Strangling Fiction
09/12/05 08:24
NY
Times reported on the increasingly bleak fiction
sales. Much
hand-wringing ensues, and, as a result of these
numbers, agents, publishers and other
gatekeepers continue to tighten the noose around
their own necks in response. It's as if someone
told you that you were threatened with
frostbite, but instead of getting out of the
cold, you began lopping off your limbs.
Modern fiction is dull. It is too often stilted, precious, small, and inconsequential. Look at the fiction titles on the NY Times' list of "10 Best Books of 2005." Is there one book there that does not testify to the severance of "literature" from "entertainment?" Is there one book there you can call "grandly entertaining?" I cannot tell you how many recent books I have put down at page 100, bored to death. Most seem the tortured efforts of the excessively trained and mildly talented. It's like shrill broadway voices. You can hear the voice lessons in every note. "Hear me work!" the voices scream at you. It is an inherently selfish sort of act--to demand that others watch you work. It means that the audience is there for your benefit. You are no longer there to entertain them. So many of those voices sound alike because they are trained to sound alike. So it is with the modern novel born of writer's workshops and BAs and MFAs in creative writing. "Watch me work," they scream.
I don't pay good money to watch people work.
The academization of letters demands that "literature" become arcana. Academics cannot own what everyone understands or enjoys. Once that happens, the public owns the form. There must be codes and signs and ciphers that the elite book reviewers and fiction profs alone can decipher. They don't care if the novel loses its audience. As a matter of fact, that loss simply cements their ownership of the form. The loss of the audience is growth of their power.
I find few things more annoying than the sound of Garrison Keillor's cloying voice as he introduces the day's poem in his "Writer's Almanac." First, the entire exercise seems a paeon to the death of letters. It's a daily eulogy, with its funereal music and his oh so morticianly vocal tones. "So and so died on..." He's asking us to fetishize the dead. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to realize that what's dead is reading and writing about which anyone gives a shit.
"They" seem desperately to want writing to be like Classical music--a reference to a better (to their mind) and bygone age. Culturally, Classical music is quite insignificant. Symphonies struggle and die, the form barely refreshes itself. It is absent from the popular mind. However, its practice requires monastic devotion and the judgment of it requires a depth of musical knowlege most can't approach. The specialists own it lock, stock and barrel.
However, most of us don't make music at work every day. We don't write music to our friends and co-workers. We don't use music to communicate daily. However we do us words thusly, and we use stories as well. Thus it is a far greater stretch to drag away from us these things--words and stories--with which we're intimate--to divorce them from us, their natural audience The pulling and tugging it takes is herculean.
Why would you want to take writing away from the mass of people who read daily, and tell and hear stories daily? Turning the writing of stories into a monastic exercise of a very few monks and acolytes toilling in dank rooms is a grossly counter-intuitive act. But it is succeeding. The sales figures will continue to fall as long as the gatekeepers continue to horde and fetishize the form, and see it as badge of membership into an elite clique, instead of a beautiful means of mass entertainment.
Modern fiction is dull. It is too often stilted, precious, small, and inconsequential. Look at the fiction titles on the NY Times' list of "10 Best Books of 2005." Is there one book there that does not testify to the severance of "literature" from "entertainment?" Is there one book there you can call "grandly entertaining?" I cannot tell you how many recent books I have put down at page 100, bored to death. Most seem the tortured efforts of the excessively trained and mildly talented. It's like shrill broadway voices. You can hear the voice lessons in every note. "Hear me work!" the voices scream at you. It is an inherently selfish sort of act--to demand that others watch you work. It means that the audience is there for your benefit. You are no longer there to entertain them. So many of those voices sound alike because they are trained to sound alike. So it is with the modern novel born of writer's workshops and BAs and MFAs in creative writing. "Watch me work," they scream.
I don't pay good money to watch people work.
The academization of letters demands that "literature" become arcana. Academics cannot own what everyone understands or enjoys. Once that happens, the public owns the form. There must be codes and signs and ciphers that the elite book reviewers and fiction profs alone can decipher. They don't care if the novel loses its audience. As a matter of fact, that loss simply cements their ownership of the form. The loss of the audience is growth of their power.
I find few things more annoying than the sound of Garrison Keillor's cloying voice as he introduces the day's poem in his "Writer's Almanac." First, the entire exercise seems a paeon to the death of letters. It's a daily eulogy, with its funereal music and his oh so morticianly vocal tones. "So and so died on..." He's asking us to fetishize the dead. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to realize that what's dead is reading and writing about which anyone gives a shit.
"They" seem desperately to want writing to be like Classical music--a reference to a better (to their mind) and bygone age. Culturally, Classical music is quite insignificant. Symphonies struggle and die, the form barely refreshes itself. It is absent from the popular mind. However, its practice requires monastic devotion and the judgment of it requires a depth of musical knowlege most can't approach. The specialists own it lock, stock and barrel.
However, most of us don't make music at work every day. We don't write music to our friends and co-workers. We don't use music to communicate daily. However we do us words thusly, and we use stories as well. Thus it is a far greater stretch to drag away from us these things--words and stories--with which we're intimate--to divorce them from us, their natural audience The pulling and tugging it takes is herculean.
Why would you want to take writing away from the mass of people who read daily, and tell and hear stories daily? Turning the writing of stories into a monastic exercise of a very few monks and acolytes toilling in dank rooms is a grossly counter-intuitive act. But it is succeeding. The sales figures will continue to fall as long as the gatekeepers continue to horde and fetishize the form, and see it as badge of membership into an elite clique, instead of a beautiful means of mass entertainment.