Experimentalism is Dead, Part III
A denouement...
THE BALLAD OF MOPEY MAGOO
Oh, listen to the dreadful drag of his heel
And look at his inflated cheek
Being bored by a book is the status-quo look
Of the lonely forlorn and the meek.
While a story has long been a big mental meal
Made of tongue-twisters, surprise, and a thrill
It’s now a lab manufacturing drab
And rated as over-the-hill!
(Refrain) Oh—Mopey’s exhausted the whole ancient canon
From sage Confucius to each lady Brontë
And if he should find something new in the mind
May I squeal and hop-hop and be jaunty!
He’s been searching the labyrinth of shelves
In the black bowels of Babel
He’s been a-looking from Nairobi to Nanjing
Trying to revive the rabble.
For the electric blur or the burble
Or the choking strap of Their rule
Has bred stagnation in lieu of creation
And deemed each of us a tiny old fool!
Where were we?1
One cannot sacrifice both language and creativity. If a novel is straightforward, unoriginal (not in a derogatory sense, but simply meaning that its plot is not exceptional2), then it must compensate with pristine, superior language. Likewise, if a novel lacks that sort of language which assumes a transcendent quality, then it must be creative, either in the story it explores or in the manner with which it explores the story. A novel that does not have either language or creativity is not a novel. It is a collection of meaningless letters on a page, unable to coalesce and offer an insight into the human condition. A dud.
This is, in part, a problem engendered by the death of experimentalism. I coined a phrase, “Neo-Egoism,” in “Experimentalism is Dead, Part I,” which constitutes my attempt to explain the current literary landscape. Here, I will attempt to offer a definition. Neo-Egoism encompasses the sort of literature that is navel-gazing without considering why it is navel-gazing and what it has to say about that navel-gazing. It is a literature that embraces the following fallacy: because you are a person living a life, you ought to write about that life. Not every story is a Story, however. Consider when a friend tells you an anecdote which, in order to understand and laugh at, requires the knowledge of an inside-joke between your friend and his friend, an individual you have never met. Or remember that one rambling relative at the Thanksgiving table who fluffs an anecdote with irrelevant, uninteresting details, only to arrive at a conclusion that is neither entertaining nor satisfying. Sometimes, he doesn’t arrive at a conclusion at all. Such is the pitfall of recommending to everyone that they write what they know3, i.e. only what transpires in their own life. Certainly, it is possible to discover the divine in the banal, and great writers often do. Without that, though, the banal remains the banal and your words flounder on the page like fish out of water.
Let me be clear that I bear no grudges against auto-fiction. I bear grudges against those authors who admit that they are writing about themselves, that the events in the book are replicas of their real life, not recognizing that even in writing about one’s own life, the “self” on the page is distinctly different to the “self” in reality. This is emblematic of a particular strain of auto-fiction. One where most of the sentences adhere to an unchanging structure (subject-verb-object), where most of the verbs are tired, out of gas, where barrenness is equated with emotional depth. Not every sentence requires abstruse, multisyllabic words and descriptions like a man who is “great-maned and filthy, rimed saliva in his beard, old bruises across the forehead gone soft and crumbly.”4 One of my many flaws is my penchant for purple prose (I cannot help it—I am a devotee of Nabokov). I recognize that always writing in this manner is suffocating. Perhaps you are even feeling suffocated as you read this sentence… But it seems that this opting for simplicity represents an opting for simplicity of thought and, more importantly and more unsettlingly, an abandonment of creativity.
As with all literary matters, my instinct is to turn to Philip Roth. Roth is a top-drawer example of the boons of auto-fiction (he is far from the only example. In fact, auto-fiction has been around since man became literate. Of the 21st century, Ben Lerner is the auto-fiction extraordinaire, but I have only read 10:04, many years ago, so I am unable to comment meaningfully or truthfully on his work. Earlier, Marcel Proust wrote, essentially, what is now termed “auto-fiction.” Anyone who has read In Search of Lost Time, however, will know that Proust considered the existence of three selves: the narrator, the writer, and the person). One of my favorite Roth novels is Zuckerman Unbound, the second in the Zuckerman series. In it, we meet Roth’s alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, as he contends with fame in the wake of Carnovsky (the fictional counterpart to Portnoy’s Complaint). It is obvious, immediately, that the struggles of Zuckerman are the struggles of Roth. But we don’t care. We don’t care if Alvin Pepler is real or fabrication. We don’t care if an Alvin Pepler-type character sent death threats to Roth’s parents in Florida. We don’t care, nor are we concerned with, whether the events of Zuckerman Unbound actually occurred. In all likelihood, at least some of them did. But we are not preoccupied with fact v. fiction because Roth entertains us. With language, with humor, with unhinged former-quiz show kids, with pathos and sincerity.
