So if one of the underlying conditions of contemporary life (at least western life) is the individual person or place being inescapably enmeshed in networks of history and technology, it makes sense that the natural way to write about that might be the sweeping novel of systems in which those connections and conduits are a crucial part of not only the story but its delivery. But if that networked state is truly the default, isn’t whatever story we tell automatically arising from that condition, whether directly acknowledged or not?
The artist Robert Morris said that
The quality of intimacy is attached to an object in a fairly direct proportion as its size diminishes in relation to oneself. The quality of publicness is attached in proportion as the size increases in relation to oneself. (qtd)
Trying to attain that intimacy despite dissolved boundaries between public and private, I’ve drifted as a writer toward socially and physically isolated characters. Rather than avoiding the complications of contemporary life, for me it’s a way of engaging them — where else but fiction is it still possible to imagine an isolated life? It’s a way of negotiating between my desires for fiction as fortress and fiction as focus, a manageable, navigable node in a much larger whole. So even in a story in which “nothing happens,” everything is happening, all the time — it’s the butterfly effect of everyday life.
This may just be a sad excuse for my boring fiction, but I feel like there’s more to it. Many of my favorite novels (and history books, too) are those in which out of the way, supposedly irrelevant places and overlooked lives are revealed as crucial to larger webs of meaning and power. So how small a moment, and how quiet a life, is too little to link to things larger and louder than itself? And how quietly can we write about them before becoming too boring to read?
What’s more, creative people are supposed to be creative. We — and I mean all of us: writers, editors, publishers, agents and publicists — aren’t supposed to cling to outmoded and elitist systems. We are supposed to like what is fresh and new and challenging. Instead of standing around, befuddled and sneering at the new world, we ought to be contributing to the solution. You think that blogs seem inhabited by amateurs and you consider yourself “an expert”? Do something about it. And what’s wrong with a book blog anyway? Did you really think you lived in a world where you controlled public consumption and taste and that word of mouth wasn’t spreading anyway? The difference is, now you can see it.
~ Marie Mutsuki Mockett
My novel excerpt “A Landscape That Never Changes” is online at Emprise Review. It’s another chapter from The Bee-Loud Glade, and in the story it comes immediately after this chapter * but before this one, with another chapter from a parallel plotline in between. It’s still the story of a man who gets laid off from marketing artificial plants and finds a new job as a decorative hermit in a billionaire’s garden. But it’s even better than it was the last time I mentioned it, because like a fine wine the manuscript has been aging. Maybe more like a fine cheese.
I’m a little concerned/amused that the three chapters published as excerpts so far have all taken place indoors, because after the first few chapters it’s very much an outdoor novel. So maybe these are giving the wrong impression?
Also, I forgot to mention that I was interviewed at PANK recently.
* There’s also a later version of that chapter posted at Fictionaut.
My story “Big Blue” is in the Winter 2009 issue of Camas: The Nature of the West. It’s about Paul Bunyan, so you know you want to read it.
It starts like this:
You could hear his heart breaking like thunder. And I don’t mean “like thunder” the way a poet might mean it, no, I mean it actually sounded like thunder because he was just that damn big. And his heart was that much damn bigger. There’s nothing poetic about a man that size falling apart, not for the folks down below who may as well live in the shadow of a dam held together by cracks.
“Be Your Own Boss” is now online at PANK — it’s an excerpt from my novel The Bee-Loud Glade, about a man who gets laid off from marketing plastic plants and finds a new job as a decorative hermit in a billionaire’s garden.
An earlier chapter appeared in Pindeldyboz, and there’s also an alternate (more recent) version of that chapter at Fictionaut. Another chapter is forthcoming next month at Emprise Review, and hopefully the whole novel is forthcoming at some point, too.
Now dressed in full nature writing regalia — spear in hand and animal pelts on — I am finally ready to do battle. I am ready to leave behind the effete fear that politics will somehow taint my work, to understand that this exclusion is mere fashion, and that fashions change. I am also ready to leave behind the nature writer’s sense of impotence. What I want to carry into the fight is humor, irony and the personal essayist’s recourse to the testing ground of self. What I want to leave behind is “Oh, how lovely!” while what I want to carry into the fight are the moments — often lovely moments, yes — when I am briefly outside of myself, moments that remind me of how multifarious and delightful this world still is and that speak to my own animal wildness. What I want to leave behind is false romanticism. What I want to carry into the fight is the original romantic urge for the specific, the local, the real. What I want to leave behind is quoting Thoreau; what I want instead is to follow more deeply the complex spirit of the man. What I want to leave behind are pages of facts. What I want to carry forward are facts marshaled for purpose, facts enlivened because they follow an idea. What I want to leave behind is the sanctimony of quietude and order and “being in the present.” What I want to embrace is loud and wild disorder, growing this way and that, lush and overdone. What I want to leave behind is the virtuous and the good, and move toward the inspiring and great. And while we’re at it I want to leave behind anything false, false to me that is, false to what I feel is my experience on this Earth. What I want instead is to wade through the mess of life without ever reaching for a life ring called The Answer.
~ David Gessner @ Terrain
I finished the novel I’ve been writing about a hermit for the past few years, and now it’s out in the world in search of an agent and/or editor (one rejection already!). It’s a bit strange to wake in the morning and not need to work on a project I’ve lived with for such a long time. And I haven’t yet found the focus to start something new. So I feel a bit eremitic myself, suspended between here and there, adrift in the aether of completion and contemplation while still firmly grounded in the lingering feeling of work to be done.
There’s an excerpt from the novel forthcoming soon (I think) at PANK, and an earlier, since revised chapter appeared at Pindeldyboz a while ago.
And by now I’m so set in my habit of collecting clippings and links and readings related to hermits and solitude and etcetera (big thanks to Meng-hu’s Hermitary), that I haven’t stopped gathering yet and I’m not sure I can. Or that I want to just yet.
Perhaps the key ethical principle of British environmental literature has been that making us see differently is an essential precursor to making us act differently. So it is that each new generation of British environmental writers finds itself trying to design the literary equivalent of the “killer app”: the glittering argument or stylistic turn that will produce an epiphany in sceptical readers, and so persuade them to change their behaviour. I used to believe in the possibility of this killer app, both as a reader and a writer. But I’m increasingly unsure of its existence. Or, if it exists, of its worth. At least in my experience, environmental literature in Britain gets read almost exclusively by the converted to the converted, and its meaningful ethical impact is minimal tending to zero. As Vernon Klinkenbourg noted with glum elegance last year, most documents of environmental literature are “minority reports – sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments [of such literature] are contradicted by the way the vast majority of us live, and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle … sceptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing, or submit to its evidence.”
~ Robert Macfarlane
Reading Macfarlane I’m reminded of this passage from David Gessner’s Sick of Nature:
The standard response to this unfairness of things is to curse and wave our little fists at the wicked telemarketers, but today I have a different reaction. I marvel at their effectiveness. Had the pro-landbank forces called in a team of essayists, what would we have done to help? Assembled, we’d have looked like a reunion of Unabombers: solitary, hollow-eyed, scraggly-bearded characters ranting against progress. Likely our strategy would have been to abandon the phone lines and take to the beaches to wander, alone and aimless, in search of terns and profundities. Not only that, but had we somehow—despite ourselves—won, the victory party wouldn’t exactly have been a barrel of laughs.
I shared some thoughts about very short fiction at Laura Ellen Scott’s VIPs on vsf blog. Laura assures me I didn’t make myself sound too much like the Unabomber, thank goodness.