Saturday 11/2/24
The value of a work of fiction is directly related to the amount of life it contains. Life should permeate every aspect of a work. Each part of a work. I don't mean realism. I mean the stuff of being alive as fully as possible. This life cannot be faked. There's no Frankensteining life into a work where there is none. Life is legitimate and real. You should be able to look anywhere in a work of fiction and see and feel and know the life.
MFA-machined fiction is many things that are bad, and none that are good, but what all of that fiction has in common is how devoid it is of this life I'm talking about. You cannot teach someone to be able to have life in fiction. That's an ability with which they need to be born, even if it takes years--decades--for that life to come to be the stuff of their work.
We can help people write more clearly, but that's about as far as it goes. You can't teach someone how to invent. How to compel. How to stir. Inspire. Connect with. and you can't teach them how to create work that is full of life--that is life itself.
As we've seen, the writers of the system turn to their own lives for their material. They fictionalize the content of their lives for their stories and their novels. They can't invent. Unfortunately, they also lead uninteresting lives. These are cautious, frightened, sheltered people, and almost always people nestled away within a cocoon of privilege, so that content is meager and uneventful.
They all have degrees. The classroom is what they know. It's where they've been validated--never mind that this is not substantive or meaningful validation--in their lives.
For the ex-jock who peaked in high school, validation in life was--and still is--a matter of having been third team all conference back in 1992.
Ironically--given how much publishing system people hate sports (because sports involves a more level playing field, ability, and competition)--writers of lifeless fiction are very similar.
They also peaked back in the past doing this thing that wasn't important and, further, doesn't attest to any notable ability on their part. For all of their schooling, these people aren't even well read. They read the same things. They have to do what the others amongst them are doing. That's how they are. That's how they write. It's how they think.
It's how they don't think.
It's how they avoid thinking.
There are many works of fiction where it's just these people using themselves as characters and talking about their English degrees and grad school work. Who is that really interesting to? Anything can be interesting, depending on who the writer is. And depending upon the amount of life in the work. That's a caveat we should get out of the way.
But when what you're really doing is just a form of name-checking, you're not creating anything with any life in it. You're default-writing because there's nothing else you can do. There's nothing you know. Nothing you can invent. Nothing for you to give.
Who are you writing for at that point?
The answer, really, is no one. In the only regard that actually matters: In terms of what the work offers in its value as work. In how much life it contains or doesn't.
Work with life adds to our lives. The work that lasts the longest does because of the life it contains. Life doesn't date. Not the life force. Not life in absolute form. Not wellspring-life. And that's what a work of fiction should be: Wellspring-life.
Speaking of Frankenstein: In Bride of Frankenstein, Henry tells Dr. Pretorius that the latter hasn't succeeded in creating life with his homunculi, but rather the simulacrum of life.
It's like with Junot Diaz. When you have simple, repressed, sheltered, frightened, insecure, people, who've never lived, who can't handle anything real, and you give them bad fiction that has a few Spanish swear words and says "tits," they think they're these badasses for reading it. Taking a real walk on the wild side. It's fantasy. Something that plays into their delusions. Their delusions about themselves. What they want to think about themselves, no matter how little basis that has in reality.
Do you recall that episode of Frasier where Frasier says to Niles that owning Ella Fitzgerald's Ella Sings Gershwin doesn't make him soul brother number one? Which isn't to compare Ella Fitzgerald to Junot Diaz, because she was great and he hasn't a speck of ability, but you know what I mean.
But give these people actual life? Time to get in bed with their four cats and phone the therapist for a third session next week and have another crisis/meltdown on account of their fear/anxiety--and knowledge--that they've never had a real thing to say or write in their lives, and they never will.
That's upsetting, being like that. Someone like that is going to hate, fear, and envy someone not like that--the more so, the more so. Which is why these people feel as they do about me. Among other reasons.
