"Griffith, Nicola - Beauty and Brilliance and Risk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith Nicola)
Nicola on the Web
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 Beauty and Brilliance and
Risk
A
couple of times in the last few months I've seen myself
described in print as a British writer. Each time, it startles
me. I don't know why, exactly, because I don't think of myself
as American--I'm English, born and bred, still a citizen,
still with at least the remnants of a Yorkshire accent--but it
does. Perhaps it's less to do with the nationality than with
the writer part of the description: I haven't had anything
published in this country for six years. In fact I got the
most amazing rejection letter the other day from an editor at
a reputable London literary house. She was turning down my
latest novel, Stay, on the grounds that it wasn't literary
fiction because, and I quote, "while reading, more often than
not, I felt completely caught up in the suspense of the
novel." She then went on to say that she wouldn't be able to
market it as suspense because the plot lacked murders, car
chases, and even identifiable bad guys. In other words, it's
not a suspense novel. But she couldn't position it as a
literary novel because she had a great time reading it.
This attitude, of course, is not peculiar to the
English. When I was trolling for blurbs for The Blue Place in
the US I talked to a literary author known for her southern
novels who said she loved the book but wouldn't give me a
quote. "Why?" I asked. "Because it's obvious you're having too
much fun," she said. "I wouldn't want to encourage that. You
shouldn't be wasting your talent. You should be writing more
serious fiction."
So my question is: how did the definition of literature
become so narrow that we aren't allowed to have fun? When and
why did it become passŽ to actually enjoy reading or writing a
novel?
A
few years ago, the New York Review of Books announced, with
great fanfare, the death of fiction. Fiction, they said, could
not provide the proper moral or intellectual seriousness of
non-fiction. Fiction was mere make believe. Let the masses
indulge in escapism if necessary, but the movers and shakers
of the world should not pollute their intellect with such
frippery. Now what surprised me about all this was how much it
seemed to surprise others. To anyone who has ever paid
attention to the treatment of science fiction it seemed
obvious that this was inevitable: the end result of the
process of privileging reality over imagination which began
long ago.
The urge to divide the world between the good (us,
familiar), and the bad (them, unfamiliar) is a very human
trait. We do it with everything. In the story I tell myself
about this process as it applies to literary criticism (and,
as John Clute reminded us yesterday in the opening plenary,
those of us who aren't academics are absurdly free to make up
what we want without having to provide footnotes), I like to
pretend that critics first began dividing writing into Good
and Bad based on the quality of the prose. (Why? No other
reason than that it comforts me to believe that once, in some
dim distant golden age, good writing mattered.) So we began
with the Good box and the Bad box, based on prose quality but,
human being what they are, that left far too many books in the
Good box. So the critics added a second Bad box to the first,
and in this one they tossed anything containing people,
places, or experiences that those doing the judging could not
possibly become familiar with through experience: fantastical
animals or places or human powers. In other words, all science
fiction and fantasy. Once a process has begun, it's pretty
hard to stop it, and to the first two boxes was added a third,
this time for fiction that was merely unlikely to be or become
familiar. We're talking here of war, survival, heroism and
wickedness, exotic locations and extraordinary events, plus
the kind of characters the average white, upperclass urban
literary critic was unlikely to encounter in every day life.
This meant that the third box got filled with historical
fiction, crime fiction, westerns, plus stories about people of
colour or lesbians or stupid people or prostitutes or
whatever. It wouldn't matter how well-written any of this
stuff in the Bad boxes was--how finely the characters were
delineated, how brilliantly the narrative constructed or the
themes developed--it wouldn't be familiar, it wouldn't match
the critics' reality, and so it wouldn't be Good. This
winnowing continued until all that was left were novels about
the probable and the everyday: mostly straight, mostly white
upperclass urban people in unexciting situations and boring
places. In this way, what became classified as good literature
is claustrophobic fiction that is afraid to leave the
apartment and walk around in the big wide world, afraid to
leave its familiar world and be vulnerable. This is fiction
that eshews plot, because it wouldn't want to risk some critic
saying that it was even slightly unlikely, because that could
be construed as melodrama. The hipper you want your literary
novel to be, the less personal struggle the better, and the
less big emotion, because if you get it even slightly
wr
some critic will call you na•ve or sentimental. In
fact, if any character feels anything at all it's probably
safer to tip the reader an ironic wink; after all, you
wouldn't want them to think you actually believe this
stuff.
