Mapping the New Reality
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AMERICAN FICTIONS Mapping the New Reality If the novel is, instendhal's words, a mirror moving along a highway, what is the fate of the novel in our time, when highways are turning "smart" and electronic gadgetry defines the fabric of human communi- ties? Depicting our elusive reality may prove impossible, but Sven Birk- erts here lauds the efforts of some of America's more daring novelists. by Sven Birkerts t has become a tiresome subject, writer alike of an attenuating communica- and I feel more than a little perverse tion. The reader no longer expects to en- bringing it up. Still, there is more to counter a challenging vision of life as it is be said-much more-so let me be- really experienced, and the writer is no gin. American fiction, the genre, is longer sure how to present an encompass- in a muddle. I specify "genre" be- ing and relevant picture of things as they causeI the problem does not have to do so are. The ink on the old contract is fading. much with the individual works, which are This is not a new or sudden develop- various and often excellent, but with the ment. My sense is that the current condi- form itself. And to contain the generalizing tion has been several decades in the mak- impulse, if only slightly, I will specify still ing. As far back as the 1960s we heard further: It is the American novel that is in a laments that the American novel was ex- state of muddle. hausted, finished; that it had moved into How can I say this? How can I at one minor and academic modes, had divorced and the same time suggest that there is no itself from political and social realities, and shortage of worthy works and express con- so on. Indeed, these plaints came at a time cern for the art? In the same way, I sup- when other literatures-Latin American pose, that one can point to the large num- and Eastern European, especially-were bers of affluent citizens in this country and burgeoning. We heard the same song with still assert that the economy is in trouble. It slightly different words during the '70s and is a question of the big picture, the center; '80s, when minimalist modes became the it involves the disorientation that every seri- fashion. In a famous 1976 essay, ' "Plastic ous novelist must feel when he or she tries Fiction," Gore Vidal lamented that novels to get a fix on the meaning or worth of the had become mere "teaching-tools, artifacts novelist's enterprise. Simply, there is a per- stinking of formaldehyde in a classroom." vasive and anxiety-inducing sense of drift, The culmination of this disaffection was an awareness on the part of reader and reached two years ago, when Tom Wolfe WQ SPRING 1992 AMERICAN FICTIONS launched his widely discussed broadside, "Stalking the Billion- Footed Beast: A Literary Mani- festo for the New Social Novel," in the pages of Harper's. Wolfe de- clared in no uncertain terms that American fiction writers-he mainly discussed novelists-had capitulated to reality, that the rough and rowdy facts of the world had driven them into sub- mission, forcing a retreat into self- reflexive, self-indulgent, and gen- erally self-defeating postures. Our writers had handed over their au- thority to journalists and other purveyors of the documentary-a major mistake. And Wolfe urged as a solution a return to the exam- ple of the 19th-century social novel. There he had found inspi- ration for his own colossally suc- cessful The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)) and other writers could help themselves to the same well. Though he was wrong about the solution-and I hope my rea- sons for saying so will emerge shortly-Wolfe was, I think, right about the problem, which is a problem of representation. How to render in words a convincing picture of reality? The answer, alas, is not to call" for more representation. would simulate a seemingly coherent exte- It is reality that has changed. And the prob- rior order. lem is that to this day the aesthetic identity of the American novel remains largely teth- his is not, in itself, a problem. There ered to the basic premise of 19th-century is nothing intrinsically wrong with realism. Though a few brave souls have T the realist procedure, and in skilled made a go at incorporating modernist ap- hands the results can still be persuasive. proaches-including fragmented or multi- The problem lies elsewhere. It lies in the ple narratives, inward monologues, ambi- fact that our common reality has gradually tious referentiality, and the like-the grown out of the reach of the realist's in- majority have stayed with the staple ori- struments. We live our late-century lives entations of realism. Whether this is owing less and less in the four-square world of to some peculiar warp in the collective cre- surfaces and bounded events that realism ative disposition or is simply a reflection of evolved to depict. Our business is increas- the demands of the marketplace-give ingly with a new experiential hybrid. We readers what they want or risk failure-is live among signals and impulses and pro- hard to say. But the fact remains that even cesses that our language has a hard time now, in the early 1990s, our fiction is over- capturing. Our consciousness is mapped to whelmingly realistic in approach. Whatever a new field, and the contours of that field other ambition a novel may have, its princi- are determined by the way we spend our pal means are a development of credibly days. We don't talk over the fence but over rounded characters and a narrative that the phone-worse, we leave messages on WQ SPRING 1992 103 AMERICAN FICTIONS machines and check in to see if our mes- writer who would represent the world and sages have been returned. Our professional do so with some artistic tension has be- lives are likewise shorn of clear bound- come all but insurmountable. It will only aries-most of us interact more with but- intensify as we march deeper into late-mo- tons and digits than with people. We drive, dernity (or wherever it is that we are park, drive again, surrounding ourselves marching). Very few writers have the narra- during bubble time with a distracting envi- tive gifts and perceptual resources to make ronment of music or talk-show barking. readable fiction out of the real stuff of our Dinner? Often as not we nuke it in the mi- daily experience. John Updike is one of the crowave, before kicking back for a well-de- very few, and it is precisely for this that Rab- served night in front of the VCR. bit at Rest (1990) is important: It is a kind of If I present a caricature, it's to drive "limit text" for the contemporary realist. home a point: that the ambient drift of our And the others, those who lack Updike's dailiness is not exactly fodder for the novel- special alchemizing gifts? Most of the rest ist. We fight traffic, not duels. An accurate have taken one of the available paths indi- depiction of our doings would involve inor- cated by Kauffimann. They have steered to dinately extensive descriptions of down- one side or another of the great chal- time-outwardly dull and routinized move- lenge-to find a shape for the experiences ments. And I don't know how much more and sensations of our historical moment- dramatic interest a cut-away view of our in- in order to find a way to tell a satisfying ner lives would provide. The spread sheet, story. And while many have succeeded at worries about the MASTERCARD bill, a bit this, it is fiction itself that has paid a price. of flirtation at the deli counter. Fiction is now just an adjunct to the cul- What I'm saying is not new or revolu- tural life, an entertainment or a private tionary, though I don't hear it verbalized all vice. It is no longer the powerful medium that often. Way back in 1963, in an essay of exploration and reflection that it used to entitled "Mass Society and Post-Modern be. And this is a shame. Fiction," Irving Howe quoted the critic Stanley Kauffmann: When Vittorio de Sica was asked why so he much-maligned movement of many of his films deal with adultery, he is minimalism may have been the first said to have replied, "But if you take adul- T real signal of the crisis in the genre. tery out of the lives of the bourgeoisie, What was, &- is, distinctive aboutmini- what drama is left?". It is the continu- malism, apart from its fetishistic attention ing problem of the contemporary writer to the brand-name specifics of our social who looks for great emotional issues to move him greatly. The anguish of the ad- environment (as if these, properly decoded, vertising executive struggling to keep his might tell a story of their own) is the use of job is anguish indeed, but its possibilities the gap. Minimalists such as Ann Beattie, in art are not large-scale. The writer who Raymond Carver, Frederick Barthelme, wants to "let go" has figuratively to leave and Bobbie Ann Mason have a way of the urban and suburban and either go abruptly cutting from one rendered mo- abroad, go into the past, or go into those ment or situation to some completely dif- few pockets of elemental emotional life ferent scene, in order to confer eloquence left in this country.