IN DEFENSE OF LITERATURE

EMPIRES COME AND GO;  LITERATURE STAYS

     Mephistopheles offered Faust a book that contained everything (in exchange, fittingly and quite generously, for his soul).  To write that book is an age-old human lust, as timeless as the longing to enter the flesh of another or cross the high seas or breastfeed or kill.  After all, empires come and go. The soul stays.

     Literature has always been healthy.  In every age, there have been plenty of people feeling their hunched way through the body of a language, forging away in the chilly darkness toward that state of non-being out of which a text becomes infinite.  Sublime archivists will never be obsolete, whether they write the Book of the Dead or the Vedas, Midnight's Children or The Autumn of the Patriarch.  The very "prestige" of being a novelist is steeped in the plenitude of past literatures. Literature is a tautological, self-perpetuating chain-letter: it inspires writers to fashion texts that keep other texts in circulation.
     Strangely, that's not something writers like to admit these days.  Our genealogy is ignored (not so much in the writing of our literature as in talking of it), as if it lessened our individual achievement rather than confirmed it. The only authors eagerly celebrated are media stars like Mailer and Hemingway?"easy" showy prototypes of the legend of the solitary bitter white alkie testosterone-driven novelist (castrated by his own brutal Muse).
     Of course, fiction is an arena for young males to measure themselves against one another, compare doorstopper-novel sizes, and exorcise their geekiness.  Most male American writers nourish fantasies of being morose rock stars.  And surely all writers are vain. Literature is in fact one of the healthier ways of expending our human arrogance.
     But, during their interview on PBS's 'Charlie Rose' recently, Mark Leyner, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen talked much more about TV than about the contemporary novel whose "crisis" they were ostensibly there to address.  Wallace said his generation was raised on TV, and as TV could deliver pleasure in large doses, contemporary fiction had to do the same.  Franzen complained that he couldn't do what TV does—write about precinct life for instance—yet fiction had to compete with compulsory electronic media time.  They all felt that TV had changed our audiences' expectations.
      So we are a minority.  Nothing new in that.  In ancient Egypt, only writers read. In ancient Greece, only some male citizens read.  In the Middle Ages, schooled monks and landowners read. The extraordinary modern spread of literacy has never implied that the planet's population is inclined, genetically or sociologically, to consume literature without unpleasant strain. So why try to bridge the gap between Terry McMillan and Angela Carter fans? Why compare literature with TV? Are our writers' literary expectations changing?
     The problem may be that younger writers assume that there's an equation between literature and temporal power. As an inadverent result, they appear as interested in copies sold as the publishers who judge literature by balance sheets. Those are irrelevant concerns. In reality, good writers run the risk of early success.  Only Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Unna-mable, books that meet with resistance, are the survivors.  Frustration and marginality are at the core of what it means to be a writer: being the animal that perennially strays from the herd, the poete maudite or nerd.  We can't expect the world to encourage our early choice to anoint ourselves its critics.  The lamb that strays from the herd is the first to be butchered because it's too much trouble to keep. Unlike a shepherd, a non-suicidal society knows not to alienate its intellectuals too much, so our "sacrifice" is usually quotidian and bloodless. 
      Besides, writers, too cynical for most socially integrated jobs, have long passed the secular buck to the moneymakers, the engineers and soldiers of this world who make the big decisions—whether the environment survives another millennium or not, whether the hard-breeding masses of the Third World resort to revolution or immigration and, at a very minor level, whether books generate enough profit or are successful enough narcotics to warrant their post-electronic existence.  Writers eschew all mundane power in a world that won't accept its fundamental nonsense.  It's not a bad price to pay for staying unco-opted.
     Particularly in America, whose genius it is to exploit underground resistances for profit. America has found that overexposure can turn any rebel into a middle-class trend; mass consumption drains their essential insurgency and renders them inauthentic and thus ineffectual.  No disenfranchised voice can escape being appropriated by America's status quo once it is defined "high art. " So, unlike TV culture, in its day art must be apocryphal.
