Integrating a great amount of social and political reality into fiction is so obviously potentially invigorating (personally, socially, aesthetically, politically…) that it is hardly worth pointing out, let alone explaining at great length, except for the ideological fixation, the often religiously apolitical or retrograde mindset of otherwise perceptive critics and much of the intellectual culture and corporate culture not least. Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World is a strong example of a fruitful step forward in the creation of badly needed social and political imaginative narrative discourse. Much more by way of criticism could be expanded on in regard to Newman’s continent-crossing epic (and political fiction and criticism in general)—by way of Edward Said not least. Throughout the course of his incredibly valuable literary and political efforts, Edward Said explored in great detail the “urgent conjunction of art and politics” and how “crossing borders” of diverse kinds, including genre, “as well as the representative deprivations and exhilarations of migration has become a major theme in the art of the post-colonial era”:
Much of what was so exciting for four decades about Western modernism and its aftermath—in, say, the elaborate interpretative strategies of critical theory or the self-consciousness of literary and musical forms—seems almost quaintly abstract, desperately Eurocentric today. More reliable now are the reports from the front line where struggles are being fought between domestic tyrants and idealist oppositions, hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, cartographic and archeological descriptions, explorations in mixed forms (essay, video or film, photograph, memoir, story, aphorism) of unhoused exilic experiences.
The major task, then, is to match the new economic and socio-political dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale….
The fact is, we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment….
Surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts.
The émigré consciousness—a mind of winter, in Wallace Steven’s phrase—discovers in its marginality that ‘a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern, is the last hope for thought’.
Furthermore, “The modern history of literary study has been bound up with the development of cultural nationalism, whose aim was first to distinguish the national canon, then to maintain its eminence, authority, and aesthetic autonomy,” so that today more than ever, Said argues, crossing borders in geography, ideology, culture, genre, etc., is of paramount importance to counter the myths, the narrative frauds, often generated by a dominating inegalitarian and unjust system of rule, where there has been and remains:
an absolute requirement for the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between the [ostensibly] civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the [supposed] barbaric brutality of those who for some reason—perhaps defective genes—fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment, so well revealed by America’s Asian wars, for example.
The scathing, appropriate nature of Said’s remarks correlates with Newman’s sharp words at various points in the novel, such as in the opening—“when Reporter asks Defence Minister why for God’s sake Britain doesn’t increase military aid to Columbia”—and though Newman’s and Said’s passages are found in what are thought of as different genres they are both well placed, both aesthetically and affectively powerful, full of insight, reflecting and encapsulating useful compelling experience. I think Wood is correct that hysterical realism cannot make nearly the same claim, that the dominant nature of the most highly acclaimed social novels today do not measure up to these standards of Said and Newman, which are among the highest, most professional standards of contemporary thought, experience, intelligence, and art, revealing some of the most vital elements of human consciousness and culture. Authors have to be willing to cross certain perhaps difficult borders to get there—national, informational, cultural, political—borders put up directly and indirectly by various corporate, academic, governmental, social and cultural ideologies, structures and powers:
It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed “counter, original, spare, strange” [Gerard Manley Hopkins]. From this perspective also, one can see “the complete consort dancing together” contrapuntally…
an exciting, even fascinating, and needed prospect. Reviewing The Fountain at the Center of the World in The Texas Observer, Karen Olsson notes that in Politics and the Novel Irving Howe observes a similar “contrapuntal,” transgressive dynamic in political novels:
Because it exposes the impersonal claims of ideology to the pressures of private emotion, the political novel must always be in a state of internal warfare…. The political novelist…establishes a complex system of intellectual movements, in which his own opinion is one of the most active yet not entirely dominating movers.
In relation to The Fountain at the Center of the World, Olsson adds:
A political novel whose lines are drawn too starkly—say, one in which the characters the novelist agrees with are sympathetic and their political opponents unsympathetic—would be tiresome. Newman has for the most part avoided that trap, though it’s never in doubt which side he’s on. He allows ideology to hit up against its opposition and its own failings.
Howe continues where Olsson left off:
Are we not close here to one of the “secrets” of the novel in general?—I mean the vast respect which the great novelist is ready to offer to the whole idea of opposition, the opposition he needs to allow for in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies.
