I'm reminded of M John Harrison's old screed against fiction as "worldbuilding," which he compares to a manual for a vacuum cleaner, and places in this in opposition to his belief that writing is mostly done by the reader.
Probably my most recent experience of fiction as intervention was rereading Samuel Delany's Dhalgren with a loosely organized asynchronous reading group. The reading group was chaotic and uneven, people worked through the book at wildly different paces, had extremely varied reactions--many didn't finish--and in retrospect this felt extremely appropriate for the book. Perversely I think reading along with people who gave up on the book, and seeing in particular at which points they quit, lent the fictional city of Bellona an extratextual presence as a sort of place that we spent time in and left.
that particular screed has been on my mind a lot over the past few months. i'm trying not to see worldbuilding type fiction (or worldbuilding as something the reader agrees to engage with?) as a bad thing, but i'm struggling a lot with what any positive affordances of this model could be.
it's really funny that you bring up delaney! he is one of my touchstones for fiction as intervention. bellona is such a textual place that really feels like it starts to overlap with one's experience of the world. my favorite from him is probably trouble on triton, which feels like an intellectual exercise with real implications as much as it feels like a novel. also, to share my dhalgren experience, i read it about five years ago, and when i finished it i threw it off a balcony in frustration (i now regret this for so many reasons). i found it so frustrating to read, but since then it's only gone up in my estimation and i find myself thinking about it a lot. i'd love to revisit it now that i've read more of his work.
I really like Triton, it's one of my favorites also. It's interesting to read it against le Guin's The Dispossessed (a reading which I think Delany encourages with his subtitle). Other differences aside, The Dispossessed felt more novelistic and satisfying to me, whereas Triton, as you say, is both a novel and an exercise, one which I think Delany leaves unsolved on many levels. We are left to work out the implications ourselves, which I think is why it's left such a lasting impression on me.
I don't have a coherent idea about what a positive vision of the worldbuilding model might be, but the closest I've gotten is something like that ambiguity. Bellona is described in vivid detail (as with much worldbuilding fiction) but also with ambiguity and uncertainty. There is no map after the title page, or clear history (like with Harrison's Viriconium books). So I'm pushed to bring Bellona into explicit conversation with the cities I've lived in and experienced, as opposed to the literal fantasy of some worldbuilding: that a city can be almost entirely constructed within the text, and all that is left to the reader is a little imaginative coloring between the lines.
Have you read Delany's Neveryon books? I read them also probably five years ago, and I enjoyed them, but I've been meaning to reread them for a while now. I have a feeling I'll find more in them. I think I remember them having some engagement with that sort of ambiguous historicity.
you know, i haven't read the dispossessed since i was a teenager, and i'm not sure i got a lot out of it at the time. if i were to write the ultimate triton essay that i'm envisioning i would have to revisit it.
i really like what you've said about bellona as a city which doesn't actually exist in the context of a science fictional landscape, but is forced into dialogue with the 'real world'. this is giving me a lot to think about, and i think i'll bring this idea with me as i try to find more work that feels like serious intervention.
and i have not read them (i am very bad at being any kind of completionist and for some reason have a horror of series) but i guess he's good enough that i probably should!
oooo lots to chew on here (first among them the incipient nature of the “it’s so easy, just get out of your shell and improvise with a text! aren’t you a performance/theater/literature scholar after all?” command!). autofiction/autotheory seems like a particularly suitable vista for thinking fiction as intervention, given its movement in the other direction (audience is necessitated a different modality of engagement by nature of the text). I’m thinking Hervé Guibert or Miranda July’s new book or Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma or Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, something along those lines… what does that stir up for you? I also think about reading fiction for form—it’s (often momentary) revealing of mobile and suggestive forms already existent in the world—as a way out of the consumer binary (Giovanni’s Room is a good example of this!). Loved the post, the perfect balance of provocative and productive.
oh also Sartre’s designation of the two forms of experimental poetry (explosive vs like retrenching or smt I think?) in his essay that introduces Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers might be helpful here? Maybe not? Idk? Is this helping?