      And it's absurd to begrudge the very essence of America.  Its writers are not movie-stars.  There is a reason America has a bigger budget for its military band than for the NEA and no LTV features videoclips of book excerpts.  Literature never enjoyed extensive social relevance in this nation. (Instead, literary expatriation did.) Commerce runs America, draws its immigrants, inspires its ideology, whittles its soul. People come to these shores with the upwardly-mobile dreams they couldn't fulfill back home. (Few ever dream of producing literature in a foreign language.) They don't come to contemplate, they come to get rich.
     So, naturally, TV is America's podium; it has replaced, all-in-one, the Coliseum, the village square, Sunday church, vaudeville shows, freak exhibits, the town fool.   TV has not usurped or dimwitted our audience.  Its territory is limited to layman's versions of trauma and captivity narratives (talkshows), tragedies (soap-operas), cartoony Homers.  Its crude, brash solicitation of our interest is sharply antithetical to the demands posed by literature.
     No doubt, TV has unsavory side-effects (such as a capacity to turn every American into a cliché-regenerating actor and erode the lines between fantasy and fact, though this latter development should make fiction, if it ever did reach that audience, more effective).  But basically TV is an abundant source of carnivalesque novelistic imagery and a valuable peephole for us into the soul of middle America. Yet in the game show of art, TV is not a contestant.
      Literature is not temporal nor mind-numbing entertainment, nor a market-sensitive commodity.  It is ineffable pleasure and pain, and a wakeup outcry; it takes long to mature and aims for mutability.  It is not in "competition" with "other" media.  Literature is not a newsbringer. Writers sacralize language for shelter in a world that has never had and will never have unity.  They aren't accountable to fact checkers.  Are Ovid, Kafka, Mallarme, Calvino, Cortazar, Abe newsworthy? Literature gives a more accurate picture of its era, but only in retrospect.  What we understand about Paris in the 1850s from Baudelaire is vastly different from what we learn from the papers of his day.  Being outsiders, writers can unveil their age for the coming generations. Contrary to the media, we write for the future.
    So why do many writers feel threatened with extinction? What is the cause of their anxiety? Is the Net, as more and more writers argue these days, responsible for this alarm?
     The fact is that computers have been attracting neophytes to the intrigues of language, adding neoteric writers to our motley ranks. The Net, via e-mail, chat sites and web pages, is drawing Americans to the pleasures of textual self-expression. Writing of any sort encourages reading as a way of enhancing one's tools and filching inspirations.  Furthermore, the Net is democratizing publication, as any young writer can start a web site to post his own and friends' fiction to an international browsing readership of thousands.
     At the same time, the high-tech backlash is also fanatically writerly: our dozens of technoskeptic, neo-Luddite movements are centered on writing. From the "Lead Pencil Club" of publisher Bill Henderson to the Unabomber and from the trendiness of New Age bards and storytellers to the popularity of performance writers, rap poets, and poetry slams, language is becoming "shamanistic," "liturgical," ablutional again. The unbridgable gap bet-ween signifier and signified that recently made words pointless has been for now laid to rest.
     And yet every other week last spring I found myself reading yet another essay by some writer or critic bemoaning the long-touted death of the novel, the trendiness of non-fiction and memoirs, the loss of precious reading public to "other" media, the shortage of white male writers who get seduced away by Hollywood and the Net, the autocracy of the computer which has  been leading our literature toward a post-literate book-hating future.
     As I began working my way down the list of those meta-aesthetic insecurities, I was amazed by how easily they were invalidated. They were only valid as symptoms of a cultural crisis that spawned them and which can explain them. The following are two reasons I can see for the spread of such pervasive literary malaise at a time of an actual literary boom:
     A.)  In any American-style democracy the consuming multitude eventually displaces the intellectual elite?the aristocratic classes that throughout this millennium in one form or another ruled by virtue of force or habit and had the leisure to study and appreciate esoterica and sponsor its creation. Traditionally, most writers came out of those circles or rose to join them.  Now that "elite" is a dirty word for disparate reasons both in p.c. liberal-academic and rightwing-fundamentalist circles, naturally writers feel summarily abandoned. 