Even Hatch meets Chano Salgado, and crosses borders to do so. Chano Salgado meets international businessmen in Seattle, and crosses borders to do so. Country meets city, poverty meets wealth—the so often politically opposed and humanly bound. There can scarcely be a more structurally sound set-up (aesthetic basis) or a more political set-up for a novel. Thus, both Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel and Edward Said’s powerful and important critique in Culture and Imperialism seem particularly useful in relation to Robert Newman’s political fiction and other such narratives. Nowhere is it apparent that James Wood or Jonathan Franzen has a better or even equivalent understanding of what is crucially to be found lacking in the ambitious contemporary social and political novel. “Moral responsibilities” along with aesthetic responsibilities are of great concern, but to simply invoke the past achievements of the traditional genre of the novel, its Victorian heights and character-centered demands, is insufficient given the great diversity of such fiction (some of which also represents a type of hysterical realism, parts of Dostoievsky perhaps most notably), just as insufficient, Said notes, as relying too heavily on the modernist and postmodernist approaches to the novel with which the genre continues to struggle. Besides that, we live in another era, though deeply connected to the past.
Calling for less information, especially in social and political novels, about how the world works also seems to me to be a grave mistake, as I’ve demonstrated. The need for such material in novels seems to me to be greater than ever, and so it may be beneficial to reconsider some roots deeper than Victorian times of contemporary novels, as does Lennard J. Davis in “A Social History of Fact and Fiction” (found in Literature and Society (1980), edited by Edward Said). Davis quotes Harry Levin’s remark that “Fiction approximates truth, not by concealing but by exposing artifice.” It may, at least—exposing such artifice as (Noam Chomsky suggests) the “endless webs of deceit” propagated by powerful myth makers that serve to confuse the public (and of course individuals within the public) not infrequently causing them to act against their own values and interests. On factual issues, good independent journalism and study, research, are most useful for clarifying matters. Such knowledge may then be well incorporated—must be increasingly, I argue—into socio-political novels, at least and especially, to most fully reveal human condition and consciousness, to most powerfully, rewardingly, insightfully narrate particular dramatic situations. The novel has long used information for such vital purposes, as Davis has shown:
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century…the word novel seems to have been used interchangeably with the word news—and both were applied freely to writings about true or fictional events… [although by the eighteenth-century] what we have seen is that the novel, at least in semantic terms, seems to have moved from a parity with journalism to a separate identity as a fictional work…[yet] the primacy of centrality of language as representation in eighteenth-century novels [such as Robinson Crusoe] shows us how fictional narrative is actually part of powerful discourse associated with journalism…transcribing reality into language…with the aim of increasing the number of those privy to information, of creating political ideologies, and of embodying social consciousness in the printed word. The nexus between news and novels is a powerful one because it allows us to see that fictional narratives, by participating in a journalistic discourse, are also parts of an information-disseminating system that is by definition social. Raymond Williams has aptly referred to literature as social language and social practice—and I think by showing that novels were part of the journalistic discourse, we can add dimensions to the concept of ‘social language.’
For the eighteenth-century novelists the factual side of public things was not entirely outside their realm of interest. With the advent of the category of the purely fictional and its antithetical category of the purely factual—a division our modern world acknowledges and relies upon—has also come a weakening and an isolation to the novelistic discourse. Fiction is now perceived for the most part as a separate and specialized discourse that has been canonized and valorized as aesthetic, and therefore removed from the world of public events. Even those contemporary novelists who oppose this limitation are working against a general and widely accepted view of fiction. Novels still report on the ideologies of our cultural moment, but they are treated as being part of a discourse that is no longer immanent, no longer energized as is news by its continual impingement on the world of things… This is all the more ironic when we consider that before 1725 the literary and the journalistic elements of newspapers were virtually indistinguishable, serialized novels resting cheek by jowl with fabricated news stories, invented biographies, and the details of continental wars. The price we have paid for pure fiction is that now novels are regarded as supplementary, and authors who openly profess to be writing fictions are treated as people who are in a major sense not telling the truth.
There is no reason, aesthetic or otherwise (and in any event, no total possibility) for novels to consist of “pure fiction,” devoid of factual or journalistic discourse, a mode of non-fiction literature which—as Tom Wolfe famously showed in The New Journalism (1973)—has long since reached lofty aesthetic heights and real power, often quite novelistic in manner. Despite Wolfe’s weaknesses as novelist, which Wood ably documents, in The New Journalism he makes important observations and claims that by at least the latter half of the twentieth century:
the most serious, ambitious and, presumably, talented novelists had abandoned the richest terrain of the novel: namely, society, the social tableau, manners and morals, the whole business of ‘the way we live now,’ in Trollope’s phrase. There is no novelist who will be remembered as the novelist who captured the Sixties in America, or even in New York, in the sense that Thackeray was the chronicler of London in the 1840’s and Balzac was the chronicler of Paris and all of France after the fall of the Empire. Balzac prided himself on being ‘the secretary of French society.’ Most serious American novelists would rather cut their wrists than be known as the ‘secretary of American society,’ and not merely because of ideological considerations. With fable, myth and the sacred office to think about – who wants such a menial role?
