“Why can’t the books we come across at thirty, or forty, or fifty, affect us in quite the same way as the book about the children who were turned into flying mice that we read when we were eight?”
I was reading this post by Ben Greenman over at Bookslut, and for some reason I glanced over at a calendar, and I realized that aside from a couple short shorts, I hadn’t written a god damned creative thing in six months. I felt guilty because I was becoming yet another person with a degree in writing who doesn’t write, but I didn’t feel sad. I felt relief that I hadn’t spent all that time working on the MFA-type rule-driven (No adverbs on pain of death!) fiction I’ve been writing but that I really, if I’m honest with myself, have little interest in.
Last week, I went to the Walt Disney Museum here in San Francisco. On the one hand, it was a terrifying experience: room after room devoted to celebrating the man, his McCarthyism on display without any real sense that the company now regrets it. It was like walking into the indoctrination chamber of a particularly wealthy cult.
But at some point, as I was watching this Christmas movie where he asked Tinkerbell to make it snow in LA, I remembered how I would watch Fantasia over and over as a child, not leaving the couch for hours. And it was then I finally admitted to myself why Disney, George Lukas, JK Rowling, and even John Grisham and Danielle Steele were to be envied not for their success but for something else: These people, like so many classic writers, remembered that this storytelling business was supposed to be fun, and they cast no aspersions on those who wanted to be taken to magical worlds.
So when did so many literary writers just hand this fun part of storytelling over to the Disneys of the world? Lev Grossman has an interesting take on this. Whatever the reason, I can’t tell you how many professors and writers I’ve spoken to who have said things like, “I can’t remember the last time I read for pleasure,” or “There’s two kinds of readers: those who read to escape and those who read to interact with the world.”
To which I say, “Why are you making your life so hard?” I can see why people in academia might think they need to make their work “serious” to satisfy their department chairs. But I counter with the thought that losing myself is serious business. I want to lose myself in stories, not to escape but because that’s the state where I’m most receptive to learning new things. Not in the sense that I could write a paper on what I learn, but in the sense that like a child, I’m rewiring my brain with the help of a new world, which is in a sense a new lens. And as a reader, as an adult, I want to lose myself in the hands of someone I respect, a literary author. Not Walt Disney or Danielle Steele.
In his Rumpus Book Club interview, Jonathan Franzen said, “… I want the writing to be an invisible medium of writer-to-reader transmission.” I love Franzen, but didn’t so many classic books have visible, beautiful sentences that still allowed readers to be lost in a story? Why can’t they now? Maybe that’s what this GIANT post about the end of lyric writing in America is dealing with. I’m not asking literary writers to become Disney; I don’t want that. Instead, they can do something new, something better. They can create worlds that leave me awestruck and feeling like I’ve gained a little bit of wisdom when I’m done with them.
So I went to the bookstore and bought AS Byatt and Jonathan Lethem and David Mitchell and others who at least I think accomplish this and I’m going into my room to get lost for awhile. Hopefully when I come out in the New Year, I’ll want to make worlds again.
Note: There’s a whole field of research on “ludic reading,” which I didn’t go into because this is long enough, but there’s a handy write-up here.
10 responses
My initial thought after reading the links is that I don’t think it’s a question of lyricism or no lyricism. You can write any kind of fiction with lyrical touches that can still be fun to read. I think it has more to do with whether the author has affection for both the characters and the audience. Been thinking a lot about story first and foremost as I lay out the next novel.
Exactly! It shouldn’t be an either/or question.
I’m glad you mentioned David Mitchell. Thousand Autumns was a damn fun read.
I don’t know that people are writing so-called “dull” plotless prose to please their chairs, though. I suspect it has more to do with contemporary American life. If we insist our writers stick to strict notions of social realism, we’re going to be caught reading a litany of dull novels: I’d venture a majority of writers are kind of bored with modern life.
Actually, let me amend that.
Maybe b/c we spend so many hours entertaining ourselves with narrative (books, movies, TV, etc.), we feel like we’ve Seen/Read It All. Works like Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” gave readers of that period a new experience. But since I watch Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, I already know (or rather lamely assume I know) what the ocean is like, more or less.
In other words, I think to “get lost,” we need writing that takes us to the New…which is a bit thorny, since even a sixth-grader knows what the surface of Mars looks like.
Not to say that it’s impossible: it just takes writers who are bold enough to create, to invent, to bring us poor reading bastards to the New.
Amen to this. I’ve struggled with this too and you articulate it so well. I don’t care for fantasy or genre fiction, but I read literary fiction the way you seem to; I want total immersion. And these days reading a novel seems to be about the only time anymore when I can quit pretending to multitask and actually achieve a level of deep engrossing concentration.
Your brain is hot. Now what if you woke up tomorrow and there was a scary holiday grim reaper guy in your room with a scary long sickle in his hand and he said your hand was going to fall off in two months. He just knew it. And you believed him. Would you write then? I betcha you would. Well this is actually not “Melissa” this is a scary grim reaper holiday guy with a sickle in my hand. Son, your hand is going to fall off in one month.
DFW sort of achieved this lyricism + total immersion with Infinte Jest. Although his prose is definitely unique, I think there is a sort of (very modern) lyricism to it. He certainly conjured up a fully realized world.
@John, yes, I’m not saying that most people are writing dull plotless prose. In fact, I think we’re in the midst of a bit of a renaissance; I’m inspired all the time by the amazing writing that’s out there, and I don’t want people to think I’m not. I just think the renaissance would be a hell of a lot more fun — and I’d be writing more — if people would remember to stop taking themselves so seriously and have some fun while they made their worlds.
@melissa Ok, I’ll write!
I agree wholeheartedly with this post! Didn’t we all start reading because books transported us to other realities and gave us a glimpse of what might be? Didn’t we keep reading, and become writers, because there were sentences, paragraphs, whole books that shaped language in beautiful and unexpected ways? I don’t understand why so much “literary writing” that is taken seriously is written in prose that doesn’t sparkle about lives as dull (or, in many cases, duller!) than our own. I want to read books that challenge me with their use of language and with their ideas. I want to read books that show me fabulous variations of what the world could (and very well might!) be (even horrific variations). And yes, I want to have fun, both as a reader and a writer. I think you need both lyricism and story for that. I want to feel that the writer couldn’t get enough of his or her world and its characters. I want to sense that the writer laughed or cried as certain passages came out. I want to taste how much the writer savored those delicious chunks of language as they went onto the page.
Thanks for this – and enjoy the David Mitchell!
Losing myself in a story is what reading is about for me, which is why I lean toward David Mitchell and Jorge Luis Borges, for example. You’re right that we rewire our brains that way, in a new world. Yeah, too many authors take themselves too seriously – and I’ve put down a few of their books this year. It’s probably a better book if the author had fun with the process. (Lead the charge, Seth!)
Seth captured what I’ve been feeling about my own inability to write, Or, rather, lack of desire to write. I could sit down and pur out stories before my MFA but now I am at the “hard stuff,” the revision and rewriting that doesn’t come as easily. So I read. Ever since I started teaching Women’s Literature for seniors, I’ve been on a mission to read all the books I list for their outside reading first semester — my global tour semester. So far I have visited a transvestite mother in Japan, an abused Catholic girl in Nigeria, and an incestual Pilipina familia during the war. I’m exhausted, but it is the only way I like to travel. I don’t have to write a paper about it and I can just escape my own reality for a while. Does this make me a bad scholar? Should I be banned from academia? I hope not. And I hope I can learn to love my own writing again soon.
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