     Of course, most ironically, the Net is the old cognitive elite's latest holdout, one neither the flag-burners nor book-burners can resist—promoted as it is as America's Newest Frontier.  So attacking cyberspace, even on a supra-refined level, is a lost cause.  To hold on to prominence, our erstwhile patrons need to control that most intangible and isolating form of communication.  The writers who don't want to travel the cybernetic highway may as well jump ship and swim to the nearest village and pick up pen and paper again.
     B.) The religious equivalent of writers who say the novel is dead is apocalypsists who, since the beginning of time, have been predicting the end of the world (Jesus was one)—usually to their own aggrandizement. Doomsdays have come and gone and the world hasn't changed a lot. But we'd all like to think of our own time as the last, to imagine the world dying along with us—making our death less minute and inconsequential—to fantasize our novel as the last one ever written.  It makes us feel important. Writers in particular can't deal with their smallness. It's the very longevity that literature provides that attracts many of us to it in the first place. (Only within the reassuring realm of literature, can we celebrate our smallness.)
     In short, I don't think writerly anxiety can be explained away by the advent of decanonization or feminism or the Net. Anxiety is what drives writers, and we write partly because we can't control it. And we don't give up because posterity will sieve it all out.
     And notably, in 1996, while all that self-destructing Modernism-induced pessimist lit-prophesying is being regurgitated, the country is having an upsurge of restless creative energy. More people have leisure time to play writer in.  Self-divulgence is at an all-time, millennially-driven, peak. The fever of self-articulation is running high. In this time of make believe, induction to the ranks of the "elect" involves the dissemination and/or acquisition of immaterial goods; and writing is the least costly among them.  As prolific advertisers exhaustively sell us names and symbols, the only lies we can still enjoy are our own.
     As a result, interest in things literary is stupendous: ten times more undergraduates enroll in creative writing classes than ever before.  Continuous Ed. workshops, quality book clubs, community readings, bookstore signings, amateur writers' groups, readers' circles and book review venues have mushroomed.  The competition for MFA writing programs is cutthroat (when I taught at Brown University, I had to choose 5 out of 250 graduate applicants). America's English Departments are hatching thousands of potential writers every year, providing them with opportunities, deadlines, readers, editors, exercises, clemencies, and, most importantly, lessons in how to live as a reader-writer in our world.
      Having taught creative writing workshops at Brown for the last three years, I have first hand experience of their phenomenal popularity.  An average of 60 to 100 applicants submitted manuscripts competing for 12 spots in each undergraduate workshop.  No matter how many course sections were added, there was resounding demand for more.  Office hours were always crowded.  It all consistently stupefied me.
     Most of these students engaged in structural experiments and spatial juxtapositions of segments (often borrowing their text from Masonic manuals, lives of saints, Chinese sex manuals, children's books or the Old Testament) to escape the confinements of worn-out novelistic conventions. They constructed mazes of branching options, menus and maps leading to ephemeral windows of fiction, with graphics and sound on their screens. They were keen to layer, link, abolish the page. A lot of their ideas were inherited from the post-modernists—our most recent indigenous masters. But the students were not excited by form for form's and parody's sake or by the cold variations of structure; they looked for rhythm, voice, resonance, meaning. Most were second or third generation Americans wrestling with the one primary common American memory—the sense of displacement or ostracism, the sensation of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging, being at home and being lost, legitimate and lawless, which defines life in the New America. Many were majoring in sciences and incorporated nonliterary fluencies into their fiction, telling stories in anatomical or mathematical symbols or in musical scores. They wrote decentered, intransitive, cross-disciplinal prose, interminable like the information space. Their fiction reflected the breakup of the America around them—the interdependent fragmentation of our business markets, spiritual beliefs, ethnicity, nodes of governance, social mores—the evolution of the once central industrial "I Am" into the more unpredictable webbing of organic systems.
