The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. A capital
Negation destroyed him in his tenement
… … … … … … … … … …
It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud:
The assassin flash and rumble … He was denied.
Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?
What place in which to be is not enough
To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place
Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,
As the eye closes … How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality …
— Wallace Stevens
Sometimes, when he got home after twenty or thirty days on tour, promoting his book or advising crime writers and thriller directors or hosted by universities or police departments mired in insoluble murder cases, he gazed at his wife and had the vague impression that he didn’t know her. But he knew her, there could be no doubt about that. Maybe it was the way she walked, the way she moved around the house, the way she invited him to come with her, in the evenings, when it was beginning to get dark, to the supermarket where she always went and where she brought the frozen bread they ate in the mornings, bread that seemed to have come straight from a European oven, not an American microwave. Sometimes, after they’d done the shopping, they would stop, each with his or her cart, in front of a bookstore that carried the paperback edition of his book. His wife would point to it and say: you’re still there. Invariably, he would nod and then they would continue browsing the mall stores. Did he know her or didn’t he? He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real.
Sometimes when I read new fiction, I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it, I mean we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious — of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions — then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there.
Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction? Are the very real terrors of living in other, less functional cultures adequately taken into account when we critique our own? If America is sick, what is the exact nature of the illness?
At what point does a real story told in a fictional manner become subject to the rules of narrative? One would think that if the story is good enough to be fictionalized and told, it can only be for two reasons:
1) The story already exists in this paradigm. It meets the needs of character development, of plot and climax, and ultimately becomes something more than fictional gestalt: its actual reality brings it a sense of gravitas that takes the story beyond the capabilities of pure fiction.
2) The story brings with it a moral necessity to be told. Example: What Is the What, by Dave Eggers, following the painful life and growth of Valentino Achak Deng. Being one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, his story is a story that needs to be told.
The introduction, by Deng, contained this thought which struck me as unusual only after I finished the novel:
Because I was not a writer, I asked Mary to put me in touch with an author to write my biography […] It should be known to the readers that I was very young when some of the events in the book took place, as as a result we simply had to pronounce What Is the What a novel. I could not, for example, recount some conversations that took place seventeen years ago…
(emphasis mine)
The moral necessity exists for this story to be told, but after 300 pages, I found myself dragging through what remained of the book. The first part of the book, the part where it is admitted that the most fictionalization occurred, was the part where Eggers shone as an writer. But where it became less fiction and more biography is the part where I began to wonder about the struggle Eggers must have faced between acting as a biographer and as a novelist.
What I wonder (and have wondered often with other novels based upon fact), then, is this: where is the catharsis, where is the ultimate goal of fiction and tragedy left to go in a story that must be rooted in fact with its conclusions (if we choose to classify the novel as a tragedy—Deng’s life since has been one of only success and wonder in the real world since this story has been told)? We, as the reader, cannot hope that the “characters” as we have come to have known them will suffer a tragic fate for our own growth and satisfaction without violating the story’s implicit moral mandate—in fact, we seem to cheapen our own humanity by doing so.
With the seeming failure of this novel, we suffer in a different and cheap way, wishing for life written poetically and with compassion, to teach us lessons other than the same we can read in a well-written article chronicling those with whom we share this torn and ragged earth. At the end of the novel, I yearned for the same lyricism and beauty that shone through in Eggers’ early writing, and knew it would not be found. The story was no longer in any terms his to tell. Yet, a strictly historical and sympathetic book, Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa, accomplished more in terms of stoking my own reaction to the stories of the Africa’s painful self-realization than this partial-fictionalization that I was presented.
Has this then failed as a novel, or have I simply failed to answer the novel’s implicit question, to create a union of the an imagined and a real world that I simply cannot accept as whole?
