(My somewhat oblique take on the writer’s life, success, and freedom, which promptly was rejected by the editors of the anthology for which it had been solicited. Oh, well -- anyway, I like it.)
Recently, a figure apparently based on me served as the villain of another writer’s memoir (and served quite well, I’m sort of perversely happy to add). This memoir ostensibly is about its author’s various failures -- in part about his failures as a creative artist -- and his attempts to overcome them. But in fact the book is the reification of its author’s desire to become a successful author, a figure not at the fringe where most of us are, but directly at the center, a position he evidently considers his due. The book both frankly confesses to this desire (it is unintentionally the only true confession the book contains) and is an energetic and cynical attempt to achieve it.
No one who’s reviewed the book has identified this reflexive peculiarity, which I find discouraging, not only because I have an interest in seeing its many self-impugning qualities brought to light but also because this oversight makes it clear to me that it has become so ordinary for writers -- that is, so-called literary writers -- to fabricate books that anticipate the desires of a known audience that their own unselfconsciousness of the practice is matched by that of their reviewers (usually also “literary writers”). By “known” I refer to the readers about whom we can safely assume that they are uninterested in the sheer literary goals of the authors they read.
There are lots of different ways to serve these readers, mostly by being sure to provide what one recent grad student of mine frequently referred to, usually when expressing disappointment in yet another frustrating novel that I’d made the class read, as a “payoff.” This payoff generally seems to consist of having one’s expectations met -- correct and just when completing a financial transaction, which is to my mind a reasonable characterization of the exchange that takes place when the average reader invests time and money in the average memoir, the sort of book Maurice Blanchot means when he writes that it “is presented as a stoutly woven web of determined significations, as an entity made up of real affirmations: before it is read by anyone, the nonliterary book has already been read by everyone, and it is this preliminary reading that guarantees it a secure existence.”
I harp on the subject of the contemporary memoir because it seems to me that there isn’t much point in drawing a distinction between it and the contemporary “literary novel”[1] : they’re both fiction, both rely on the most familiar conventions of realism, and it likewise seems to me that the contemporary memoir -- with its special claims to a peculiar kind of truth consisting of the epistemological blending of the somewhat verifiable with a sentimental metaphysics -- is the apotheosis of a realist impulse which is, with rare exceptions, the only one permitted those who wish to be successful authors.
I’m at a loss to understand how the truth can be confined in its expression or its form to the utterly familiar, utterly artificial, and, in a sense, utterly preordained tropes of the realist narrative; truly, I’m at a loss to understand how the truth can be required to be confined at all, particularly if the truth, as my friend the memoirist says on the very first page of his book, “is what you need.” This kind of truth seems to me to be at best particularly disposable, or mild. And a mild truth, or an axiomatic truth, requires no more than a mild and inoffensive form to hold a flattering mirror up to its reader. You can draw your own political and social inferences. As Coetzee writes in Disgrace, the story that tells this kind of truth “unrolls without shadows.” Its purveyor avoids inducing discomfiture or frustration in his or her readers. There is a “payoff.”
For the writer, who finds him- or herself trapped behind a confining mask, there’s a cost. He or she ceases to be an artist and becomes an entertainer, whose job it is to deliver “payoffs” to those paying to be entertained. If one had started out seeking freedom, one receives instead -- if one is lucky -- success, and while success has its many consolations it is not freedom, which has, to be sure, fewer consolations. As Moran says in Molloy, “it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow in its reasonings and decrees. But I follow it more the less, more or less, I follow it in this sense, that I do what it tells me. And I do not think there are many voices of which as much may be said. And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands. And when it ceases, leaving me in doubt and darkness, I shall wait for it to come back, and do nothing, even though the whole world, through the channel of its innumerable authorities speaking with one accord, should enjoin upon me this and that, under pain of unspeakable punishments.” But the memory of the work “brought scrupulously to a close” under the direction of that voice will help him “to endure the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom.”
[1] I feel reasonably confident in assuming that Blanchot would classify most of today’s “literary novels” as “nonliterary” in the sense that he intends.
