Just finished reading Mark Athitakis’s energizing review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and found it unexpectedly relevant to my last post. In answer to the question, whither contemporary fiction?, Athitakis gets this out of Shields:
The mash-up, the collage, the remix—this is the stuff of the future, and this is the stuff that Shields’ great fiction of the future must embrace. More Davis and Sorrentino, less Langer and Franzen. It will be brief, it won’t pretend to hide the author, and in its formal invention it will resist all efforts to assimiliate it.
So, there we are: back at begging/borrowing/stealing our material, either from other writers or from our own lives.
The thing is, philosophically, I’m pretty much behind this idea. But as a writer? I just can’t think of that much I really want to steal. In fact, I’ve tried to insert other writers’ words into my prose, but it always stands out, looking awkward — it just doesn’t flow right with the other stuff, the stuff I’ve actually written (probably to the credit of these other authors). Is it hopelessly regressive of me to even care about things like “flow”? Maybe I should boldly flaunt the seams in my writing! But I don’t know — although I’m sure it can be well done, I don’t really find anything inherently interesting about doing that.
And then there’s the other angle, the mixing of memoir and fiction to gloriously postmodern effect. Once again, I appreciate the idea, and I’ve seen it done marvelously well (I recently read Lauren Slater’s maybe-memoir, Lying, for class and was pretty much blown away). But as a writer… God, I’m just not all that interested in my own damn life (and so I hardly expect anyone else to be). Except for little slivers here and there, it’s not a story I feel compelled to tell, even with a fictional gloss over it.
So where does that leave us, as writers? I don’t want to write what Athitakis calls “more hackneyed novels with stale plots,” and anyway, I’m not hopelessly devoted to traditional narrative. But how do you write a non-traditional narrative that doesn’t sound just like all the other non-traditional narratives of your day? How do we make it exciting, and not just a gimmick? And just how exciting and original is this concept, anyway? Didn’t Joyce and the other modernists employ pretty similar techniques? In almost a century, haven’t we come up with any new tricks? If what we want is to create something fresh and new, is borrowing the best way to do that?
Um, yeah. I don’t know. But as I try to plot out my next novel, these are the questions that stress me out.
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