Recherché
I came upon two equally well-spoken, though seemingly contradictory, statements.
The first from Alexei Sayle:
Since I’ve become a full-time writer I get sent a good number of soon-to-be-published books. With many of them you get a strong sense of months spent on the internet or years passed in the British Library, meticulously researching the exact nature of monkey nut processing in Georgian England or the life of a dentist in Basingstoke.
It’s not just novice authors, either: in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral there are five whole pages devoted to how to make gloves. Unfortunately, coupled with this scrupulous fact-finding there is often a total neglect of the basic business of storytelling. Some of these writers forget that they are engaged in the business of creating fiction, inventing ideas, characters and places – they should be making exciting stuff up, when all they are doing is copying boring stuff down.
… well portrays an element of so much contemporary fiction that really gets my goat. Authors who apparently fear that they don’t really have anything to say, or that – drawing only on what they truly know – what they do have to say is so inane they feel compelled to embellish their narrative (i.e. mask their mediocrity) with the minutiae of a craft or cult or period of history that they’ve only just discovered.
The thickness of these parts of the tale so often jars with the “mere existence” portions and, at worst, sounds eerily like that bore you find at every party whose entire palaver is highlights from his mental library of trivia. The characters are stock and plain; only their work is potentially interesting – though its ultimate purpose is to act as filler, and provide the occasional cheap metaphor.
And he could not help but reflect that, yes indeed, life itself is sometimes like those ant colonies he spends his days examining. But, he wondered – and fearing the answer – was he a red or a termite ant?
(As we all know by now, one of the most risible examples of this approach to fiction is the perplexingly popular The Da Vinci Code, wherein not only does the author get his facts wrong and present ludicrous conspiracy theories as fact… but the poor chap can’t write for beans – his sole technique for creating tension being non-disclosure.)
The other quote is from Dubravka Ugresic:
In “Come Back, Cynics, All is Forgiven!” [Ugresic] offers a potent analysis of the current over-valuation of “ordinary accounts of ordinary people about ordinary things”. “The only thing that puzzles me,” she notes, “in this ardent return to reality, is reality itself” – a reality soapified, literalised, commodified, globalised. “The living Oprah is a mega-metaphor for the contemporary fetishisation of spontaneity and sincerity … Even the Croatian minister of defence, having happily avoided The Hague tribunal, was buried to the song ‘Candle in the Wind’.”
A new fascism dawns, based on obedience to worldwide market-based norms of ordinariness and sincerity. As she says, no wonder there are walls in many parts of eastern Europe graffiti’d with the words “Come back, communists, all is forgiven!”
Which, to me, is not entirely a contradiction of what Sayle is saying, but rather the other side of the coin, the other dulling trend in fiction which claims that any idea that’s ever passed through a (preferably celebrity) brain must be worthy of a printed page.
Style and the weight of experience, be gone. The lines between carefully crafted narratives that make your brain cogs spin and marvel, and marshmallow entertainment being eroded in the name of… god, I don’t know. Freedom? Democracy? Money? The global need to know what 14-year olds think of open-toed pumps?
The marketing hacks imposing unnatural selection to eradicate what those who don’t love a good read would snidely call “highbrow” then yawn… robbing the language of its full dominion, true authors of a forum, and those of us snobs who do crave a fine read of much-needed delights.
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Comment
- Thanks for these quotes.
Filling in the spaces of a narrative with trivial minutia isn’t really any different from filling it with quotidian minutia: both assume that raw information, the facts and figures of events, can stand in for any sort of reinvention or fantasy. Fiction that reads like a primer on glove making, on the one hand, or a field guide to the emotions of divorce, on the other, demonstrates a paucity of imagination. It’s a troubling literal insistence of too much fiction: it is about exactly what it seems to be about, and assumes that to be enough.
— steve May 11, 8:00am # - I happen to be reading a small heap of used James Bond paperbacks (I’m between thoughts at the moment and there isn’t much selection at the shop) and it’s the big stack o’ facts in every chapter that makes me laugh most. Not just the slew of brand names required for each meal or drive, but the pages describing the nature of the barracuda and so on. Replace those bits with something like “Barracuda have big teeth and will kill you if you aren’t as tough and cool as 007” and these novels would be very short outlines of stories.
— eeksypeeksy May 11, 9:58am # - Melville taught us how to whale.
Quotidian minutia as in Ulysses?
Trivial is a hierarchical descriptor, hierarchy necessitates value, value has goal, goal means direction, direction means travel, travel means will.
Which means things matter according to where we’re going.
Or not.
The Oprah-quotidian has an assumption of us being there already, so that the awakened consciousness of all those bourgeois matrons and matronic wanna-bes has an arriviste glamour. In the sense of aura.
I agree with Steve.
But the quotidian in the hands of the great becomes eternal. It does.
Moral judgements are no different than the aesthetic yeah?
In the end we went somewhere or we didn’t. Our kids got the benefit of our striving or they didn’t.
Somewhere in the musty caverns of critical forensics is a platinum bar like the one that sat in the Archives de la République.
The standard against which all others etc.
—
How does one read a heap of books? I want to do that, too.
Like J’onn J’onnz. Staring at them with my sort of X-ray eyes.
Absorbing them all in one gulp, like spider-enzymed soft tissue. Yum.
— msg May 11, 1:49pm # - Excellent stuff. Mind you, parts of War and Peace are pretty heavy going.
>>Even the Croatian minister of defence, having happily avoided The Hague tribunal, was buried to the song ‘Candle in the Wind’.
— MM May 12, 8:04am # - My comment got cut off, probably by admirers of Lady Diana. I went on to say:
I’m glad to hear that. After all, the song was composed for Marilyn Monroe, then conveniently repackaged for Lady Di’s funeral, a splendid excrescence of pop culture, with the brother’s speech pure television. I will have to remember this song for the next time someone’s pet hamster dies.
— MM May 12, 10:31am # - It’s a little ironic that the quote used as the first side of the coin comes from a bloke who probably sold his first book at least partly on the strength of his celebrity.
— Simon May 12, 10:52am # - Ahh, but there will always be conflicting opinions of just what a “fine read” is . . .
— bluepoppy May 12, 1:51pm # - “I will have to remember this song for the next time someone’s pet hamster dies.”
“And it seemed to me he lived his life like a hamster in a wheel,
Never knowing who to squeak to for an apple peel…”
This message was brought to you by the National Hamster Council.
http://www.hamsters-uk.org/
— eeksypeeksy May 14, 4:36am # - cue the harmonicas
— msg May 14, 1:53pm # - Interesting quotes and comments. I just wanted to say thank god I found someone else who doesn’t like Dan Brown. I read Angels&Demons at the insistence of many friends and it was just awful. He tries to write about CERN and anti-matter, and he just doesn’t get it. I also thought that his writing was awful. Plus every chapter ended with a sentence like: “Langer opened the door and what lay beyond was beyond anything he thought he would ever see.”
— colin May 19, 10:05am # - I rather liked the DaVinci Code, though more because of the thougts it aired about sex, than for the quality (or lack thereof) of Dan Brown’s writing.
Out of curiosity, has anyone griping about excessive minutae read the new-ish Neal Stephenson novels (Quicksilver, and The Confusion), or even the older Cryptonomicon? If so, what did you think of them?
— ferric oxide May 29, 8:54pm #
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