On being noticeable and impolite

By Jeff Bursey

Rabindranath Maharaj recently made eye-catching and peculiar statements that appeared on-line September 28^th in Quill & Quire’s Quillblog. In his role as a juror for the Writers’ Trust awards, he reflected on the just-released short list with Stuart Woods, who quotes him as saying:

I believe what these writers have done and what they’re doing is they’re very quietly innovative without drawing attention to their innovation. And they’re innovative in the sense that their books are more accessible – it’s more reader-friendly in many ways…. The elements of good storytelling are still there. (“Writers’ Trust shortlist trumpets unsung Canadian talent”)

What I want to dwell on are the layers of meaning in those judgments.

At the best of times (whenever they were), innovative writers—often called experimental, though a more accurate term might be exploratory—have had a hard time getting published. They write the sorts of things Writers’ Digest ignores, and which annoy conservative critics and book reviewers. Their style and manner of presentation draws attention. One can list William Gaddis, David Markson, Joseph McElroy and Gilbert Sorrentino as exemplars of that sort of fiction. They are all relatively under-read, but their difficult fictions—what others might term challenging works—have, after some time, become easier to understand. But it’s important to emphasize that such writers, due to their small number, limited press run, and limited publicity, have never posed a threat to the mainstream. It’s easy to find books by commercially successful authors like Stephen King, Ken Harvey, and Jonathan Franzen, or J.K Rowling, Stephenie Meyer and Jodi Picoult (some of these, due to their massive effect on the book market, might be seen as exemplars of “conglomerature”); it’s harder to find books by Harry Mathews, Alexandra Chasin, and A.D. Jameson. Raise as much noise as they want, they’re not going to be seen in an airport bookstore. Whereas Margaret Atwood and other brand names garner lots of leeway in sentiment and space in the press no matter if what comes out is good or bad, novels that aren’t mainstream are received in a less friendly way, sometimes seen not as art but an affront.

When Maharaj states his preference for reader-friendly books, then, that can be seen as a chiding dismissal of those who aim to write something unusual. Here I’ll have to speak from personal experience. My book, Verbatim: A Novel, set in a fictional Canadian legislature, is told in lists of politicians, letters between bureaucrats, and political debates, without a narrator in sight, and it lacks descriptions of the weary, brutal fisherfolk/hunters who populate Atlantic Canadian fiction, talking animals, or children doing cartwheels on the commons during a peaceful summer’s day that will, of course, end grimly. I am someone who, in this case, is trying to be innovative, and showily so. There’s no point in being coy about that. (Whether or not what I do is good is a separate matter that readers will decide for themselves.)

Canadians are considered very polite. From Maharaj’s remarks, it’s as if he thinks Canadian literary fiction is filled with too much brashness. Admittedly, as some people do like salt, I do like some rudeness (preferring Henry Miller, Blaise Cendrars, and Wyndham Lewis to Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Virginia Woolf), but what Maharaj is saying is that innovative Canadian writers who are too upfront and pushy about their work should dial it all down, on the way to knocking it off entirely.

That sort of blinkered, divisive view of writing has been addressed many times. One of the best examinations of that division of opinion comes from Gabriel Josipovici, a novelist, playwright and non-fiction writer, in an essay titled “Conclusion: From the Other Side of the Fence, or True Confessions of an Experimentalist” (The Mirror of Criticism: Selected Reviews 1977-1982). It begins: “It is a shock to any artist who has only thought of getting things ‘right,’ of pinning down that elusive feeling which is the source and end of all creative activity, to wake up one morning and find himself labelled ‘experimental.’” He further writes that reviews of two of his books

seemed to share the same assumptions: there are writers and there are experimental writers; the ‘experimental’ is a sub-branch of fiction, rather like teenage romances or science fiction perhaps, but differing from them in being specifically highbrow, and, like other highbrow activities, such as abstract painting and classical music, it is totally unconnected with the real world; however, we should tolerate this for the health of art (and to show how tolerant we are).