So literary fiction cowers behind its urban irony,
growing smaller and smaller--so small that it's not surprising
that some idiot in New York can't see the point of it. There
is no point in this kind of fiction. But to go from saying
there's no point in this kind of fiction to declaring all
fiction dead is not only laughable but very possibly
dangerous.
Fiction--storytelling--helps to make sense of the world
and our place in it. You could say that without story there is
no discourse: discourse is the story we tell ourselves and
each other. In a very real sense, story creates the world. If
we look only at science fiction, we see that stories about
cloning and artificial intelligence, information and
communication technology, the environment, cyborgs and virtual
reality have helped shape the last fifty years of western
culture. They have even changed the way we see humanity
itself, introducing the notion that the nature of body and
mind are mutable, no longer fixed. That's a gob-smackingly big
thing.
So when someone tells me fiction is frivolous, I get
pissed off. When someone tells me science fiction is bad
therefore they never read it--but, hey, they did read Slow
River and enjoy it, therefore Slow River must be good,
therefore it can't be SF--I get pissed off. When someone tells
me that my novel--although beautifully written, quite moving,
and about real life issues such as grief and identity--isn't
literature because it's suspenseful and (I quote again) "a
phenomenal read," I get really pissed off.
I
try write the kind of thing I like to read, and Federico
Garcia Lorca summed that up neatly when he said, "Senze
duende, nada." As Ursula Le Guin has pointed out, duende is a
difficult word to translate. It means something like passion,
or heart, or courage, or risk. Without passion, nothing.
Without risk, nothing. I like fiction that isn't afraid to put
on its party dress and go out there and dance, that isn't
afraid of looking foolish or trying something new. When I say
new here I'm not talking novelty for its own sake--writing an
entire novel from the second person viewpoint of, oh, a
three-tined dinner fork or something--and I'm not saying the
plot has to be stunningly original (how many original plots
are there?). I'm talking about taking some risk with the
story, finding a way--using whatever it takes, any tool from
any genre--to make that story believable.
I
find a lot of fiction unbelievable, genre and otherwise. To
use SF examples, generally what I find hard to swallow isn't
the genre-specific convention designed as a short-cut to the
meat of the matter--the interstellar hyperdrive, the
artificial intelligence, the time machine (although it's
always nice when the author at least takes a stab at an
explanation)--it's the other shortcuts: the assumptions left
unexamined, the plug-in characters or backgrounds, the
thoughtless acceptance of stereotypes.
Every culture has its own set of cultural stereotypes
and clichŽ, its master stories: the rich are more important,
domestic animals feel no pain, progress is inevitable,
whatever. A storyteller has to be alert to these because--if
you accept the idea that story creates the world--every time a
clichŽ is reiterated it is reinforced, and that simplifies the
world, it reduces it. And it's easy enough to avoid: you just
have to do the work. If a writer takes the time to really look
at a clichŽ--a character, a situation, a culture--to examine
it with a clear eye and strong prose, then the clichŽ melts,
because the reader sees individual people in specific
situations. (Perhaps this, amongst other things, is part of
what Jenny Wolmark was getting at this afternoon in her paper
on the pleasures and otherwise of being posthuman. When
writers are specific, they free themselves to go more places,
and more believably.) We understand that this is happening to
them for particular reasons; that a different choice, or
different circumstance would have led to a different outcome.
In other words, exposing the clichŽ, writing it out, renders
it powerless because we see there are other ways of being,
that there are alternatives.
What's interesting to me is that often the stories and
phrasing that seem so tired and cliched today are the ones
that changed the discourse of yesterday--because their
innovation became the new clichŽ. Take Sappho as an example:
she was the first writer (at least to my knowledge) to talk
about the moon in terms of being silver. She was one of the
first to talk about love and desire in terms of the dry mouth
and pounding heart. Shakespeare spoke of death as sleep,
jealousy as a green-eyed monster. All stock phrases now. The
work of Russ and Le Guin--particularly "When it Changed" and
"The Left Hand of Darkness"--influenced the discourse of
gender, yet when we read the Le Guin novel today, we roll our
eyes at the idea that using the masculine pronoun won't
influence the reader's perception of gender.
I
want to talk about the Russ story in a bit more
detail.
