what kind of fiction?

literature as world vs. literature as intervention vs. literature as escape

This week I attended a symposium on ancient performance and its receptions. The atmosphere was partly that of an academic conference, partly that of a gathering of theatre people. We discussed classical texts and their interpretative problems, but also contemporary production and performance. I felt poised between text and its production, the act of reading and the act of watching.

The strangest moment of the symposium came at the end of the first day, when we were given some lines from the Bacchae and left alone for ten minutes with the instruction to tap into our ‘primal energy’ and produce a short performance of the text. This was chaos. We had spent all day giving academic papers and were suddenly tasked with theatrical participation — worse, theatrical participation that was supposed to spring from some emotive, immediate space. Suddenly, the distance between ourselves and the text had collapsed — or it was supposed to. I have to admit that we were not particularly successful in accessing our primal energies. The group started squabbling. Most people stood around in a state of suspended animation, wanting to move but unsure how, unsure whether it was all right to touch each other or make too much noise. Someone got on the ground and started chanting ‘run’. I insisted that we needed to find a way to simulate violence. A small group detached and started running around aimlessly.

I bring this up because, throughout that day, I had been thinking about fictionality. Catherine Gallagher writes that fiction, as the familiar conceptual framework that we know it as today, was ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ in the 18th century.¹ What she means by fiction isn’t general tale-telling, but instead the establishment of a fictional world which exists parallel to reality, and divorced from it, in which characters do not correspond with real people and, on the other end of the spectrum, are not archetypes, and which mimics reality without actually intervening in it. Gallagher links the rise of this kind of fiction with the novel. So, the novel as a detached, portable story, which tells realistic narratives about realistic people who nevertheless do not exist, constituted an innovation in fictionality.

This idea of fiction as detached and portable has been haunting my thoughts lately, alongside the idea that there have historically been other ways to access stories that are not quite real. Of course an invitation to participate in a spontaneous performance, like the one we were encouraged to produce during the symposium, would baffle and even upset me. I am used to encountering fictional stories as things that are discrete and packaged, mediated by screen, or text, and always by genre. This is not to say that storytelling is not woven into my experience of everyday life — I’ve written before about how social media sites function as collective texts — but fiction is always demarcated as a separate space. The rise of the novel, of course, is paired with a slow decline in live performance. In a pre-novel society, live performance often provided a space for fictional text and audience to interact with each other. The performance of myths or satires did not create a decontextualized fictional space, but instead one that reached out toward history and the present. Audience could heckle actors or groan in sympathy. Metatheatricality — which we now associate, above all, with the Brechtian mandate to detach oneself from the text, and to reflect and analyze — reminded the audience that it was a group of spectators watching a play, and encouraged the audience to make connections between the structure of theatrical space and the structure of ‘real life’.

This is not a call to return to tradition or anything like that. I will never be a 16th century audience member shouting at an actor at the Globe Theatre, and I will never be an Athenian, with years of choral experience behind me, watching a Sophoclean premiere. I grew up with the novel and with movies, with portable narratives that one sits quietly to read or watch, and this has formed me just as it has formed my notion of what fiction is. But I have always wondered what it would mean for fiction to leak out of its novelistic form — to intervene in some meaningful way. It’s easy to fall into platitudes about how much books matter, and I don’t want to do that. So, for now, I have no answers to this question that satisfy me, but I’m certainly thinking about it. In the meantime, let me sketch out three models of fiction-audience relationship that have been on my mind lately.

1. Fiction as Escape

This feels like the dominant way that people interacted with fiction when I was growing up. It’s still very present, especially, I think, for people even slightly older than me (I’m 27). This is the ultimate conclusion of the detached novelistic form. Here, fiction provides an alternate reality that one can slip into when one needs a break from one’s own life. There’s an acceptance that fiction is so detached from reality as to be almost arbitrary — in fact, the power of this model comes from the fact that fiction and reality do not interact. Like all fiction-audience interactions, this insistent separation of fiction from reality creates a worldview. I’d call it a fact-based worldview: there are things that are true and there are things that are fictional. People with this worldview are not very well equipped to deal with other peoples’ heavy narrativization, so they probably feel very confused and alarmed about some currents in the contemporary cultural and political landscape. I think this model is in its late stage.

2. Fiction as World

So many people have written about this already, so I just want to emphasize that it fits into this history of audience-fiction interactions. With this model, fiction becomes immersive and intertwined with the rhythms and logic of daily life. What’s crucial about this is that it’s not an equal life-fiction exchange — instead, one imports fictional structures and ideas and superimposes them onto ‘reality’. This necessitates a more active audience member than the escape model — the reader/watcher discovers and mobilizes information in their text of choice. The text constellates around the reader. Examples of this are: getting really into open world video games, getting obsessed with celebrity (or any other kind of) ‘lore’, conspiracy mindset, and being the kind of fantasy fan who loves sprawling series with really developed ‘worlds’. What is important about this is that the boundaries between the real and the fictional start to erode. I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing — in fact, I think it’s quite unnatural to hold fiction at such a severe remove as the escape model necessitates — but I do think that, at its core, this model is derived from the escapist model. This means that it’s not about negotiating the real and the fictional together, as an interwoven sort of inner landscape, but instead about rejecting the real for the fictional so much that the fictional obscures the real.

3. Fiction as Intervention?

And so we are back here. I guess what I’m trying to do is imagine a way out of the sharp reality/fiction binary that, I think, really isn’t healthy for anyone. Fictional stories can help people build community, and express and allocate meaning. They help to organize the material of raw experience, and designate what is valuable in that material. I’d like to be able to talk about fiction in a way that maps this process and imagines new ways for it to happen. Again, I don’t have any answers, so I’ll just share an anecdote.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to reread one of my favorite books, The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. I was surprised, when I opened the copy on my bookshelf, to find that it wasn’t actually my own copy, which I had long ago lent to my brother, but instead a copy that my friend had annotated for me. I had shelved it and forgotten about it.

Reading this annotated book felt like reading a favorite novel, yes, but it also felt like reading a letter from a friend. The annotations gave the book another layer of context. Something so grounded in my physical and emotional reality could not be an escape of any kind. I’m still thinking through this experience, but when I finished the book, I had a strong sense that some agency that existed between Gene Wolfe and my friend Alana had intervened in my life, at least in my week. The book gained meaning and presence, and I’m still thinking about the experience.

I’m not saying that the solution is to annotate books and send them to friends — that’s a very nice thing to do, but it’s one thing, so to suggest it as a cure-all would be trite. but the experience has me wondering — what kind of intervention was it? what other sorts of things can be interventions? what other possibilities are there for interactions between the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’? what are some useful tools to complicate that binary?

Please do comment if you have any thoughts/answers/examples of encounters with fiction that have felt like interventions!

1. Gallagher, C. (2006). ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, in Moretti, F. (ed), The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.