They're the same, they think the same, they write the same, they all make this big deal about degrees just as the now no-neck ex-high school football star romanticizes his former glory days.
It's sad. Pathetic.
These people aren't going to be more than he is, but they are going to be bigger douchebags. He's just going to be some simpleton. They're going to be entitled simpletons. He'll at least be involved in his community, probably, work hard for his kids, whereas these people are going to be nasty, bigoted pieces of work who close ranks and roll the logs for each other. They don't want any work with any life in it, because none of them can do work like that, so they resent the very idea. It makes them feel small.
They are small. The tiniest of people. Which is why they surround themselves with people like themselves so they can all lie to each other about how big they are.
One way in which they feel better about themselves is when they see work that is the same as their work, with references to their world. The English department, the publishing system, terminal academia. They don't read to read. They read as little as just about anyone in a world where people don't read. They look. They want to see the words that serve as hallmarks of their life, for lack of a better term, their subculture.
Do you understand the difference?
We'll look at something typical here in this prose off so you can see what I'm talking about.
I'm going to say something important first. When I talk about the life quotient of a work, I'm not talking about as this mathematical tallying up. That's the paradox. The full quantity and depth of the life quotient should be evident in the entire work--every part of it. Because this is an absolute--not a coupling of figures for a final sum.
There is progression. Aggregating. Building. But that full-force of life needs to be in everything.
This is from Nancy Lemann's "The Oyster Diaries" in The Paris Review. It's a "story"--I use the quotes because this is fiction that is not really fiction, given that it's transposed, limited autobiography from a boring person--about not understanding sports--these people usually can't tell a hockey puck from a basketball--and attempting to offset sports (which, again, are bad with references to things that were read in college and being in class. Here we go:
It’s also an arena for people who are grown men, and sometimes quite old men, who take a child’s game so seriously it’s as if they’re soldiers bound for battle zones in a war to fight for our ideals. My husband approaches sports with a level of dedication normally reserved for the enactment of international peace agreements, and a lot of men are like this. They experience weird levels of well-being at victory and existential despair at defeat. Maybe sports provide for them an alternate route to emotion without actual human interaction, a route to the realm of poetics and sensibility without having to read a poem or have a sensibility.
Jack is a conundrum. I am the perfect wife for him since I have no needs and am easily suffocated and am not suffocating. Maybe I’m not needy enough. Men like needy women. Damsels in distress.
The worst things that happen, you don’t see them coming. That’s what makes them the worst. One of the vagaries of age is a loss of the ability to see or detect things that are right in front of you. Usually it’s when you’re cooking and you can’t find the oregano. But this is a metaphor with a bigger meaning—like when you don’t notice that your husband has turned into a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing,” wrote Walker Percy. Yes, it is unsettling to discover that the man you love is not the one you thought he was—or the one he never was, but you embroidered him into a vast ideal, and you can’t change your entire personality in one instant and stop embroidering people into vast ideals. But there is one good side to disillusionment. At least you’re in the real world after that, jolted out of your pathetic stupor. Like welcome to the world, the normal world of disillusionment. The loss of my ideal of him seems almost paltry in comparison.
Like Dante, lost in a dark wood in the middle of the journey of our life, you weren’t paying attention. You were so inattentive that you didn’t notice your husband had turned into a Hieronymus Bosch painting. (Just take a close look at a Hieronymus Bosch painting if you’re wondering what I mean.)
When I learned of his transgression I threw myself into Dante and Shakespeare, seeking to understand the world that I had failed to see. I couldn’t decipher it without a guide, so I took classes. The classes were at Georgetown. I tried not to talk in class because my contributions were inappropriate, but the other oldsters (auditors) talked so then I did too. The kids stuck purely to the text and the question at hand, as did the oldsters. Whereas when I talked it was all about My Personality, not just Shakespeare. That’s why I’m always cringing in retrospect about my ego disorder.
