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realism and culture
I've been thinking a lot lately about literary realism, and whether it's a good thing or not.
Many of my favorite twentieth-century writers (Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.) consciously and deliberately violated the tenets of literary realism in their fiction. You could argue that the textual experiments of Burroughs or Barthelme (or, more recently, those of Ben Marcus) constitute a kind of higher order of "realism"—we live in a world densely webbed with discourse networks, and the work of those authors reflects that reality in a way that you could technically call mimetic. The experience of reading these stories matches our experience elsewhere, yes, but the characters—if there even are characters—resemble us only indirectly.
I think that there is a value to the act of telling stories about experiences that resemble our own. We can see this by looking at the last thrity years of American literary fiction, which is characterized by an explosion of women's writing, minority writing, and gay writing. The people who ran the women's presses and women's bookstores that sprang up in the 1970s understood that realistic storytelling was not only pleasurable but also political: the terrain of representation was contested terrain, on which battles could be fought and won. The early gay and minority presses had this same sense of awareness and enjoyed similar success.
I like reading fiction that evokes the fragmentation and density of our contemporary world, but I think fiction can do more than just that: it can tell a story about that world, and how people—people we recognize as being like us—negotiate it. This is something that I try to do in my own work. For my money, the only writer out there who is really doing this with regularity is Don DeLillo. This probably explains why I like DeLillo so much.
(Backstory: I've been thinking about this stuff because a while ago, The Magnificent Melting Object recommended Nathalie Sarraute. I checked out her book Tropisms / The Age of Suspicion. It's a weird hybrid—half of the book is a collection of strange microfictions, the other half is a set of four pieces of literary criticism— but the literary criticism half deals a lot with the question of realism (particularly psychological realism) in twentieth-century fiction.)
(Wishlist: I need to find people in Chicago who I can sit down and talk about books with.) Labels: book_commentary, narrative, writing |
Thursday, February 21, 2002
9:38 PM
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