A
couple of years ago I wrote an essay which included some
thoughts on "When it Changed." My complaint in the essay was
that Russ, while dangling before us a gleaming vision of women
as autonomous, whole human beings, actually fails to take a
more important imaginative leap. The way I saw it, when the
men return to Whileaway after a nine hundred year absence,
Janet, instead of feeling like a second class citizen in their
presence, should feel superior. After all, they don't speak
her language, they don't understand her culture, how
Whileawayans have children, and they look "like apes with
human faces." It seemed to me as though Russ was reinforcing a
particularly dangerous clichŽ, the one that goes, "Hey, women
only have what they have because men let them, and the men can
come along and take it away any time they like." It seemed to
me that she had thrown away a golden opportunity to show how
generations of freedom from prejudice might change a woman's
psychological response to a man, that she should have pointed
out that only someone who has grown up in a sexist society
would be preprogrammed for such otherwise inexplicable,
instant feelings of inferiority.
When I wrote that essay a couple of years ago, then, I
was remembering reading the novella for the first time fifteen
or twenty years before. What I remember of that first reading
was an intense sense of anger and betrayal: the feeling that
Russ had held out this delicious vision but, when I reached
for it, she snatched it back, threw it to the ground, and
trampled on it. Recently, though, it occurred to me that one
of the reasons I was able to be angry with Russ twenty years
ago, that I was able to see her work as a failure of
imagination, was because of the way this novella--and her
novels, and Le Guin's novels, and Sturgeon's, and Delany's,
and many others--had influenced the cultural story, the
discourse, my understanding of gender. If she hadn't written
it a few years before I read it, I might not have known enough
to be angry.
So fiction is important. Fiction is what shows us the
continuity and difference between people then, and now, and
soon. It gives us an awareness of what being human
means--whether we're talking about the psychologically broken
killer in Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood or the idealistic Don
Quixote. (What would our concept of idealism look like without
Cervantes? How would we have articulated it? Would we have
articulated it?) Sometimes I think of fiction as a
kaleidoscope: each story is a twist of the tube, bringing some
of the set bits into a new pattern, reflecting new shapes and
hinting at new possibilities.
Fiction does not have to mirror real life. None of mine
does. For example, in my novels, none of my characters ever
talk about being a lesbian; they just are. Naturally, not
everyone likes that, but when some editor or critic reads Slow
River or The Blue Place and complains that "It's not like that
in the real world!" I respond: "And your point?" I think I
have a pretty good idea what their point is, of course, but
for me the point is to create an imagined space that didn't
exist before. If a reader wants to know why Lore or Aud never
mentions being a dyke, she'll have to work it out for herself,
she'll have to imagine a world where who you have sex with
just isn't an issue. With luck, that imaginative exercise may
change how she thinks. Virginia Woolf's novel, Orlando, has
been similarly criticised for being fanciful in ignoring the
constraints of gender and not dealing with the harsh facts of
life. In Arguing With the Past, Gillian Beer points out that
Woolf moves her fiction away from the arena of real life facts
and crises because she denies the claims of such ordering to
be all inclusive. In other words, she wanted to change the
discourse. This is what good fiction does; it also gives the
reader a fabulous ride.
This ride, this escape, is vital. It's why so much
mainstream literary fiction fails. It's also why I don't think
it's a coincidence that there's been a recent resurgence of
interest in--and critical acceptance of--historical fiction.
With a historical novel, a crafty writer can bypass the
prevailing wisdom about reality and literature. "Well, you
see," they can tell the critic, "it's about this girl who
actually really was painted by Vermeer, she really existed, so
it's serious and worthy novel, not like that frivolous
invented nonsense." They can take advantage of the perception
that people in those days weren't, well, you know, weren't as
sophisticated as they are now. So of course it's natural that
their characters fall in love or get patriotic and that sort
of thing because then they don't know any better. And it's a
known fact that there were wars, and kings and queens, and
everything, and people nearly died a lot because medicine was
pretty bad. Oh, and the clothes were gorgeous.... In other
words, they get to write good old fashioned stories, where
stuff actually happens and interesting characters move through
a vivid world feeling big emotions, without having to worry
about being accused of being na•ve or escapist.
What is it about escapism? Why does it bother critics
so much? Tolkien was right, I think, when he remarked that
those most likely to be upset by the notion of escape are the
jailers.
Good fiction, the kind that teaches us things and
changes how we think, almost has to be escapist. It has to
take the reader on a ride, sweep him to a world outside his
own. Only if he's sufficiently caught up in your people or
places or situations will he temporarily set aside what he
knows to be true and play by your rules.
So I don't believe fiction should mirror reality. If I
were forced to compare fiction to real life then I'd want it
to be larger than life, not smaller. Fiction, in my opinion,
should be super-saturated, drenched in a kind of brilliance.
It should be more, not less.