That was marvelous for journalists – I can tell you that. The Sixties was one of the most extraordinary decades in American history in terms of manners and morals…
and “in terms of” larger social and political issues as well, which Wolfe apparently does not largely grasp, or with which he otherwise refuses to much involve the novel. But his point, as far as it goes, is important. He notes that historically:
Novelists routinely accepted the unpleasant task of doing reporting, legwork, ‘digging,’ in order to get it just right. That was part of the process of writing novels. Dickens travels to three towns in Yorkshire using a false name and pretending to be looking for a school for the son of a widowed friend – in order to get inside the notorious Yorkshire boarding schools to gather material for Nicholas Nickleby.
Social realists like Dickens and Balzac seemed so often to delight in realism pure and simple that it was held against them throughout their careers. Neither was regarded as a literary artist in his own lifetime (Balzac was not even invited into the French Academy).
Wolfe goes on and continues to emphasize that as far as he is concerned the more realism in art the better, whereas I agree more with Rebecca West’s comment regarding realism in art that “one of the damn thing is ample.” Nevertheless, as I demonstrated in regard to Franzen’s work and even in regard to some of Newman’s novel, too little fact and information can seriously limit or undermine what might otherwise be adequate or more highly compelling and beneficial fiction—on grounds socio-political, aesthetic, private, personal and otherwise.
Serving as a chronicler of Paris or London, or New York or Washington D.C., or Rio de Janeiro, Abuja, or Jakarta is no doubt an important task for both non-fiction and fiction, if well done—especially if emphasizing in fiction, as Wood urges, the role of character and human consciousness, and doing so, to my tastes, by getting at reality to a significant extent via some manner other than wholesale realism. Yet a task that is in every way complimentary to this one, and even more important and more compelling, in my view, is accounting for some major movements and other elements of the “world” (not necessarily mainly or even much geographically) in ways that reveal an understanding of the extraordinarily great quantities and types of social injustice—and the growing threat to life everywhere—and the observed and imagined consciousnesses and conditions of countering such inhumanity. This does involve quite a bit of research or investigative journalism—no matter the mode, realistic or fantastic, of the eventual imaginative work.
It may seem that hysterical realists are greatly concerned with conveying much socio-political information and insight in key relation to exploring human conditions and consciousness but as I’ve touched on here and have explained in more detail in another essay, “Fiction and Social Change,” this is largely not the case. Rather, today’s hysterical realists are the highly acclaimed remnants and descendants of Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Barth and others, those who have written, what was at least once called, “black humor,” of which Robert Alter makes telling observations in “History and the New American Novel” (1975)—in Motives for Fiction (1984)—to a degree that in part not only foreshadow but surpass Wood’s critique of today’s hysterical realism:
If much of this fiction has been obsessed with the war and the terrible revelation of the nature of history embodied in the war, the writers, following the general logic of obsessions, have addressed themselves more to the materials of recurrent fantasy than to their ostensibly objective referents. What I am suggesting is that these novelists, even (or perhaps especially) when their surface details are most insistently historical, have been concerned with something very different from history. Indeed, one frequently finds their adversary impulse toward contemporary reality accompanied by a predisposition to dismiss it impatiently, not to bother with imagining it in any complex way. This quality was shrewdly observed a number of years ago by Burton Feldman in a trenchant critique of black humor (Dissent, March-April 1968): “For all the violence of its assault on American culture, black Humor gives no sense that this enemy is worth attacking. It is only there, a middle-class moonscape; and then Black Humor slips off into fantasy and parody.”
“Middle-class moonscape” is an apt description of the America evoked in the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, where outraged social criticism, sentimental moralism, and science-fiction fantasy form a piquant if not altogether credible ménage a trios. The case of Vonnegut is an instructive one because the comic-strip clarity of his novels lucidly illustrates a conception of history largely shared by Pynchon and Barth, though perhaps partly camouflaged through the complicated elaboration of design in their more ambitious work. Vonnegut’s stylistic, structural, and psychological simplicity, coupled with a genuine verve of narrative inventiveness, makes him the most easily accessible of these writers and thus the most widely read. I would attribute at least some of his popularity, however, to the need of many readers over the past decade for a novelist who could write away history while seeming to write about it.