     And while I was watching the PBS program on the state of our emerging fiction, I wondered how differently three of my MFA students might have fared on the air, and it was my stubborn suspicion that these unpublished computer-literate student writers who were contagiously optimistic and impassioned would have been truer to the spirit of literature.
      Good literature irreverently and unexpectedly confronts the anemic taboos of its society. Writers transcribe the present—a realm that as of yet has no visible historic shape.  We record the refuse of history, the tales of extras.  So we are always at the beginning.

     There was a slight slump in America post postmodernism.  We have more great living writers today than anyone could hope for.  But their best work may soon be behind them. And, in due reaction, the next generation pulled a Wharton-meets-Zola, bombarding us with end-century Hegelian novels of (violent) manners and social commentary.  Not unlike the anal yuppie children of hippies, these neorealists conceived their revolution as a nostalgia for fame, hierarchy and flatness, writing as if they hadn't been raised on Blood Meridien, J.R., Gravity's Rainbow, The Names, The Public Burning, or The Dead Father.  Inevitably, that yuppie backlash soon expired at the hands of its own outdated conservatism.
      A society depends on its realist writers, even in our post-Oulipo/post-digital age, to create its illusion of order, define its codes and norms, help the public recognize the (failing) world of which they are symptoms.  Language is first of all a culture's homogenizing tool. But literary language can also be a healing tool; its metaphors can bring catharsis to our glossolalic demons.  So ours is a loaded burden: writers are responsible for sustaining every dark age in human history?writers who were Christians first (Augustine) or Fascists first (Plato) or Communists (Marx), who bit their own lure and gave over their genius to propaganda.  I like to think good writing is fetishized and compassionate terrorism. 
     Reality has always been "greater" than fiction.  Fiction is our relentless attempt to humanize nature and reason our excesses. Most often, fiction turns life into pseudosummary to save the world from chaos.  But at its best, fiction is a bottomless pit.  So when fiction seems more "realistic" than reality, as it did in America in the 80s, something is awry: our writers are bored or scared. 
     This brings me back to the writers' complaints and frustrations that abound this year bemoaning the ubiquity of sensationalism, the injustices of the literary market, the dichotomies of majority versus minority that currently claim center stage in our culture.
     None of it seems new and noteworthy. After all, widespread bad taste (not unlike today's sarin) is proof of democracy, reminding us that reality cannot be uttered; that all our words are euphemisms; that life is not the sum of its parts, and that if fiction is to illustrate life, it has to overcome its own fictional limits.  In a world of so many gods, cause and effect don't stand a chance. As for America's resented emphasis on multiculturalism, it is only a euphemistic prop disguising the inequity of its financially totalitarian system. Lack of cohesion is integral to America's social experiment (ours is a land of competing conquerors).  Cultural diversity in literature has been around as long as there have been diverse cultures in the world.  It is of no more import to posterity if a black female writer gets inordinate public attention than if D.F.Wallace, W.T.Vollmann and M.S.Bell are widely admired this spring.  After 100 years, the best literature among them will remain and the rest will be moot.
     That's why I always return to those early Greeks like Homer or Sappho or John of the Apocalypse who constructed texts that have withstood the millennia.  From this vantage point, whether the novel is dead and novelists disempowered and the whole print medium grows extinct, seems hopelessly irrelevant.  So what if Homer sang his epic and Sappho wrote on sheepskin and John on papyrus?  Masterpieces read the same on bond paper or computer screens or whatever the toymakers come up with.  Sappho was exiled across the seas, Homer was homeless (though posthumously claimed by seven cities), and John was a hermit whom the Patmos islanders thought a lunatic. We care little of their mishaps, and if anything, we even assume their work may have profited from adversity.  So why do we protest adversity when it carelessly strikes us?  Or is all this literary angst about something else?