thanks for your comments, i hadn't even thought about autofiction as it's not something i've engaged with in any depth and now i'm looking at this from a different angle. i'd have to read some of the books you mentioned or something else with that sort of structure to give you a full response, but right now this is making me think of a certain kind of quasi-novel that is concerned with narrativizing and archiving history while still retaining some of the trappings of fictionality, i.e. daša drndić's work or adania shibli's minor detail. this is really complicating the strict definition of fiction that i sketched out above, but at the same time, works like these are unquestionably novels situated in the lineage of novel writing. much to think about, it would be interesting to write a future post about books that take novelistic fictionality as a starting point and then reach toward some kind of contact or confrontation with the specifics of the real.
i agree entirely that reading for form is 'a way out of the consumer binary', this is a wonderful way to put it. sometimes i like to think of a book as a conceptual toolkit, or a lens that can be overlaid on different situations. this means that there's really no 'putting down' the book.
and thanks for bringing sartre to my attention here, i'll look into his framework. i've also been meaning to read jaeggy for years, maybe this is my sign.
Fleur is a fucking icon!!! think you would love Sweet Days of Discipline, and I’ve got a total soft spot for Water Statues and I am the Brother of XX ; also Daša is such a great reference point for this, would love to see what you write about that !!!
This was a great post thank you for sharing. I don’t think so quite have an answer but this week I finished reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of The Sower (as part of a reading list for my qualifying exams) and I think it would fall in the category of Fiction as Intervention. It was too grounded in not just my but perhaps a collective, our physical and emotional reality if you are one to just look around. It still had a clear line of demarcation that separates it as Fiction as World. In someways it seemed like an instruction manual of things needed to prepare, both from our environment, our belief systems, and the people we keep around us, for a harrowing world that was present and still is yet come to pass in its totality - atleast for us in the US.
i haven't read the parable of the sower yet, but have been meaning to for ages. i think that you hit upon something important here, which is that sci fi has a lot of potential to function as an intervention. i think there is something very materially powerful in the ability to imagine a future. it's an inherently politicized genre in this way.
unfortunately i don't have any essays on this, that set of categories is just something i thought up -- however, i've been reading a lot more on the history of fiction/fictionality, so if i come across something, i'll link it here.
I'm reminded of M John Harrison's old screed against fiction as "worldbuilding," which he compares to a manual for a vacuum cleaner, and places in this in opposition to his belief that writing is mostly done by the reader.
Probably my most recent experience of fiction as intervention was rereading Samuel Delany's Dhalgren with a loosely organized asynchronous reading group. The reading group was chaotic and uneven, people worked through the book at wildly different paces, had extremely varied reactions--many didn't finish--and in retrospect this felt extremely appropriate for the book. Perversely I think reading along with people who gave up on the book, and seeing in particular at which points they quit, lent the fictional city of Bellona an extratextual presence as a sort of place that we spent time in and left.
that particular screed has been on my mind a lot over the past few months. i'm trying not to see worldbuilding type fiction (or worldbuilding as something the reader agrees to engage with?) as a bad thing, but i'm struggling a lot with what any positive affordances of this model could be.
it's really funny that you bring up delaney! he is one of my touchstones for fiction as intervention. bellona is such a textual place that really feels like it starts to overlap with one's experience of the world. my favorite from him is probably trouble on triton, which feels like an intellectual exercise with real implications as much as it feels like a novel. also, to share my dhalgren experience, i read it about five years ago, and when i finished it i threw it off a balcony in frustration (i now regret this for so many reasons). i found it so frustrating to read, but since then it's only gone up in my estimation and i find myself thinking about it a lot. i'd love to revisit it now that i've read more of his work.
I really like Triton, it's one of my favorites also. It's interesting to read it against le Guin's The Dispossessed (a reading which I think Delany encourages with his subtitle). Other differences aside, The Dispossessed felt more novelistic and satisfying to me, whereas Triton, as you say, is both a novel and an exercise, one which I think Delany leaves unsolved on many levels. We are left to work out the implications ourselves, which I think is why it's left such a lasting impression on me.
I don't have a coherent idea about what a positive vision of the worldbuilding model might be, but the closest I've gotten is something like that ambiguity. Bellona is described in vivid detail (as with much worldbuilding fiction) but also with ambiguity and uncertainty. There is no map after the title page, or clear history (like with Harrison's Viriconium books). So I'm pushed to bring Bellona into explicit conversation with the cities I've lived in and experienced, as opposed to the literal fantasy of some worldbuilding: that a city can be almost entirely constructed within the text, and all that is left to the reader is a little imaginative coloring between the lines.