Return to The Bottom Drawer
Recently, a figure apparently based on me served as the villain of another writer’s memoir (and served quite well, I’m sort of perversely happy to add). This memoir ostensibly is about its author’s various failures -- in part about his failures as a creative artist -- and his attempts to overcome them. But in fact the book is the reification of its author’s desire to become a successful author, a figure not at the fringe where most of us are, but directly at the center, a position he evidently considers his due. The book both frankly confesses to this desire (it is unintentionally the only true confession the book contains) and is an energetic and cynical attempt to achieve it.
No one who’s reviewed the book has identified this reflexive peculiarity, which I find discouraging, not only because I have an interest in seeing its many self-impugning qualities brought to light but also because this oversight makes it clear to me that it has become so ordinary for writers -- that is, so-called literary writers -- to fabricate books that anticipate the desires of a known audience that their own unselfconsciousness of the practice is matched by that of their reviewers (usually also “literary writers”). By “known” I refer to the readers about whom we can safely assume that they are uninterested in the sheer literary goals of the authors they read.
There are lots of different ways to serve these readers, mostly by being sure to provide what one recent grad student of mine frequently referred to, usually when expressing disappointment in yet another frustrating novel that I’d made the class read, as a “payoff.” This payoff generally seems to consist of having one’s expectations met -- correct and just when completing a financial transaction, which is to my mind a reasonable characterization of the exchange that takes place when the average reader invests time and money in the average memoir, the sort of book Maurice Blanchot means when he writes that it “is presented as a stoutly woven web of determined significations, as an entity made up of real affirmations: before it is read by anyone, the nonliterary book has already been read by everyone, and it is this preliminary reading that guarantees it a secure existence.”
I harp on the subject of the contemporary memoir because it seems to me that there isn’t much point in drawing a distinction between it and the contemporary “literary novel”[1] : they’re both fiction, both rely on the most familiar conventions of realism, and it likewise seems to me that the contemporary memoir -- with its special claims to a peculiar kind of truth consisting of the epistemological blending of the somewhat verifiable with a sentimental metaphysics -- is the apotheosis of a realist impulse which is, with rare exceptions, the only one permitted those who wish to be successful authors.
I’m at a loss to understand how the truth can be confined in its expression or its form to the utterly familiar, utterly artificial, and, in a sense, utterly preordained tropes of the realist narrative; truly, I’m at a loss to understand how the truth can be required to be confined at all, particularly if the truth, as my friend the memoirist says on the very first page of his book, “is what you need.” This kind of truth seems to me to be at best particularly disposable, or mild. And a mild truth, or an axiomatic truth, requires no more than a mild and inoffensive form to hold a flattering mirror up to its reader. You can draw your own political and social inferences. As Coetzee writes in Disgrace, the story that tells this kind of truth “unrolls without shadows.” Its purveyor avoids inducing discomfiture or frustration in his or her readers. There is a “payoff.”
For the writer, who finds him- or herself trapped behind a confining mask, there’s a cost. He or she ceases to be an artist and becomes an entertainer, whose job it is to deliver “payoffs” to those paying to be entertained. If one had started out seeking freedom, one receives instead -- if one is lucky -- success, and while success has its many consolations it is not freedom, which has, to be sure, fewer consolations. As Moran says in Molloy, “it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow in its reasonings and decrees. But I follow it more the less, more or less, I follow it in this sense, that I do what it tells me. And I do not think there are many voices of which as much may be said. And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands. And when it ceases, leaving me in doubt and darkness, I shall wait for it to come back, and do nothing, even though the whole world, through the channel of its innumerable authorities speaking with one accord, should enjoin upon me this and that, under pain of unspeakable punishments.” But the memory of the work “brought scrupulously to a close” under the direction of that voice will help him “to endure the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom.”
[1] I feel reasonably confident in assuming that Blanchot would classify most of today’s “literary novels” as “nonliterary” in the sense that he intends.
Return to The Bottom Drawer