     It may be a rite of passage inherited by previous male authors of this language and this century, a mini LoneRanger tradition within which marking on the bitterness of the literary life is perceived as a sign of maturity, mental gravity and literary accomplishment, a ritual where the sacrifice and distress undertaken for the sake of the text is amply romanticized. I hate to take part in mouldy nature vs. nurture debates and cliche polarities of the eros-logos, anima-animus, nature-culture type, but, while watching the Charlie Rose program, I uncharacteristically wondered how three estrogen-driven young writers might have spoken instead.

     And it was then that it occured to me, for the first time, that I was meant to be at the stove all day.  My grandmothers spent their lives feeding livestock, watering gardens, drying fruits and meats, and baking feasts out of what they had fed.  My mother's life is an urban version of the same: cooking, selecting food, entertaining.  "Tyche" took me far away from tradition: I left home at 15 and the world changed in my absence, and no one expects me to produce a meal any more, and no one wonders about my flagrant culinary ineptitude.
     I know it is a banal metaphor, but I spend the same amount of time at the laptop blending ideas that my foremothers spent at the stovetop blending stews.  Sometimes my "recipes" come out macabre, sometimes bland, sometimes my unleashed signifier is out of sync with the signified world and I'm undermining my own quest, but I keep chopping and churning mechanically, as if there is nothing else for me in the world to do.  The feeling I get from doing this is easily recognizable: repletion.  Like my grandmother I lie awake many nights concocting ways of multiplying goods to feed family, passersby, beggars and every-one else, to stave off needless death.  My world's resources are overexploited and everyone I know tries hard to eat less.  These days the image of a feast is often preferred to the thing itself, as fat-free diets, credit cards and microwaves changed our experience of consumption  It is symbols that feed our world—which is why we suffer from appetites we can't satiate.
     Today people worry that our society is "unreal"; they pine for a "natural" language that can eclipse difference into presence.    In the last two decades, New Age movements have been advocating an articulated "return to the body."  Feminist thinkers and women's studies have been taking metaphysics back into physical and material realms.   Ethics have gained currency.  Earth goddesses and strong feminine attributes are making a comeback. Contemporary scientists have become interested in the physiological make-up of the mind and even psychotherapy has become increasingly physiochemical rather than analytical.
     In this context, if I were called to identify a direction for our new American fiction, I'd say we're moving toward a satiating (feminine) aesthetic, coming on the heels of the ultra-controlled American novel of the late 80s.  Garcia Marquez, Milorad Pavic, Georges Perec, are three diversely exemplary living writers who practice this open aesthetic.Faulkner consummated it.  My guess is that in a world looking for refuge from clonal self-promotion and infantilized neediness, our writers' machismo will give precedence to a parental urge to make our language inclusive, laden, unabashedly plentiful and even incarnate.  I don't  mean to prognosticate; I simply expect our fiction is becoming stronger, for Promethean reasons: because this is a hungry world, and it can only feed on what it can make of itself.
     I also expect that if our cyberworld renders the novel historically obsolete, we'll create more suitable, possibly more open, mongrel forms to exhaust. ("If the old methods are obsolete," Virginia Woolf wrote of Henry James in 1921, "it is the business of a writer to discover new ones.")  The novel is not our only possible vibrant literary gesture and has not been in use that long. And if the question "Why bother to write books?" was answered affirmatively by Cervantes, Blake and De Sade, there will always be writers who will find good reason to persist.  And if we think ours is a time of evanescence, we should read the Symposium.  If we think too many novels are published today indiscriminately, we should look up Henry James in 1886 lamenting the "trash triumphant," the "stupid public," and the "exaggerated homage rendered to authorship." Finally, if Plato couldn't eradicate literature, if the Catholic Church couldn't stomp it out, if Communism couldn't silence it, I think there can be no fear that any foreseeable frenzied techno-corporatistic buildup, or legions of TV sitcoms, will snuff it out.  And that is a lovely sense of security.