There’s no one better to hear this from than Roth himself:
This is from Roth’s Paris Review interview—a treasure trove of observations, insights, and maxims about the writing profession. We all write about ourselves. We all pluck from our memories, our experiences. But it is still pretending. Impersonation. A performance. The donning of masks. “The sly and cunning masquerade.”
It’s not as simple as writing about ourselves—it’s about locating the heart of every story, the entertaining and meaningful core. That’s where the profundity emerges, for profundity cannot be manufactured or forced. At the end of a novel, no reader is impressed by the biography of the author. What they are impressed by are the words on the page and the storytelling. To know that the author is the “same person”5 as the protagonist in their novel does nothing to titillate the reader. The hand is revealed. The balloon pops. The magician shares their secrets. Creation is reduced to the sterile soil of reality.
If Roth doesn’t convince you, here’s Nabokov, speaking of the same subject:
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.
Yes, you will inevitably cull from your own life when you sit down to write fiction. But you must recognize that it becomes deception—in your reader’s eyes and your own—as soon as it touches the page. It may even become deception earlier than that, when you first recall the memory.
Why would you even want to admit to your reader that you are writing quasi-memoir? Doesn’t that deflate the trick? Doesn’t it surrender the power you wield over your reader, the ability to take them on a journey, to convince them that the unreal is actually the real?
One of my favorite anecdotes about Nabokov: during an interview, he was asked about people conflating him with Humbert Humbert, if he worried about any similarities between him and his nymphet-inclined protagonist. He did not refute the possibility of him being a pedophile. Instead, he said something like, “Nonsense. We are very different individuals. For instance, Humbert Humbert confuses one butterfly species for another, whereas I would never make such an egregious mistake.”6
Every writer ought to follow Nabokov’s example. Do not indulge in exegesis. A book is a book, and once it is published, it is severed from the author. Wasn’t it Borges who said, “To publish is to forget”?
When a novel is deemed “raw” and “real” only because it is a true7, autobiographical depiction of the author’s reality, not because it is innovative or aiming to capture something difficult about human existence or full of mellifluous language and alternating sentence structure and an ear for the rhythm of words (all of which, by the way, can be achieved without sacrificing “rawness” and “realness”), then we have not only failed the novel as an art form, but we have failed as artists and patrons to confront the questions of life in a manner not possible by most, in a manner that transcends the fluctuations of time.
What does auto-fiction have to do with the death of experimentalism? It’s a convenient example that illustrates a greater point: in this trend towards writing about ourselves, our minds’ creative abilities have withered. We have opted for the easy route too often and cowered from the challenge of creating what does not exist, exercising our imaginations. Whatever way you shake it, writing is a difficult art form. Every art form is difficult. It’s why such a small fraction of the population succeeds at it.
To complete this screed—have I actually said anything? Have I created more problems instead of providing solutions and hope? Problems, we’ll soon see, are not so undesirable. Let’s return to a piece I mentioned in Part II of this never-ending diatribe: Donald Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing.”
Barthelme explores the difficulties facing writing and the writer (c. 1987), including criticisms aimed at post-modernism. For one, he cites Wittgenstein in asserting an important, salient claim, which begs to be read over several times and considered in the light of our society:
Problems are a comfort. Wittgenstein said, of philosophers, that some of them suffer from ‘loss of problems,’ a development in which everything seems quite simple to them and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial.
Problems—obstacles—are at the heart of every narrative. You’ve heard it all before: inner conflict, outer conflict, what’s standing in the way of your character reaching their goal. Problems are inherent in the process of writing itself. Plot holes, writer’s block, sore fingertips (assuaged by the obsolescence of the typewriter), drafts and re-drafts, missed deadlines, bad reviews, etc. etc.
“Shallow” and “trivial,” along with “competent”—are those not the three worst words a writer can hear?
It’s natural that an aversion to problems, an aversion to the plumbing of problems leads to shallowness. It is, quite literally, shallow. If you only graze the surface and don’t dive into the soil—all tangled with roots, infested with worms, damp and thick—you cannot expect to discover anything of emotional and aesthetic depth. Namely, that which has not been discovered before.
To backpedal to our friend Philip Roth, when asked about how much of a book he knows before he starts, Roth responded with the following:
But the point that best serves our purposes comes a little later:
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.
This in response to certain criticisms against postmodernism, accusing it of being “masturbatory,” “chilly,” and “[excluding] readers by design.” I’m not suggesting that postmodernism is the solution to stale literature, nor should we return to it—after all, that would not be evolution, and what we want is to build upon history, for new buds to sprout from those roots. What we should glean from postmodernism, or at least from Barthelme’s “Not Knowing,” is the notion that writing, and art, is challenging, is filled with uncertainty, is “ meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality or a jackleg attempt to ‘be’ external reality.” Why must everything be plain as day, explicitly expressed on the page for easy consumption? What happened to the abstract, the surreal, or, in Hemingway’s analogy, the unseen parts of the iceberg?
