July 24, 2008
Dear Clusterflock
Is fiction’s job to disturb the comfortable, comfort the disturbed, or both?
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19 Responses to “Dear Clusterflock”
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Is fiction’s job to disturb the comfortable, comfort the disturbed, or both?
19 Responses to “Dear Clusterflock”
Leave a Reply
I like to think of fiction as unemployed. Possibly unemployable.
Both, but not necessarily at the same time. I think good fiction out to give the reader a general disquiet or, at the very least, pause. It isn’t until later, upon reflection or reread that a person should find comfort. We should need to take time to recover.
I’ll echo Sheila. I don’t think fiction has a job.
I tend to think of Kafka saying that literature is an ax that breaks the frozen sea within us. Fiction can do that, and that’s what Lish is saying when he points out that a story can save your life. But there is a wide range of reasons for writing fiction and reading it that isn’t entirely covered by such hopes for what it might achieve.
Fiction is dreams set to typography, plot, and style.
Whether it’s fiction’s job or not is a question better left to those who know more than I. What a good fiction (or good poem, as I deem) does for me is open the universe to me. (I’ve mentioned that before, if I’m boring anyone, please just ignore me.)
I was catching up on the New Yorker last night, in a May issue, Annie Proulx, did it to me again. (titled something like, Cowboys and Their Songs, or some such, I’m too lazy just now to go in to the dining room and pick it up off the table where I left it lay after reading a third of it, having had to put it down because I emotionally couldn’t read anymore of her words just then. It disturbed me in my comfort spots, comforted me in my disturbed spots, and, as an erstwhile writer of fiction, I was simultaneously enraptured by her facility with words and timing; and nearly unconsolable and jealous and angry with myself for not working harder at it than I do.
Rick–that is a splendid Annie Proulx story; Cindy read it first then passed it on to me. Proulx knows better than anybody how to let the story tell itself. She just set it down there, and it broke Cindy’s heart and then mine. Life is always so much larger than we realize, even when we think we realize this.
Rick, that Proulx story did the same thing to me (although I finished it, and you must, too). It just devastated me. She’s relentlessly honest, relentlessly human, relentlessly bleak. The power of her work is hard to take, but we are better people for having read her.
I love your description above, by the way. You are a writer.
Dammit… it’s JOURNALISM… that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.
“Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward”.
– “Mr. Dooley In Peace And War” by Finley Peter Dunne, 1899
Time will tell, Cindy and Daryl, won’t it?
XOR some more.
“So here, finally, the forecast: Years from this past moment, in a house filled with framed crewel adages and Eastlake antiques, with years to append his abilities of hindsight, he sits with a bit more knowledge and wonders: how did she know before he?”
–Rick Neece, “Weather Report” from Elimae
Very nice, Rick.
The job of fiction is to not have happened as described by the author, at least to the author’s awareness (”Any similarity to persons living or dead….”) Beyond that, there’s enough fiction around that hopefully a given reader can find something to give them what they need. Good fiction satisfies many needs for many people.
I find enough wonder and enlightenment in “real life” that I have not bothered with fiction in any serious way for years. Call it ADD or sermons in stones; I can’t sit through a movie, yet Renaissance motets on the radio or the stories of dear friends move me to tears. Politics provides the laughter; a drive in the suburbs, the dull flavorless filler. Maybe I’m just collecting source material for my Great American Novel.
It is fiction’s job to confound the unconfoundable.
*thanks, brandon*
Fiction, poor thing, may be overemployed instead of unemployed: tell a good yarn; explicate a historical situation in a more pleasing way than most historians can; use words to create sounds and images in a way that hasn’t been done before and stretches the very idea of what words can do (think Gary Lutz); open up a character’s psychology in such a way that we understand ourselves and others more clearly; deliver other lives into our hands and minds so that, even if we aren’t literally reincarnated after death, we feel that we have been, right now, every time we finish a story. Orson Scott Card isn’t a good writer in a linguistic/”literary” sense, but I’m very pleased to have spent time with Ender and Bean as they fought their war. Guy Davenport and WG Sebald were very fine writers in a literary sense and made words do remarkable things, but they also taught me about real things I’d never known before, like Robert Walser and Musonius and the ways the mind can wander when one is on a walking tour of eastern England. Wow.
Oh, what’s that movie — tv show? play? Eh, the mind has gone — where someone says… “Artists use lies to tell the truth”. That’s kind of how I look at fiction. I am less interested in fiction (in the technical, literary sense) that comforts the disturbed than I am in fiction that reveals truths. Fiction on TV, that can be my fluff that lulls me into complacency.
But do I think that’s its job? Well, that isn’t up to me ’til I sit down and write it.
Jenny, Jenny! I have your site bookmarked!
Jenny–thanks for the fine observations here. And incidentally, the quote you are referring to actually comes from Picasso, who said “Art is a lie that tells the truth.”
And as Coop says, we are all, in many ways, always making fictions. We know the world by way of our fictions, our capacity to model worlds in our minds and learn from our own imaginings and the guided imaginings prompted by the words of others. Have you ever experienced rude treatment from a clerk when you paid for purchases–and all the way home you said to yourself: “When he said that I should have said this, and then he would probably have said this and I would have said this“…? I suspect that most of us do this, and when we do we are making fictions that probe at potential worlds and experiences in a way that is not just a silly little game–it’s a window on how we know “the” world at all, how we move forward by making, to some extent, the ground we tread.