What a Work of Fiction is For

Rohan Maitzen has posted on her blog an extended discussion of her experience reading Martin Amis's Money with her book club. Rohan says she disliked the novel because of its morally odious narrator, but also describes the character as "memorable," with a "distinctive and unforgettable voice." She as well admits the novel is "sometimes LOL funny" and that Amis's style is at times "virtuosic."

 

Pretty clearly Rohan (and her book club colleagues) could not get past the intrinsic assumption that a fictional character is to be regarded as a person, to whom we respond in the same way as we would an actual person--we wouldn't want to know the protagonist of Money in real life, so why should we put up with him in this novel? This is an assumption I have never shared, and in this case it has led Rohan as a reader to overlook what she has herself identified as the novel's aesthetic virtues. Rohan's reaction to Amis's novel suggests to me that we have fundamentally different expectations of what a work of fiction is for.

 

For me, a work of fiction is a verbal fabrication that has as its goal the creation of artistic effects precisely like a "distinctive voice" or an act of sustained comedy. Rohan concedes that Amis wants us to dislike his narrator, so this, too, might be considered an artistic achievement in Money. If we do dislike this character, Amis has succeeded in setting up a reading experience in which we will have to wrestle with the moral complexity of reading about him, anyway.

 

I will go out on a limb here and say that works of fiction, far from being "empathy machines" by which we come to be closer to "other people," should be a space in which we discard our ordinary concerns for actual people altogether. We might instead contemplate the way in which "character" is simply another device the writer may use to take us into a verbal world not just of moral complexity but one that doesn't operate by ordinary moral principles at all. This is a world where imagination and "virtuosity" with language are the supreme values, although of course the artistic vision expressed by the writer might raise all sorts of questions that might have all sorts of moral implications when we return to the world "outside the text."

 

Rohan suggests there is an inherent difference between women readers of a writer like Amis and his more numerous male readers. But I think this again is really the difference between regarding characters in a work of fiction as persons and considering them the effects of language. I certainly don't believe only male readers such as myself (and I am no doubt in a minority of male readers in my own assumptions about reading) would want to think about literary works in this latter way. And unquestionably many male readers of Martin Amis are themselves responding to Amis's work for features beyond its implications for an aesthetic theory of fiction. (I should also say that, although I do like Money, I am not otherwise a particular enthusiast for Amis's fiction.)

 

If we should respond to fictional characters as if they are real people, what is the point of creating fictional characters at all? Just tell me about some real people you admire and maybe I will admire them too.

Comments

[Rohan Maitzen]

We do disagree I know - but I think your summary of my approach is somewhat reductive! I did not overlook the novel’s aesthetic or crafted or skilled aspects, for one thing, as your quotations show. But for me it matters what this kind of skill is used for. I am much influenced by Wayne Booth, who explores the ways style itself (including narration and point of view) has ethical implications. This is not about confusing fictional people for real people but about considering the whole experience on offer by a novel. It just can’t be the case that it doesn’t matter at all what the artful sentences say or do - or so I think.

[Dan Green]

Although ultimately what the sentences say and do is help build a portrait of a character who is, as you yourself recognize, execrable, but deliberately if artfully so. The effect is similar to what Nabokov does in Lolita (although I would not claim that Amis rises to Nabokov's level as a stylist).

Would you say that the ethical implications of the "whole experience" are always of primary importance to you, over and above a novel's aesthetic value? In Money, are you ultimately objecting to John Self, the narrator/protagonist, or to the "bad boy" smirk you detect in Martin Amis the author?

[Ika]

I think the framing here around "mistaking characters for real people" isn't the most helpful one for understanding the objections to MONEY that I see in Rohan's post. For me, her account wasn't oriented around characters as such, but around the way the book positions and addresses its reader.

Here is my theory of reading!

Books are angled towards a particular kind of reader (the "implied" or "mock" reader). I think of this as a bit like that anamorphic skull in Holbein's Ambassadors - you can look at the painting from any angle you choose, but you'll miss something that's clearly "there" in the painting if you don't look from the angle where the skull becomes visible. Similarly, books create a sort of perspectival position for their readers, from which their aesthetic (and other) qualities are best viewed. (Charles Altieri, in Towards an Aesthetic of the Affects, would say that this is in fact an inherent part of their aesthetic qualities and their capacity to almost literally "move" us, giving us a new orientation towards the world and shifting us out of our everyday positions and thought patterns.)

The problem comes when the best orientation or position for reading a book is one that a real-life reader *doesn't want to* take up, for ethical (or other) reasons.

Wayne Booth (who Rohan mentioned in her follow-up to her blog post) in fact defines a bad book as one "in whose mock reader we discover a person we refuse to become". I don't see Rohan as thinking that John Self is a real person, but as refusing to become someone (even temporarily) who thinks attempted rape is funny. (Booth's argument resonates with Judith Fetterley's in The Resistant Reader, about refusing to be "immasculated" as a reader - refusing to agree to read from the perspective of a male implied reader.)

[Dan Green]

The "refusing to become someone who thnks X is funny" (or "X is beautiful" or "X is politically acceptable" or "x is morally permissible"--choose your Xes) would remove about half of world literature from the reading list, wouldn't it?