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| Guest of Honor Speech delivered in Liverpool,
2001 |
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Nicola on the Web
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Beauty and Brilliance and
Risk
A
couple of times in the last few months I've seen myself
described in print as a British writer. Each time, it startles
me. I don't know why, exactly, because I don't think of myself
as American--I'm English, born and bred, still a citizen,
still with at least the remnants of a Yorkshire accent--but it
does. Perhaps it's less to do with the nationality than with
the writer part of the description: I haven't had anything
published in this country for six years. In fact I got the
most amazing rejection letter the other day from an editor at
a reputable London literary house. She was turning down my
latest novel, Stay, on the grounds that it wasn't literary
fiction because, and I quote, "while reading, more often than
not, I felt completely caught up in the suspense of the
novel." She then went on to say that she wouldn't be able to
market it as suspense because the plot lacked murders, car
chases, and even identifiable bad guys. In other words, it's
not a suspense novel. But she couldn't position it as a
literary novel because she had a great time reading it.
This attitude, of course, is not peculiar to the
English. When I was trolling for blurbs for The Blue Place in
the US I talked to a literary author known for her southern
novels who said she loved the book but wouldn't give me a
quote. "Why?" I asked. "Because it's obvious you're having too
much fun," she said. "I wouldn't want to encourage that. You
shouldn't be wasting your talent. You should be writing more
serious fiction."
So my question is: how did the definition of literature
become so narrow that we aren't allowed to have fun? When and
why did it become passŽ to actually enjoy reading or writing a
novel?
A
few years ago, the New York Review of Books announced, with
great fanfare, the death of fiction. Fiction, they said, could
not provide the proper moral or intellectual seriousness of
non-fiction. Fiction was mere make believe. Let the masses
indulge in escapism if necessary, but the movers and shakers
of the world should not pollute their intellect with such
frippery. Now what surprised me about all this was how much it
seemed to surprise others. To anyone who has ever paid
attention to the treatment of science fiction it seemed
obvious that this was inevitable: the end result of the
process of privileging reality over imagination which began
long ago.
The urge to divide the world between the good (us,
familiar), and the bad (them, unfamiliar) is a very human
trait. We do it with everything. In the story I tell myself
about this process as it applies to literary criticism (and,
as John Clute reminded us yesterday in the opening plenary,
those of us who aren't academics are absurdly free to make up
what we want without having to provide footnotes), I like to
pretend that critics first began dividing writing into Good
and Bad based on the quality of the prose. (Why? No other
reason than that it comforts me to believe that once, in some
dim distant golden age, good writing mattered.) So we began
with the Good box and the Bad box, based on prose quality but,
human being what they are, that left far too many books in the
Good box. So the critics added a second Bad box to the first,
and in this one they tossed anything containing people,
places, or experiences that those doing the judging could not
possibly become familiar with through experience: fantastical
animals or places or human powers. In other words, all science
fiction and fantasy. Once a process has begun, it's pretty
hard to stop it, and to the first two boxes was added a third,
this time for fiction that was merely unlikely to be or become
familiar. We're talking here of war, survival, heroism and
wickedness, exotic locations and extraordinary events, plus
the kind of characters the average white, upperclass urban
literary critic was unlikely to encounter in every day life.
This meant that the third box got filled with historical
fiction, crime fiction, westerns, plus stories about people of
colour or lesbians or stupid people or prostitutes or
whatever. It wouldn't matter how well-written any of this
stuff in the Bad boxes was--how finely the characters were
delineated, how brilliantly the narrative constructed or the
themes developed--it wouldn't be familiar, it wouldn't match
the critics' reality, and so it wouldn't be Good. This
winnowing continued until all that was left were novels about
the probable and the everyday: mostly straight, mostly white
upperclass urban people in unexciting situations and boring
places. In this way, what became classified as good literature
is claustrophobic fiction that is afraid to leave the
apartment and walk around in the big wide world, afraid to
leave its familiar world and be vulnerable. This is fiction
that eshews plot, because it wouldn't want to risk some critic
saying that it was even slightly unlikely, because that could
be construed as melodrama. The hipper you want your literary
novel to be, the less personal struggle the better, and the
less big emotion, because if you get it even slightly
wr
some critic will call you na•ve or sentimental. In
fact, if any character feels anything at all it's probably
safer to tip the reader an ironic wink; after all, you
wouldn't want them to think you actually believe this
stuff.
