Realism ain't Real

I've never wanted to write a Great American Novel. Such an undertaking presupposes, let's call it, a micronostalgia for a very compressed period of human time. If our species truly has evolved over millions of years, then the Great American Novel author is a bit of a dead fly in the ointment of time. And a desire to pontificate with purpled prose, for example, the doldrums of a dustbowl wheat farmer, just seems a little silly to me. That book too will turn to dust.

Novel writing has not been around that long either. And the realism comprising the voice of the Great American Novel - or any other so-called literary novel - is a fantasy, a cultural collusion.

The deft turning of phrases is our human birdsong at its best.

It is on my mind quite a lot these days as I spend many hours editing storytelling and getting a little too close to the sound, not just of my own voice, but that weird intersection between the sounds and their meaning.

These sounds comprise the uniquely haunting, human ability to generate storytelling. Once the sounds and shapes of written language are pared down to the stick of realism, however, this lathed language becomes mistaken for the thing that it is trying to describe. And yet, this stick language is what commands the big literary prizes. I don't want to go Plato's cave on you all, but a realistic novel is a bit like a shadow on the wall, and a realistic novel prize is another shadow applauding the shadow play.

Right now Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is on my to be read list not because I'm a fan of realism, but because the book is essentially an archeological artifact, written by someone probably keenly or obtusely ignorant of quantum physics. And probably ignorant of the chemical composition of paper upon which a realistic narrative floats like sticks on a sea.

Carbon Web

I wrote the previous paragraphs last night. This morning I read that E. L. Doctorow has passed, and I read further from The New York Times,

“Someone said to me once that my books can be arranged in rough chronological order to indicate one man’s sense of 120 years of American life,” Mr. Doctorow said on the publication of “City of God.”

A reference to an early, fantastical work also crops up:

His second book, “Big as Life” (1966), was also drawn from genre fiction. A peculiar fantasy — science fiction, sort of — the novel is about New Yorkers who are thrown together one morning when, without explanation, two human giants are found standing, seemingly immobile, in the lower Hudson River. An unsuccessful book — “Unquestionably it’s the worst I’ve done,” Mr. Doctorow said in 1980, and would have no reason to change his mind later — it remains his only novel no longer in print.

And from his canon, that is the book I would like to read. Realism ignores how fantastical reality is. We are, last I checked, inexplicably spinning around in a mobius strip of space-time, made of what we call carbon, eating carbon, writing with carbon on carbon.

Literary realism strips awe from existence.

Genre, on the other hand, incites awe. That's nothing to be embarrassed about. Sharknado 3 debuts tonight on the Syfy channel, but I won't be able to watch it because I'll be out on the Hudson, where no doubt giants from some other space-time continuum will be bathing near the Statue of Liberty.

We live in a universe ebullient with imagination, and one where literary realism ain't real.

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