Perhaps contemporary literature simply reflects our contemporary society (as it should, correct?). A society that favors instant gratification, short bursts of dopamine, and the literal over the implicit. Two-hour films are considered long.8 Books over two-hundred pages are considered doorstoppers. We want everything now now now and anything that stands in the way of our immediate pleasure is deemed dense, obtuse, or pretentious.
Is it any wonder why creativity has faltered under such conditions?
What have we established? Experimentalism is dead, literature has been tamped down into conformity, MFA programs breed that conformity, intellect has gone down but belief in one’s intellect has gone up (see: Neo-Egoism). What do we do? That’s the point of this kind of essay, I suppose—to offer a solution. Perhaps it will dissatisfy you, the solution I’m about to offer, the advice I’m giving to myself and to all of you, but there is a convenient, pixelated screen that separates us and protects me from any physical backlash. My solution is simple, just one word: read. Read more and read widely. Don’t just read contemporary fiction. Don’t just read Plato and Lao Tzu9. There is nothing to boost the prowess of your writing, your comprehension of craft and storytelling, your understanding of culture and humanity like reading. No matter how much you write—even if you write 10,000 words a day—you will always be limited by your lack of reading. There is a certain depth of cerebral awareness, of sympathy that you reach when you read across all centuries, across all styles, across all countries. A depth that translates to the page, to the sorts of problems you are able to wrestle with10, that is simply unattainable if you don’t read. Lazy reading engenders lazy writing.
There are many talented writers who ignore whole swaths of history (I have blind spots, too—plenty of them—but I am trying my best to fill them) and it is evident in not just how they write, but also how they think. Existing in a literary vacuum will cause you to stagnate, perhaps even to regress. In Annie Hall, Alvy likens a relationship to a shark: if it stops moving, it dies. To repurpose that analogy, writing is like a shark. If it stops moving, it dies. And what we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.11
My lyricism cannot compare with Pynchon’s, but I hope you enjoyed The Ballad of Mopey Magoo all the same.
What is original, anyway? What story has not been told a thousand times over?
“Write what you know” is not inherently poor advice. You would never encourage someone with very little or no knowledge of history to write a Civil War epic. If, however, that person is willing to isolate themselves in a library, poring over firsthand accounts, learning the dialects, understanding the politics, the power that contributed to the war, then, at a certain point, he will have attained the necessary level of expertise to write his desired epic, thus, writing what he knows. But such research requires a commitment not everyone is capable of, and any inconsistency will be magnified, scrutinized, pointed to as an indication of the author’s inadequacy. Consider, for instance, the depth of DeLillo’s research for Libra.
From DeLillo’s Mao II.
I put this in quotes because I’d like to emphasize that the transcription of life to the page is never perfect. By committing your autobiography to the page, you inevitably create a new “you,” a new self. This is a distinction that I believe we must maintain.
I scoured the web searching for this interview because Nabokov’s own words are much more entertaining than my paraphrasing. I know it exists, but where?
What is truth? Who is the arbiter of truth?
From Cheever’s Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review: “Verisimilitude is, by my lights, a technique one exploits in order to assure the reader of the truthfulness of what he’s being told. If he truly believes he is standing on a rug, you can pull it out from under him. Of course, verisimilitude is also a lie. What I’ve always wanted of verisimilitude is probability, which is very much the way I live. This table seems real, the fruit basket belonged to my grandmother, but a madwoman could come in the door any moment.”
Why do we speak so often of run-times when evaluating films? Two of my favorite films of the past couple of years—Killers of the Flower Moon and The Brutalist—were frequently the butt-ends of jokes about their 3+ hour lengths. What a terrible imposition to have to sit through 180 minutes of art instead of spending those 180 minutes scrolling through TikTok.
Though if pressed to choose between the two, choose the former. Here, my apparent biases come into play.
And problems for which you do not demand solutions. Problems into which you’re content to dig deeper, even if you know you’ll never reach a conclusive bottom.
How I wanted to end on a positive note, but I could not resist such a delicious last line! Perhaps I’ll try to satisfy your optimism in this footnote—the true ending, for those who made it this far. Literature is not a dead shark. Literature is alive and well (ailing, rather, but hanging in there). Our world has simply evolved into one of mass consumption and commodification. Intellect is no longer celebrated. Celebrity is. But it won’t last—it can’t last. Art is too strong to crumble under the weight of a temporary mediocrity. After all the fads fade away and technology is rendered obsolete, art is what remains. And great, creative, propulsive art is still being made, all around us. It’ll take some time until it emerges from the rubble—when the Cloud implodes, when the Internet shuts down, when our brains return to their base states of stimulation—but it will, and we will have finally understood what we’ve been missing. It will be glorious. Glorious.