So literary fiction cowers behind its urban irony,
growing smaller and smaller--so small that it's not surprising
that some idiot in New York can't see the point of it. There
is no point in this kind of fiction. But to go from saying
there's no point in this kind of fiction to declaring all
fiction dead is not only laughable but very possibly
dangerous.
Fiction--storytelling--helps to make sense of the world
and our place in it. You could say that without story there is
no discourse: discourse is the story we tell ourselves and
each other. In a very real sense, story creates the world. If
we look only at science fiction, we see that stories about
cloning and artificial intelligence, information and
communication technology, the environment, cyborgs and virtual
reality have helped shape the last fifty years of western
culture. They have even changed the way we see humanity
itself, introducing the notion that the nature of body and
mind are mutable, no longer fixed. That's a gob-smackingly big
thing.
So when someone tells me fiction is frivolous, I get
pissed off. When someone tells me science fiction is bad
therefore they never read it--but, hey, they did read Slow
River and enjoy it, therefore Slow River must be good,
therefore it can't be SF--I get pissed off. When someone tells
me that my novel--although beautifully written, quite moving,
and about real life issues such as grief and identity--isn't
literature because it's suspenseful and (I quote again) "a
phenomenal read," I get really pissed off.
I
try write the kind of thing I like to read, and Federico
Garcia Lorca summed that up neatly when he said, "Senze
duende, nada." As Ursula Le Guin has pointed out, duende is a
difficult word to translate. It means something like passion,
or heart, or courage, or risk. Without passion, nothing.
Without risk, nothing. I like fiction that isn't afraid to put
on its party dress and go out there and dance, that isn't
afraid of looking foolish or trying something new. When I say
new here I'm not talking novelty for its own sake--writing an
entire novel from the second person viewpoint of, oh, a
three-tined dinner fork or something--and I'm not saying the
plot has to be stunningly original (how many original plots
are there?). I'm talking about taking some risk with the
story, finding a way--using whatever it takes, any tool from
any genre--to make that story believable.
I
find a lot of fiction unbelievable, genre and otherwise. To
use SF examples, generally what I find hard to swallow isn't
the genre-specific convention designed as a short-cut to the
meat of the matter--the interstellar hyperdrive, the
artificial intelligence, the time machine (although it's
always nice when the author at least takes a stab at an
explanation)--it's the other shortcuts: the assumptions left
unexamined, the plug-in characters or backgrounds, the
thoughtless acceptance of stereotypes.
Every culture has its own set of cultural stereotypes
and clichŽ, its master stories: the rich are more important,
domestic animals feel no pain, progress is inevitable,
whatever. A storyteller has to be alert to these because--if
you accept the idea that story creates the world--every time a
clichŽ is reiterated it is reinforced, and that simplifies the
world, it reduces it. And it's easy enough to avoid: you just
have to do the work. If a writer takes the time to really look
at a clichŽ--a character, a situation, a culture--to examine
it with a clear eye and strong prose, then the clichŽ melts,
because the reader sees individual people in specific
situations. (Perhaps this, amongst other things, is part of
what Jenny Wolmark was getting at this afternoon in her paper
on the pleasures and otherwise of being posthuman. When
writers are specific, they free themselves to go more places,
and more believably.) We understand that this is happening to
them for particular reasons; that a different choice, or
different circumstance would have led to a different outcome.
In other words, exposing the clichŽ, writing it out, renders
it powerless because we see there are other ways of being,
that there are alternatives.
What's interesting to me is that often the stories and
phrasing that seem so tired and cliched today are the ones
that changed the discourse of yesterday--because their
innovation became the new clichŽ. Take Sappho as an example:
she was the first writer (at least to my knowledge) to talk
about the moon in terms of being silver. She was one of the
first to talk about love and desire in terms of the dry mouth
and pounding heart. Shakespeare spoke of death as sleep,
jealousy as a green-eyed monster. All stock phrases now. The
work of Russ and Le Guin--particularly "When it Changed" and
"The Left Hand of Darkness"--influenced the discourse of
gender, yet when we read the Le Guin novel today, we roll our
eyes at the idea that using the masculine pronoun won't
influence the reader's perception of gender.
I
want to talk about the Russ story in a bit more
detail.
