Gotham Diary:
New Forms
15 July 2015
“New forms!” wails Konstantin. Doesn’t he? It’s just about all I remember from The Seagull. (I am not a fan of Chekhov — there, I said it.) Among other things, I find Konstantin unspeakably tedious, and, until yesterday, his call for new artistic forms expressed nothing more than the emotional acne of adolescence.
I still don’t think much of Konstantin, but I do see that we are very much in the middle of developing new forms. There’s no need to wish for them; they’re taking shape as we write.
I touched yesterday on the problem of fiction and nonfiction. What is the difference, anyway? It seems to depend on the context. In a New York Times news story, we expect that every statement refers to a documented actuality: this happened here, and that person said or did that. An incidental indicator of a news story’s veracity is its clunkiness. It takes a while for all the actualities that are involved whenever something happens to sort themselves out. And the process by which they do sort themselves out — a process that takes place in our minds — is the same process that enables novelists to create their fictions. A magazine article about an event, written weeks or months later, with plenty of time for reflection and consideration, is already halfway to fiction.
History is the story that we tell ourselves about what happened, and the story changes over time. Most people don’t read enough history, over a long period of time, to realize that history has its fashions just like everything else. History has its own history. Now, the vernacular view of shifts in historical accounts is that history written today is better than older histories; historians are always working hard to get things right. So today’s history is true, it is nonfiction. But this is a short-sighted simplification. It is true that historians endeavor to stick to actualities. But the weight that they assign to different actualities, the emphasis that they place on certain parts of the story, does not reflect an actuality. It cannot. The most important kind of statement that history makes — this is more important than that — is an actuality only in the sense that the judgment took place in someone’s mind.
(An interesting difference between history and fiction occurs to me. In a novel, a character might suddenly realize that he has fallen in love. The historian will confine himself to the time and place of the wedding — with perhaps a word or two about the bride.)
The tension between fact and fiction is mirrored in another avenue of literature. Along this avenue, as we might say, the fronts of the houses present those rational judgments about the world to which we give the names criticism and autobiography, while the more relaxed rear ends deal in feelings and memoir. Until very recently, each end had a strong gender association, which I hope I don’t need to spell out. These days, a lot of street-fronts are being remodeled to look more like memoirs. It used to be absolutely forbidden for a critic to interject a note of personal feeling. Feelings were thought to be an unmanly weakness, and an impertinence as well. Nobody was interested in anybody else’s feelings! But now we understand that feelings are where everything begins with us.
We also understand — see my entry on World Theory — that nothing in the world is permanent without us. The Japanese rebuild the temple at Nara at regular intervals, and regard it as over a thousand years old. The Tour Eiffel and the Empire State Building look like they’re built to last forever, but neither would survive a century of absolute neglect. The mere existence of the greatest book in the world, whatever you think that might be, depends on its readers’ ability to convince other people to read it. For some reason, a lot of men have trouble accepting this contingency. They want to believe that, once a thing is made, whether it’s a skyscraper or a novel, it’s “out there in the world,” leading its own life, forever. This might tell us why such men would make terrible mothers, but I still can’t quite explain it. Why do some men seem happiest when they’re done with something?
Feelings are no longer irrelevant or impertinent. “Objectivity” is a fairy tale. The value of a piece of criticism doesn’t lie as much in the rigor of its logical analysis as it does in the emotional responses that inspired it. I don’t want to read criticism that hides this essential information; I want to know how the critic feels. Criticism must therefore be infused with memoir.
For example, I don’t think that I should have engaged so deeply with Edward Mendelson’s views on the work and character of William Maxwell if I had not rather sloppily mistaken him for Daniel Mendelsohn. I admire Daniel Mendelsohn, although I never fully agree with him. I read and enjoy his pieces knowing that I am not going to agree with a lot of what he says. So it was not alarming to find that I disagreed with much of what Edward Mendelson had to say. And it made perfect sense that Mendelson held Maxwell’s fables in high esteem; I should expect Mendelsohn to do the same. I used to do the same thing myself. (I still love the fables, but I don’t want to write about them until I’ve read them all, re-reading the ones that I love in the process.)
It did surprise me that the tone of Mendelson’s piece was unkind — until I woke up to the fact that it wasn’t by Mendelsohn.
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In the last two or three years, I have ever more consciously striven to write entries that blend memoir and criticism as seamlessly as I can. This means that many entries are too teachy-preachy for readers who like stories, while others are too ephemeral for readers who are discomfited by the personal. It’s a good thing that I’m used to feeling like Edith Wharton — too fashionable for Boston, too intellectual for New York.
I don’t expect to change readers’ minds, but I do hope to leave behind an example.