Have you read Delany's Neveryon books? I read them also probably five years ago, and I enjoyed them, but I've been meaning to reread them for a while now. I have a feeling I'll find more in them. I think I remember them having some engagement with that sort of ambiguous historicity.
you know, i haven't read the dispossessed since i was a teenager, and i'm not sure i got a lot out of it at the time. if i were to write the ultimate triton essay that i'm envisioning i would have to revisit it.
i really like what you've said about bellona as a city which doesn't actually exist in the context of a science fictional landscape, but is forced into dialogue with the 'real world'. this is giving me a lot to think about, and i think i'll bring this idea with me as i try to find more work that feels like serious intervention.
and i have not read them (i am very bad at being any kind of completionist and for some reason have a horror of series) but i guess he's good enough that i probably should!
oooo lots to chew on here (first among them the incipient nature of the “it’s so easy, just get out of your shell and improvise with a text! aren’t you a performance/theater/literature scholar after all?” command!). autofiction/autotheory seems like a particularly suitable vista for thinking fiction as intervention, given its movement in the other direction (audience is necessitated a different modality of engagement by nature of the text). I’m thinking Hervé Guibert or Miranda July’s new book or Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma or Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, something along those lines… what does that stir up for you? I also think about reading fiction for form—it’s (often momentary) revealing of mobile and suggestive forms already existent in the world—as a way out of the consumer binary (Giovanni’s Room is a good example of this!). Loved the post, the perfect balance of provocative and productive.
oh also Sartre’s designation of the two forms of experimental poetry (explosive vs like retrenching or smt I think?) in his essay that introduces Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers might be helpful here? Maybe not? Idk? Is this helping?
and what to do with someone like Fleur Jaeggy? where does that fiction take us? (wheels turning now)
thanks for your comments, i hadn't even thought about autofiction as it's not something i've engaged with in any depth and now i'm looking at this from a different angle. i'd have to read some of the books you mentioned or something else with that sort of structure to give you a full response, but right now this is making me think of a certain kind of quasi-novel that is concerned with narrativizing and archiving history while still retaining some of the trappings of fictionality, i.e. daša drndić's work or adania shibli's minor detail. this is really complicating the strict definition of fiction that i sketched out above, but at the same time, works like these are unquestionably novels situated in the lineage of novel writing. much to think about, it would be interesting to write a future post about books that take novelistic fictionality as a starting point and then reach toward some kind of contact or confrontation with the specifics of the real.
i agree entirely that reading for form is 'a way out of the consumer binary', this is a wonderful way to put it. sometimes i like to think of a book as a conceptual toolkit, or a lens that can be overlaid on different situations. this means that there's really no 'putting down' the book.
and thanks for bringing sartre to my attention here, i'll look into his framework. i've also been meaning to read jaeggy for years, maybe this is my sign.
Fleur is a fucking icon!!! think you would love Sweet Days of Discipline, and I’ve got a total soft spot for Water Statues and I am the Brother of XX ; also Daša is such a great reference point for this, would love to see what you write about that !!!
This was a great post thank you for sharing. I don’t think so quite have an answer but this week I finished reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of The Sower (as part of a reading list for my qualifying exams) and I think it would fall in the category of Fiction as Intervention. It was too grounded in not just my but perhaps a collective, our physical and emotional reality if you are one to just look around. It still had a clear line of demarcation that separates it as Fiction as World. In someways it seemed like an instruction manual of things needed to prepare, both from our environment, our belief systems, and the people we keep around us, for a harrowing world that was present and still is yet come to pass in its totality - atleast for us in the US.
Also do you have any articles or essays on fiction as world, as escape, and as intervention framework?
i haven't read the parable of the sower yet, but have been meaning to for ages. i think that you hit upon something important here, which is that sci fi has a lot of potential to function as an intervention. i think there is something very materially powerful in the ability to imagine a future. it's an inherently politicized genre in this way.
unfortunately i don't have any essays on this, that set of categories is just something i thought up -- however, i've been reading a lot more on the history of fiction/fictionality, so if i come across something, i'll link it here.