Real / irreal

Clive photographs the title page.
Glimmerglass.
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.

For an essay of mine having to do with what is called fantastic and what is called realistic, please go here to the Mercer blog. And here's a taste:

    Given the way books are discussed in our time, it’s possible to say that my A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is a realistic narrative about a Depression-era’s orphan’s struggle to find his place, or that Glimmerglass is a search that takes place in a solid, realistic world but does the fantastic thing of taking the muse as a possible, literal figure—and at one point borrows from the ancient form of the somnium, or dream vision. But I would not reach for genre terms to describe either of them. For me, books are on a kind of thread or continuum, moving from one way of telling the truth to another. All that matters to me is whether they are good books or not.
     All art is created, shaped, dreamed into existence. What matters is not genre or categorization but the extent to which a fabric made of words—the warp and weft making up a kind of little maze—contains an Ariadne’s thread of energy that leads to larger life.

Comments are open there. I'd love to know what other people think about these things and have already gotten an interesting letter from a fellow novelist... Please leave a comment at the Mercer site if you have an opinion!

Morning thoughts: on making

Interior decoration by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass, out in September.
A lion, a leaf, and a crown--surely they are
nothing if not realistic. And yet, put them together...

AB OVO

Often I'm startled by my own absurd temerity in saying anything about books. What do I know? Why don't I stick to my own narrative and lyric frolics and words and keep my mouth fast shut otherwise? A writer is always making things up, beginning at the very beginning--knowing nothing about how to make what she must make next. It's yet another thing about being a writer that enforces (or should enforce) a kind of humility, whether a writer wants it or not. Having revised a poem or novel or story, I hold an amount of strange knowledge . . . and yet it all flies out the nearest window, never to return, when I sit down with the blank page, the not-yet-born next.

Yet I do persist in this mania of having and changing opinions, thinking that I know things about what I do. For example, I've long felt that the roots of our literature in English are quite other than what is often praised--this thing called realism that so dominates much of our thinking about books. And I've felt, in fact, that there is no such thing as realism, just as there is no such thing as the fantastical or irrealism. These words are but handles, convenient ways of describing points on a continuum. As I've said before, if a book could be perfectly and wholly "realistic," it would then replace reality in one Borgesian swoop. All works of literature are made from nothing, or from Yeats's "a mouthful of air." That is the nature of creation and the sub-creation that is literature.

From Beowulf to Gawain and the Green Knight to The Tempest to Tom Jones to Bleak House to the latest narrative in prose or verse, what matters in poetry and fiction is energy. Is the work alive? And the answer to that question has little to do with where a work falls on the continuum between realist and irrealist, and everything to do with whether it captures something of the energies of life.

* * *

ON RESOLVING TO SHUT UP (AGAIN)

It occurs to me (once again) that I have already said these things before, in some way or another. These morning thoughts, written before the dawn . . . Waking, making. Making is a kind of waking, isn't it? And a maker desires to be awake, to wake others.

* * *

OUR BORING, MODERN OBSESSION

Here's Jacob Bacharach, author of A Bend in the World, at Huffington Post:

Sometimes I think that all the really great works of surrealism predate our boring, modern obsession with dividing the real from the unreal, truth from fiction, the conscious mind from the dream. I'm using surrealism in its common and not specific sense; a lot of the works I'm going to mention are what you might call magical realist, or experimental, or postmodern, or just plain weird. I'm actually a fan of weird fiction myself. If my own writing ever spawns a genre, that's the name I'll lobby for. Anyway, in working on a current unfinished writing project, I've been rereading the Bible, and it's reminded me that of a friend of mine who once said that Revelation was his favorite science fiction novel. I'm a fan of Job, myself, which would give Burroughs a run for his mugwumps, although for true weirdness, you really ought to reread Genesis, in which the utterly ordinary and the utterly otherworldly coexist and commingle in a manner totally alien to the modern ear and imagination; the poetry of creation gives way to genealogy, and God flits between instantiating His word and dickering with little humans over the specific price and measure of disobedience...
I tend to think that all great literature has an element of the fantastical and the surreal: Bolaño, Melville, Djuna Barnes, Anne Carson, Laurence Sterne... Each era throws up writers who take their elbows to the way we're supposed to see things, and these are the ones I come back to when I am bored with being bored.

Via that interesting young seminary professor and writer, Wesley Hill

Real and irreal

Detail from the cover of Thaliad. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
I picked this one for the post because it suggests a kind of leafing
and fruiting and singing that joins all good writers, maugre the mode!

This post is a wandering set of responses to another post, in which the ever-interesting Patrick Kurp talks about the literary loves and antipathies of H. L. Mencken. The portions about Mencken as a boy are full of charm, and the whole piece is of interest.

* * *

Having written two fantasy novels (grounded in the landscape and Scots-Irish/Cherokee lore of western North Carolina) and a number of short stories because one of my children was mad for fantasy, I find that am equally happy on either side of the "fanciful and unearthly" vs. "highly literal" divide. Oh, just remembered that I wrote a book-length post-apocalyptic poem, so that's tumbling into the fantastical, too, and I went back to the classical idea of the somnium for a chapter in a forthcoming book. Perhaps I am impossibly mixed--or mixed up--at this point. You see, somehow I fail to feel a keen, profound difference between what others view as various modes when I write. I like to frolic as and where I will, and as story leads.

I'm fond of mythic and fantastic classical works, and in English I like many of the fantastic-leaning poems of Old English and the medieval world. I find it curious that so many people have a pronounced love for or dislike of what we call irrealism. And yet how far it goes back in Western and world literature... So shall we toss Homer? Ovid? Portions of Shakespeare? What about Dante? Gilgamesh? The Mahābhārata? The Dream of the Rood? Or were those elements fine then but not fine now, or not fine for the novel?

In the end, I don't find the divisions of genre helpful for me--I mean, as a writer--and am quite willing to look for a good book under many sorts of labels. But I don't find it a fault that somebody else wouldn't feel the same way. Instead, I find the tendency to like or dislike in this way to be interesting and intriguing. (Of course, maybe that's because it says something about a person's makeup, so I'm off on a writer's nosey, personality-examining jag when I consider the subject.)

Such strong opinions are a challenge to my own stance, surely. And while I know my own mind, I'm not adverse to changing it.

I wonder what Mencken thought of the more fantastical creations of Twain. He may be labeled a realist for perfectly sensible reasons by literary historians, but Twain has some creations that fall strongly into another realm. Even Huckleberry Finn revels in the fact that people have very different angles of vision on the world and how to navigate it--a profusion of angles that just might suggest that we're already living in a kind of metaphorical multiverse, right here and now.

As to this matter of "realist" and "speculative" (choose whatever term you like for the latter--the sf/f/h world seems to expend a great deal of energy arguing that point) fiction, I believe it's all the same realm--a kind of continuum. A writer can move about on that continuum. A writer can stay put. Writers on many points of the continuum can strive to make a truthful and strong story. (Or they can strive for something lesser, but winning the world and losing your soul is a whole other dilemma and fish-kettle...)

Don't all narratives differ from reality and rejoice in making up a world? If a writer reached the point of absolute realism--impossible--we would have reality. And wouldn't that act of transforming words into complete realism be an irrealist tale?