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Missing the point of the reality of fiction

In the era of social media, do we read and write differently? Tim Parks thinks so.
(Stephen Osman / Los Angeles Times)
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Los Angeles Times Book Critic

On the New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks mourns the decline of fiction as a place to explore taboo and transgression in an age of oversharing and self-exposure.

“Dickens lived 150 years ago,” Parks writes. “Society has changed. Taboo after taboo has fallen away. People can now boast about coming from humble origins. Homosexuality is no longer something to be hidden; there may even be social and commercial advantages to a writer’s ‘coming out.’ Love relationships and marriages are no longer conceived of as fortresses of propriety, such that every difficulty or infidelity must be strenuously denied. And in any event it’s becoming harder and harder to deny things. Everyone’s posting photographs on Facebook, everybody’s leaving traces of what they do or say on email and Twitter.”

And yet, his ensuing question — “What does all this mean for creativity?” — seems exactly wrong to me.

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I’m not talking (or not entirely, anyway) about the conservatism latent in Parks’ lament. Homosexuality is no longer something to be hidden? That it ever should have been is the real sin. Such social fictions have been dismantled, in part, by the work of writers such as John Rechy, Radcliffe Hall, Adrienne Rich, William Burroughs — writers as revolutionaries, whose purpose was precisely to destroy the pernicious power of taboo.

One might say this is the key to all transgressive literature, to make transgression acceptable, or at least visible, to erode those “fortresses of propriety” that lock our truest selves away.

Parks mourns the loss of what he calls “the protection of fiction,” which in his view appears to means the ability of an author to hide behind, or within, his or her creations. I see his argument — one of the great appeals of fiction (for the writer, anyway, if not also for the reader) is its illusion of distance, the sense that in writing about made up, or disguised, people, we can say things we might never say directly, if our stories were identified as being about us.

At the same time, there’s a reason I call that an illusion, for our writing is always about us. It has to be, or why else would anyone want to give up a piece of his or her own life to immerse in ours?

I’m not referring here to autobiography, except in the sense that Jonathan Franzen once used the term in relation to Franz Kafka, “who, although he was never transformed into an insect … devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt and with the modern world.”

Kafka’s work, in other words, “is more autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been.”

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That’s a key point, for literature is about more than mere experience; it is a vehicle to express the inner life. Society may change — we know it changes — but our interiority as human beings remains essentially the same.

I think of Augustine, observing in the 4th century, “People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

That’s as true now as it has ever been. It’s the driving motivation of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” and Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage,” both of which Parks cites as examples of what let’s call anti-novels, in which the self is not submerged within the story but becomes the story instead.

Still, wasn’t it ever thus? Dickens — who “complained,” Parks notes, “to friends that rules of propriety prevented him from talking about large areas of experience” — wrote out of that experience nonetheless. So, too, did Beckett, whom Parks also cites. Their intent was no different from that of any contemporary writer: to reflect on who we are and how we live.

Literature adapts, in other words; it is always expanding, unlike the library of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, for whom “[t]he world ended … the day my Nautilus dived for the first time beneath the waves. On that day I bought my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last newspapers, and since that time I would like to believe that mankind has neither thought nor written.”

I came upon that Verne quote in a Georges Perec essay on how to arrange one’s bookshelves, a delightful piece about the impossibility of keeping literature contained.

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This, I’d suggest, is the larger idea Parks is missing — that creativity grows out of its moment rather than the other way around.

Twitter: @davidulin

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