A
couple of years ago I wrote an essay which included some
thoughts on "When it Changed." My complaint in the essay was
that Russ, while dangling before us a gleaming vision of women
as autonomous, whole human beings, actually fails to take a
more important imaginative leap. The way I saw it, when the
men return to Whileaway after a nine hundred year absence,
Janet, instead of feeling like a second class citizen in their
presence, should feel superior. After all, they don't speak
her language, they don't understand her culture, how
Whileawayans have children, and they look "like apes with
human faces." It seemed to me as though Russ was reinforcing a
particularly dangerous clichŽ, the one that goes, "Hey, women
only have what they have because men let them, and the men can
come along and take it away any time they like." It seemed to
me that she had thrown away a golden opportunity to show how
generations of freedom from prejudice might change a woman's
psychological response to a man, that she should have pointed
out that only someone who has grown up in a sexist society
would be preprogrammed for such otherwise inexplicable,
instant feelings of inferiority.
When I wrote that essay a couple of years ago, then, I
was remembering reading the novella for the first time fifteen
or twenty years before. What I remember of that first reading
was an intense sense of anger and betrayal: the feeling that
Russ had held out this delicious vision but, when I reached
for it, she snatched it back, threw it to the ground, and
trampled on it. Recently, though, it occurred to me that one
of the reasons I was able to be angry with Russ twenty years
ago, that I was able to see her work as a failure of
imagination, was because of the way this novella--and her
novels, and Le Guin's novels, and Sturgeon's, and Delany's,
and many others--had influenced the cultural story, the
discourse, my understanding of gender. If she hadn't written
it a few years before I read it, I might not have known enough
to be angry.
So fiction is important. Fiction is what shows us the
continuity and difference between people then, and now, and
soon. It gives us an awareness of what being human
means--whether we're talking about the psychologically broken
killer in Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood or the idealistic Don
Quixote. (What would our concept of idealism look like without
Cervantes? How would we have articulated it? Would we have
articulated it?) Sometimes I think of fiction as a
kaleidoscope: each story is a twist of the tube, bringing some
of the set bits into a new pattern, reflecting new shapes and
hinting at new possibilities.
Fiction does not have to mirror real life. None of mine
does. For example, in my novels, none of my characters ever
talk about being a lesbian; they just are. Naturally, not
everyone likes that, but when some editor or critic reads Slow
River or The Blue Place and complains that "It's not like that
in the real world!" I respond: "And your point?" I think I
have a pretty good idea what their point is, of course, but
for me the point is to create an imagined space that didn't
exist before. If a reader wants to know why Lore or Aud never
mentions being a dyke, she'll have to work it out for herself,
she'll have to imagine a world where who you have sex with
just isn't an issue. With luck, that imaginative exercise may
change how she thinks. Virginia Woolf's novel, Orlando, has
been similarly criticised for being fanciful in ignoring the
constraints of gender and not dealing with the harsh facts of
life. In Arguing With the Past, Gillian Beer points out that
Woolf moves her fiction away from the arena of real life facts
and crises because she denies the claims of such ordering to
be all inclusive. In other words, she wanted to change the
discourse. This is what good fiction does; it also gives the
reader a fabulous ride.
This ride, this escape, is vital. It's why so much
mainstream literary fiction fails. It's also why I don't think
it's a coincidence that there's been a recent resurgence of
interest in--and critical acceptance of--historical fiction.
With a historical novel, a crafty writer can bypass the
prevailing wisdom about reality and literature. "Well, you
see," they can tell the critic, "it's about this girl who
actually really was painted by Vermeer, she really existed, so
it's serious and worthy novel, not like that frivolous
invented nonsense." They can take advantage of the perception
that people in those days weren't, well, you know, weren't as
sophisticated as they are now. So of course it's natural that
their characters fall in love or get patriotic and that sort
of thing because then they don't know any better. And it's a
known fact that there were wars, and kings and queens, and
everything, and people nearly died a lot because medicine was
pretty bad. Oh, and the clothes were gorgeous.... In other
words, they get to write good old fashioned stories, where
stuff actually happens and interesting characters move through
a vivid world feeling big emotions, without having to worry
about being accused of being na•ve or escapist.
What is it about escapism? Why does it bother critics
so much? Tolkien was right, I think, when he remarked that
those most likely to be upset by the notion of escape are the
jailers.
Good fiction, the kind that teaches us things and
changes how we think, almost has to be escapist. It has to
take the reader on a ride, sweep him to a world outside his
own. Only if he's sufficiently caught up in your people or
places or situations will he temporarily set aside what he
knows to be true and play by your rules.
So I don't believe fiction should mirror reality. If I
were forced to compare fiction to real life then I'd want it
to be larger than life, not smaller. Fiction, in my opinion,
should be super-saturated, drenched in a kind of brilliance.
It should be more, not less.
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| Guest of Honor Speech delivered in Liverpool,
2001 |
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