See? "...wrote Walker Percy." It's like a paper for class. You don't know who Walker Percy is. You don't know anyone who knows who Walker Percy is. Chances are. Unless you're well read or you're one of these people in this world. Again, doesn't mean there's no viable reason that Walker Percy shouldn't ever come up. But this ain't it. This is just signposting. It's flashing the secret hand gesture that says, "See? I'm one of us." Shakespeare. Dante. Hieronymus Bosch. Sports bad (and men--with no attempt to illuminate why, but rather just 'cause). Classroom good.
At the end of the excerpt, we get into some mental illness stuff. These people are usually mentally ill. So that's no surprise.
See how this plays to the choir? There's no one else in the church. These people are the only ones there (and not because they care about the sermon or are listening). Everyone else is off doing other things, for a host of reasons, but one of those reasons is because there's nothing worth reading in the church, so to speak.
It's so simple, isn't it? What's going on here, I mean. Why it's what's going on here.
In these few paragraphs we know everything we need to know about this writer and everything she'll ever do or has done, and everything about her.
Now, that's not going to stop this system from hooking her up.
That's why this system will hook her up.
And speaking of cringing: "Oldsters" will do it.
(By the way: Should you decide to look into Walker Percy, you'll see his novel The Moviegoer touted the most; if want to check him out, though, a better bet is his correspondence with Shelby Foote, who wrote many diverse things, the best of which is his three-part chronicle, The Civil War: A Narrative.)
The writer we just so can't imbue her work with life. So she's going to reference other writers as an attempted substitute.
But what did we say about that kind of thing right at the top of this entry? That's not going to work. And it didn't.
Now let's look at something completely different, which just so happens to involve a physical situation that is itself an attempt to create life.
The life I'm talking about, though, isn't this act of copulation with its intended result, but is rather in everything else. The story. The characters. The ideas. The truths. The language. The soul of the work. Which is in evidence in every part of it, this being but one part.
“Shit,” the girl’s father said after his daughter’s departure while he was still where he was in the darkness that probably wasn’t dark enough.
“You might as well finish,” the girl’s mother advised. “You’re nearly done, right?”
The man didn’t know how to respond. The question seemed obsolete, which voided any answer he had, despite how accurate it may have been.
“I guess,” he said, resuming.
They were trying to have another child and time, as time does, was running out. He’d done what he told himself was his best not to be selfish and understand how important this was to his wife. That though she had never held back on her love, she still had more love to give. Which made it important to him by extension. No, more than extension. To all of them. Directly. It wasn’t what they lacked, but rather that there was more to be. He’d get there. Soon. And if not soon, then eventually. You make the people you love happy, he thought. But sometimes it was also just easier.
She’d been to a specialist who counseled that all wasn’t lost given how far these matters of medicine had come, and plenty of women were doing what she wanted to do at her age and even older. The doctor said that word “even” like he caught himself having made a mistake right around the “v,” but it was too late to stop and the slip became something else for burying in the mix.
See how much life there is in that? It explodes with life. "You make the people you love happy, he thought. But sometimes it was also just easier." Where else are you going to get something like that? It's that depth of humanness. And it's in so few words.
Also: Consider, as just one example, the part about "burying" in the mix. That's a music term, right? But let's say you don't know that. You don't think there's something you're not getting. It makes perfect sense regardless. No reader is left behind. Whereas, with the excerpt from The Paris Review story, it's as if the piece is designed to leave readers behind. To leave anyone behind who isn't like the MFA-like bot who wrote the piece.
Think of it like points of contact. Have you ever been mountain climbing or tried to scale a wall? Or just tried not to fall coming down a hill? You want as many point of contact as you can get. It's the same with writing and readers. You want to give your reader as many possible points of contact. There is no one in this world I care about as much as I care about a reader. These people? They have no respect or regard for readers. They never even think about them. They're not trying to provide a reading experience. They're not trying to offer anything to a single person--a single reader--in the world. That's not what they're about, and they don't have the talent to do it.
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