ON DISLIKING STORIES
There’s a Kurt Vonnegut interview from The Paris Review that really stuck with me (actually, interview is an imprecise term; Vonnegut after a while got tired of the questions he was being asked and ended up interviewing himself). Vonnegut was ‘asked’ what a story was and he said that, essentially, a story was just a practical joke. “Here’s, for instance, a good plot: ‘a woman moves into an old house and gets the pants scared off her,’” Vonnegut said. “All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”
I was at an impressionable age and there was something about this that bothered me — Vonnegut’s tone of an old showman embarrassed by the cheapness of his tricks — and I felt that there had to be more to writing and to structure, something beyond practical jokes and the seven basic plots.
There was a hint for me in a Richard Ford interview in which he discussed his technique for writing scenes. “It’s always easy to write about things that fuck up, and people leave and the door slams and that’s the dramatic end. But I’m always interested in what happens after somebody walks out the door,” he said. And a hint in a John Barth interview in which he discussed what animated him to write The Sot-Weed Factor. “My project was to make an end run around Flaubert, to get to something older, looser, freer, more epical, and rough,” he said.
What I was coming across was a view that art had narrowed itself specifically in the period of conforming to modernity. Around the time of Flaubert, ‘tales’ became ‘short stories,’ ‘chronicles’ and ‘epics’ turned into trim economical ‘novels,’ playwriting developed a heightened sense of compression, shifted from baggy tragedy to lean ‘drama.’
There’s a startling sense of cleanness and economy if you compare, let’s say, the short stories of Flaubert’s pupil Maupassant to the tales of Washington Irving from a few decades earlier; or the teletype-inflected novels of Hemingway as compared with Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding; or the door-slamming drama of Arthur Miller to the verbose, loopy theater of the preceding centuries. The usual aesthetic understanding is that all of this was unmistakably progress — stories had to have clear, taut lines; a fictional work had to be delivered with the greatest possible economy both to maximize dramatic tension and to take into consideration the precious time of the reader. But there was a lingering sense amongst very sophisticated writers that literature had created a trap for itself. Barth and Ford looked for freedom outside of the sort of mathematically precise dramatic structures introduced by Flaubert’s school. Milan Kundera devoted several of his novels — particularly Slowness — to a celebration of the 18th century and its languorous aesthetic rhythms as opposed to the industrialized 19th. All of modernism, really, could be construed as a mode of rebellion against Flaubert, an interest in finding narratives that had nothing to do with stories, in opening up the aperture on a specific moment in time or illuminating a consciousness.
The general understanding of modernism is that it was, basically, a failure. People wanted stories more than they wanted bravura writing or a depiction of the spirit of the times — stories were just deeper in the psyche. And, at least in the Anglo-American literary landscape, the publishing industry by the second half of the 20th century managed to pretend that modernism had essentially never existed — and the works that sold pretty much followed all the rules of somebody like Maupassant. But, for writers, that savvy chestnutization of aesthetic rules — that we are all little children, that we are all looking for the primal sort of thrill we get listening to a story around a campfire, that stories themselves follow certain inbuilt structures — could never be completely satisfying. The allegiance to the mechanics of story implied that writers had to spend their careers learning some sort of abstract, immutable language as opposed to doing what most writers really wanted to do — which was to just open their eyes, let their imagination loose, and write honestly on whatever their experience showed them. As Michel Houellebecq put it, explaining a writerly rebellion in the ‘80s against sacrosanct aesthetic norms: “There was only one [principle] — a little reality, man! Show us the real world, anchored in the lives of real people.”
And to me, developing my own approach to writing, that turned out to be the idea that was most persuasive. It wasn’t so much about style — style, in my experience, was something that a person didn’t have much control over, it was an extension of personality or more broadly of the circumstances and tastes that had formed their writing. The question was about how to shape the material as the idea for a piece presented itself. There was a direction that had to do with stories, with a kind of geometric perfection to the structure, with some archetypal conflict as the hinge and everything else pivoting around that. And there was a direction that I associated with the looseness of Ford, the strangeness of The Sot-Weed Factor, the intensity of Houellebecq, and which held that your job as a writer was simply to inhale experience, and the odder, the less obviously archetypal, the less promising, the more interesting the challenge. “I wanted to make people care about the lives of computer programmers,” said Houellebecq of the impetus behind his first novel Whatever.
I’m in no position to say that one approach is ‘better’ than the other. The storytellers often tend to be exquisite craftsmen, they work so hard to get at the archetypal truths, the perfect economy, of their work — they often go through endless drafts, there’s a feeling of chiseling away forever at the Platonic form of the material that presented itself to them. There’s a great deal to admire in that path — and it’s often rewarded by a receptive and readily-moved audience. But the other path — aperture wide, a ‘writer’s literature’ — had its advantages as well, more freedom, and a far more forgiving standard of excellence: allegiance to the truth, however bizarre or far-flung it may prove to be.
The Flounder was one of those like Lincoln in Bardo that very many people read. Celine in the one I have read "Journey" pulled off the poetry of a man who simply is disgusted by systems regrowing out of the hubris of warlike organizations. You see him having the hard work any writer does to keep perception fresh on writing days that you are preoccupied with the 450 conscious tongue lips mouth movements thatmake up speech. You can tell w him that it was dangerous. But he anticipates Hen Miller who relied on the helpful crutch of wrapping disastrous happenings in the kind of cock eyed optimism inherent in conversations. A 200 page novel requires a breakthrough as often as not. Eggs get broken. Our mother did not teach us to be Japetto to an unreliablenarrator. She almost did, you can find her anywhere you want to look. But it is not in the egg, have to adventure firther.