Seeing Through It

John Freeman begins his review of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End by asserting that

A thousand years from now, if future generations turn to contemporary fiction as a window into the past, they will wind up with a rather skewed portrait of America. People, they might surmise, spent very little time in cars, resolved many disputes with violence, almost never slept with their spouse, and, in spite of pulling in regular incomes, never, ever went to work.

Which is precisely why future generations should not read fiction "as a window into the past." And why we should not be reading fiction of the past as a "window" onto the "reality" of the life therein evoked. Only bad writers, writers who think of fiction as a more "dramatic" way of recording history or who imagine themselves as "saying something" about The Way We Live Now, take themselves to be providing a "window" for future readers.

Good fiction is inherently a "skewed portrait," skewed by the writer's particular vision of experience and by that writer's singular way of transforming experience into language and molding both language and experience into aesthetic form. In subject or theme, most good fiction either depicts human situations in extremis, focusing on characters and events that may illustrate more or less universal human predicaments embodied in an exemplary instance but that do not exist primarily to "represent" a specific time (Catch-22, The Tunnel, Sabbath's Theater), or does indeed center on "ordinary" experiences but emphasizes their status as experiences for the characters undergoing them, not their value as emblematic events "capturing" a moment in time. The characters in Stephen Dixon's fiction, for example, do plenty of driving (Interstate is constructed around the act of driving) and are often shown at work (especially in his earlier fiction--Garbage, for example), but I don't think "future generations" will want to see these characters as anything other than the specific creations of Stephen Dixon.

The "window" afforded by the best fiction is always clouded, distorted, self-reflective. For these very reasons, it continues to fascinate. Fiction that pretends to offer a clear view onto the events of the day will never reach those "future generations" except as a moldy sample excavated by some social historian. Thus if Then We Came to the End is intended as a more transparent portal onto Our Times, I probably won't be reading it. Although judging from Freeman's description of the book, I think I already have read it, when, windowless, it was called Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I think there's a reason most historicist studies don't focus on canonical literature: I'm working on Jack London and Silas Weir Mitchell; McCann wrote about pulp novels; Benn Michaels (back when he was an historicist) wrote about Dreiser and Gilman, &c. I don't want to press this point too hard, however, because some of the best historicist work has been on decidedly literary figures like Stein. What makes such work brilliant is the way it distills the ordinary from literary, the way it tracks the artistry to discover what the material being molded is. Granted, a lot of this comes from already having a familiarity with the period in which a work was written.

To follow on the Freeman, while a scholar who only read the Ferris novel might come to a skewed conclusion about contemporary American life. But one who read more than the Ferris -- who dove into the newspaper and magazine archives; who read the popular dross published by mainstream houses; who went back and read blogs and the comments upon them -- such a scholar would know that the average American spent three-fourths of his or her life in a car, slept with his or her spouse with some degree of regularity, &c. The problem with Freeman's assumptions is all too familiar to late Nineteenth Century folk: namely, that he expects every novel to contain the culture in its totality. (Or in miniature, such that the world could, a la Ulysses, be reconstructed from it.) It's an unreasonable expectation on the part of the critic, as well as any scholar who expected any more out of a novel than its author was prepared to offer.

[Mike M.]

I take exception with the comment "Only bad writers, writers who think of fiction as a more 'dramatic' way of recording history or who imagine themselves as 'saying something' about The Way We Live Now, take themselves to be providing a 'window' for future readers."
Considering that this is what many fine writers, Stendhal comes to mind, have set out to do. Why should writers of fiction not try to convey the world they live in? This doesn't mean that every author should attempt to encompass the entirety of modern civilization into their work, but as you say every novel offers a window from which to view the world, and it will inevitably be skewed, but why shouldn't future generations read modern novels to understand how our world operates? While we may not learn the ins and outs of, say, Victorian society from Dickens or Eliot we still learn enough to inhabit (to some extent) the mindset of the period.
This turned into more of a rant than I'd wanted, but I still say that you shouldn't discredit writers who attempt to describe their world, just as you shouldn't shrug off those who create characters that couldn't exist beyond the realms of the imagination. At least, that's how I see it.