefer Greed as done by Norris or by a theologian? Take your pick.
ReplyDeleteAs to this modern dystopia we are now living: I am now coming to think that comedy is the best approach, Roman Comedy perhaps, Miles Gloriosus.