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accept the way literature acts in us, rather than just upon
us. We assume it to be a pleasant distraction against a
pre-defined reality.
In a way, this is inevitable. What goes on in our
heads daily, hourly, minutely, gets into writing only
through distancing. Writing something down provides
a displacement from the anxiety, the boredom
or the confusion of the moment. We want our minds
like the thing written down. It is easy to have this
done for you. Responding to a growing appetite for
distraction, shorthand journalistic cliché has infested
our inner lives. Generally, it means we are unable to
have respect for uniqueness of experience because
it is summed up, packaged, placed in a captionable
context. Soon this context demands total obedience;
nothing else is relevant.
The private self is subsumed, and we assume we have
to give unquestioning respect to the two-dimensional
conceits of ‘ambitious’ fiction covering the ground of
journalists and historians (Don Delillo and Tom Wolfe
being the current examples). The alternative, where
it is assumed the self gets full exposure without the
interference of common language, tends to mean the
stream-of-consciousness mode of writing. Take Harold
Brodkey’s long-delayed, much-hyped novel The
Runaway Soul; an 800 page Bildungsroman made up
of dribbling ‘poetic’ language, supposedly reminiscent
of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and Proust’s great work
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of intellect and intimacy. Being neither, it still came to
the fore because it was the opposite of the other kind
of Great American Novel. It suited the demand that
you’re one thing or the other: inner or outer. Yet the
technique of simulating intimacy reeked of that alone:
technique. Luckily, this novel has now been sidelined
as an embarrassment.
Meanwhile, Realism, whether in historical sweep
or intimate acquaintance with an individual, prefers
that such excessive literary adventures are limited to
unserious Postmodernists. No one should claim they
challenge its intimacy with life. Raymond Carver
exemplifies its naive arrogance in his essay on writing
fiction, collected in Fires. One of his maxims, he announced,
was “No tricks”. He had this printed on a piece
of cardboard stuck above his writing desk. Yet Carver’s
highly-influential ‘dirty realism’ is one big trick. This is
elided by calling it a “craft”, but craftsmanship is also
trickery institutionalised. His innocence of this is typical
of working-class sentimentality. Perhaps he never
completed a novel because such trickery revealed itself
over greater length.
His friend Richard Ford seems almost to be satirising
Carver’s self-abnegatory posing in his touchinglyoverlong
novel Independence Day; a terribly funny recital
of how failure infects and becomes the wellspring
of writing. Anyway, having a note above one’s writing
desk reminding oneself of what to do is enough to indi-
077
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