Despite the weaknesses and limitations of Newman’s The Fountain, his geo-political epic essentially avoids nearly all the weaknesses perceptively and clearly detailed here by Alter. Like today’s hysterical realists, their predecessors, “Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, and Vonnegut…finally [do not take] history very seriously,” Alter concludes, “despite the overwhelming density of actual historical detail in the [novels].” Consequently:
If the end of history is at hand, historical time being only a welter of statistical events, without causal links, all bent on destruction, there is no objective ground for narrative structure; calculated formal design must substitute for anything like development in the novel; and perhaps most critical, there are no criteria for selectivity in the novelist’s shuttle between history and invention…
which often results today in the “Hysterical Realism,” as Wood notes in his aptly titled essay, of, say, work like that of Zadie Smith, “who does not lack for powers of invention. The problem is there is too much of it” creating such a welter of details that “as realism, it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic; and anyway, we are not led toward…consciousness…” but instead are deluged in a sort of haphazard narrative schizophrenia that “is all shiny externality,” the too-often shallow or chaotic or boring juvenilia that Alter finds in Pynchon, et al, and that Wood notes of a passage in Smith’s White Teeth, which:
might stand, microcosmically, for her novel’s larger dilemma of storytelling: on its own, almost any of these details (except perhaps the detail about passing the shit and piss through the cat-flap) might be persuasive. Together, they vandalize each other: the Presbyterian dipsomaniacs and the Mormon aunt make impossible the reality of the fanatical Muslim.
In a remarkably similar observation almost thirty years prior, Robert Alter notes that Pynchon’s highly acclaimed novel Gravity’s Rainbow is also greatly marred, because:
If history is no longer a realm of concatenation, if there are no necessary connections among discrete events and no possibility of a hierarchy of materials ranged along some scale of significance, any associative chain of fantasies, any crotchety hobbyistic interest, any technical fascination with the rendering of odd trivia, can be pursued by the novelist as legitimately as the movement of supposedly “significant” actions. The end of history [in novels], in other words, is a writer’s license for self-indulgence, and Pynchon utilizes that license for page after dreary page of Gravity’s Rainbow as he describes at incredible length varieties of turds in a sewer, varieties of revolting wine-jelly candies in a British cupboard, varieties of bizarre sexual combinations in a very long daisy-chain, and so forth.
The lack of selectivity leads to local flaws; the unwillingness to make differential judgments about historical events results in a larger inadequacy of the novel as a whole.
Later, Alter adds, “I have no quarrel at all with fantasy or flaunted artifice in the novel but only with their deployment in ways that are ultimately self-indulgent and mechanically repetitious, that tend to turn the imaginative energies of fiction into a crackling closed circuit.” Five years later (1980) in “The American Political Novel,” while critiquing Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Alter notes:
What is particularly troubling about this book—and virtually the same could be said about the political novels of Pynchon and Barth—is the astonishing degree of puerility it exhibits, [including an ending that] like much of the sexual and scatological imaginings of Pynchon, Barth, and others, finally directs us more to the psychology of the writer than to any political referent, expressing ultimately a child’s fantasy of a brutal, threatening father, based on paranoid fear and resentment…. One may wonder why so many gifted and serious novelists have chosen to treat politics in such a fundamentally unserious fashion….
One would think that the political novel, perhaps more than other kinds of fiction, requires adult intelligence…. The novel’s great strength as a mode of apprehension is in its grasp of character, and the political novel at its best can show concretely and subtly what politics does to character, what character makes of politics.
Alter critiques Norman Mailer’s attempts to craft effective political fiction and concludes that (as of over three decades ago) he seems to come closest to this in The Deer Park where:
What he confronts centrally for the first time is the special power of American society to mask, sham, evade, forget reality, to seduce its individual members into giving up on engagement in the real world; and the ultimately political nature of his moral imagination is reflected in his effort here to show how this American style of cotton-candy insulation from reality allows a society to perpetrate horror and obscenity at home and abroad with hardly a twinge of conscience.
If only the novel did greatly reveal such reality. Unfortunately, The Deer Park seems to me to be regrettably dry and in any case far more focused on characters’ private lives and relationships than on any public realms within which they exist. Perceptive mid-century critic Maxwell Geismar in American Moderns—From Rebellion to Conformity (1958) also found this novel to be largely if not wholly bankrupt, with weak political gestures. Surely it is the case, as Alter notes contemporaneously, that the non-fiction but highly novelist The Armies of the Night is not only Mailer’s “most fully achieved book” it is also “certainly his most successful engagement of politics through a narrative form” and where political novelists likely have the most to learn from Mailer, though Alter’s view is that “the implications of this achievement for the future of the political novel are at best ambiguous….” Alter reasonably concludes:
It may well be that at this point in history we all need the aid of the novelist’s imagination simply to help us imagine what seems to be more and more unimaginable—the real world in which we have to live, make decisions individually and collectively, and still struggle to shape a livable political future.
Certainly there is no reason why novels (and much else) cannot contribute mightily to the task of creating “a livable political future,” but to do so novelists and their novels will have to dramatically engage, present, and explore how people interact with history in its crucial “social, political, and economic aspects” in far more accomplished detail—and not shrink from what might be thought of as “lumpy” and non-novelistic materials more often associated with non-fiction but that are actually indispensable and comprehensively beneficial to many types of intensely social and political novels—geo-political national and global epics probably especially.