Clearly, we’ve not moved on very far from the time of this collection (1983), and we may very well have moved backwards. We are in straitened times, with the arts under attack from many directions and forces. Maharaj’s remarks could be regarded as dumb, idle chit-chat were he not an award-winning writer respected for his novels and short stories, and also a teacher of writing who has the opportunity to shape and influence future writers. When such a figure starts dictating what’s reader-friendly and casts aside what’s writerly, then literary fiction has a problem, and possibly an enemy.

Novelists, playwrights, short story writers and poets of every kind are unified in at least one essential way: within the communicative act that is the piece of fiction or the villanelle resides what we want to say and how we want to say it. It’s mostly how things are said that creates barriers. One editor criticized Verbatim: A Novel by saying that nothing happened. The book contains much on economic conditions in the 1990s, environmental disasters, scandals, parliamentary bickering, the corroding of our system of government, etc. These elements didn’t register. The editor had written a few books, but my work of literary fiction didn’t have much in the way of story. William Gass has a good response to this: “Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about” (“Finding a Form,” in the identically named essay collection Finding a Form). Filled with preconceptions about what novels ought to do—tell a tale as efficiently and thrillingly as possible, then get the hell out–the editor could not make out the shape of the book in front of her.

“And they’re innovative in the sense that their books are more accessible…” If Maharaj is saying what I think he is, then the only innovation he can stand to see is that which makes books accessible, not the kind that makes books artworks that live down through the centuries. Does Maharaj fear that Canadian readers are threatened by a horde of inscrutable works?

Sometimes I come across the belief that experimental/exploratory fiction is made difficult by authors out of orneriness, or excessive cleverness, and that what’s present in the works of, for example, Joseph McElroy could have been conveyed in a more reader-friendly way, as if the style and structure got in the way of the only important thing: the story. Maharaj tries to assure any potential readers of fiction that the books on the shortlist don’t deny them that old, preserved cherry: “The elements of good storytelling are still there.” Because everyone knows that innovative writers like John Barth can’t be trusted to tell a story well, and they certainly don’t do it straight. “Even this crew,” he seems to be saying, “barely innovative as they are—innovative-lite!—they can still keep you seated around the campfire. Trust me.” The ebook and big box stores aren’t going to kill printed literary fiction alone; judges like this are hand-in-hand with them.

A serious writer ought to buck the order of things, or approach them slant. Getting rid of the primacy of story isn’t hard; it just goes against what most of us were taught. Ask yourself, when about to write: Does the world need to hear about another male character, aged thirty-three, who goes through trials and tribulations? Or to read any more multi-generational stories of a family, a grand home, a village, a nation, or follow a battered hat that’s crowned the heads of historical personages? If the answer is yes, then your telling better be singular.

I see in Maharaj’s remarks an unspoken preference for conservative ways of expressing thoughts, which over time and with practice will transform into conservative thoughts. Innovation will then be an unwelcome presence, a Banquo, in the republic of letters. Stepping away from the regular formulas often alarms people who think that act means a writer is not being realistic (as if we all could agree on what’s real). If writers are encouraged to create versions of the world in whatever fashion they choose—and some versions may take work to decipher—then there can only be anarchy. Writing against the order—against bland politeness and quietness of approach—is now to be reader-unfriendly.

But if what one writes is something that is true to what one thinks and feels, and results in work that is new, and shows independence of thought, and skill, is this a shameful deed? Should writers who do that be classed as showy, impolite, and not worthy of recognition? The type of achievement in an art work that I’m talking about occasionally does ask of a reader that he or she do some work to get the most out of a novel or poem or whatever it might be. Art does this all the time. If people don’t want to read intensively, they can always turn to television.

We live (have always lived) in stressful times. People will respond as they choose, and so there is going to be indignation, rudeness, and other unseemly-seeming feelings in Canada’s literary fiction. Those are legitimate feelings, and they have their place on a spectrum of responses to the world around us. For those who want good manners, there’s no shortage of books to choose from. I don’t deny the mainstream authors their audience. However, others will seek to create new work in new forms, and if we’re viewed as rude threats, that’s not a bad thing.