Dismal Worlds and Radical Opacity
On Intent and Mastery in Fiction. Plus, M. John Harrison and Baudrillard.
A thing they always tell you about fiction writing is that you should know everything about everything contained within your work. Know the minds of your characters, the geography of setting, the causal relationships of plot. The reader does not necessarily need to know all or even most of it but you, the writer, should, if you’re going to be satisfied with it.
In this rendering fiction can be a simple lantern revealing, in sequence, the plain whole of a story through time. Or in other cases it can be a kind of epistemic burlesque, suggesting and teasing things to the reader without revealing them, withholding definition and truth from characters and readers. That there is in the latter case a substantive and shapely whole behind the feathers and fans is taken for granted as an element of trust between writer and reader.
There’s a longstanding cliché of workshopping that divides writers into “planners”, who plan out their stories, and “pantsers”, who improvise. But the distinction seems to me to be, more than anything else, concerned with the mechanical act of sitting down and writing. In other words, it is more about how you approach the execution of the act, as opposed to the act itself or its product. Planners and improvisers should end up with comparable art, with comparable relationships to their art. They are meant to arrive at the same mastery.
One masters — in the sense of lords over and controls — their fiction, even when they improvise moment to moment, even when the art is purposefully incomplete or mysterious. You should be a God, omniscient, never a subject. All of which is to say that you should be able to know the answer to any question a reader might have. Even if your reply to a reader is “that doesn’t matter,” you should still know what the answer to the question is. And so you should discover all of it, know your fiction inside and out.
This has been a problem for me, or I believed it was, or I was allowed to believe that it was. I approach writing fiction primarily as a reader. I write in large part to fill an unnamable gap in what I read; I have to write that thing I yearn for, whatever it is, into existence. So when I write I am chasing the same excitements that good reading affords me. For a long time I thought this was a problem, and on some level I think it inarguably is; you have to be cognizant of both the things you tend toward naturally and the things you avoid because they’re hard or frightening.
Still, there is a sense that considerable writing is supposed to be work. It is very catholic, in that way. If it or its production is too cavalier, too bacchanal, it can’t be serious. There has to be a little bloodletting. You have to suffer for your art.
For me, mastery — mastering my own writing — entails suffering. Because I don’t read to master a story or a novel. If I had to, I would never read anything; I am never confident that I am picking up everything a book is putting down for me and I don’t enjoy stressing over those things. I am almost always happy with what I get and the weird conclusions I speculatively arrive at.
Perhaps that’s a long way of saying that I’ve come around to Barthes’ “death of the author”, as a reader. I cannot care about what an author intends a story to be or mean — how else could I stand to read Mishima, or Kono? I am not on a quest to reveal the One Truth of a work of fiction.
I’ve made some realizations, and gained some confidence, about my aversion to unpleasurable mastery, through M. John Harrison’s principled arguments against certain approaches to writing. Harrison, who looms ever larger over my conception of fiction with time, holds forth in an old archived blog post (emphasis mine):
My feeling is that the reader performs most of the act of writing. A book spends a very short time being written into existence; it spends the rest of its life being read into existence. That’s why I find in many current uses of the term “active reading” such a deeply ironic tautology. Reading was always “active”; the text itself always demanded the reader’s interaction if the fiction was to be brought forth. There was always a game being played, between writers and readers (for that matter between oral storytellers & listeners), who knew they were gaming a system, & who were delighted to engage each other on those terms.
That quote, and the essay more broadly, are all about “worldbuilding”, which is a specific and contested term in genre fiction. The bolded section is the crux of it: from a craft perspective, Harrison’s contention is that the kind of mastery I’m talking about — the taxonomical mapping of cause and affect, character psychology, geographic setting, metaphoric meanings of images, the deployment of all such things with planning and intent — is a deleterious practice.
Exerting mastery and control over the text, as a writer, leaves less space for the constructive relationship between the reader and the text, which is where fiction really “happens”. In truth, the reader is more the author of a text than the one who records it. And the reader will usually enter a text with the bare minimum of confidence that their read will be definitive. Again, Harrison:
You cannot replicate the world in some symbols, only imply it or allude to it. Even if you could encode the world into language, the reader would not be able to decode with enough precision for the result to be anything but luck. (& think how long it would take!) Writing isn’t that kind of transaction. Communication isn’t that kind of transaction. It’s meant to go along with pointing and works best in such forms as, “Pass me that chair. No, the green one.”
Writing does something else. It not only invites but relies upon reader-participation. Writing and reading are complementary aspects of the same process; much of what appears to be the work of writing is in fact done by the reader in the act of reading. While the writer takes advantage of this, making implications & inviting the reader to do the rest, the worldbuilder–lonely & godlike & in control of (or attempting to be in control of) every piece of footage retrieved from her obsessive creation–induces dependency in the audience, then discovers in the subsequent delirious spiral of self-fulfilling prophecy an excuse to take even more responsibility out of their hands. God’s in her Heaven & all’s right with the “world”.
Harrison’s ire is extended specifically toward so-called “secondary world” fantasies, the Middle Earths, the Galaxies Far, Far Away. As Ryan Elliott notes in his essay “In Versioning” (again, emphasis mine):
Worldbuilding fiction is a subset of popular fiction that focuses on setting as a means of providing immersion. It seeks to replace ‘setting’ with ‘world’, and a conception of the former as merely a rhetorical device with the hope that something more substantive can be referenced instead. After prioritizing the secondary world concept, language becomes a tool not merely to convey setting, but to convince the reader that it possesses qualities of an actual place that we might conceivably visit: consistency; completeness; ontological autonomy (it subsists independently of any one reader or act of reading); and epistemic certainty (we can know things about it via the text). This, however, is a goal that language cannot achieve.
What makes Harrison iconoclastic, and interesting, is that his objection to worldbuilding is not just craft-focused, but political, and it extends beyond the science fiction / fantasy ghettoes in which the merits of worldbuilding are exhaustively fought over.
Harrison’s essential view is Baudrillardian. Jean Baudrillard’s insight, written during the explosion of 1960’s political post-structuralism, was that in the age of mass media, people construct their notions of what’s real and what ought to be from media representations, and from that something like a mirror recursion can occur. A made-up or aspirational image of something can, over time, replace the ideal thing itself, such that the original starts to seem strange and unnatural. As a result, the assumptions of modern life become almost entirely constructed, rather than being grounded in anything natural or real.
For example, Leave it to Beaver’s nuclear family isn’t based on any actual family, and yet it became the de facto standard by which actual real families are judged to be healthy and wholesome. The notion of what wild nature looks like is based almost entirely on highly regulated park systems that are often more terrarium than wildland. What does a safe neighborhood look like? What does a man or a woman look like? Who made these images, and who benefits from them? Not for nothing that in the early going of The Matrix, Neo uses a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation as a hiding place — it is both a pun and an acknowledgement of conceptual debt.
Again, Harrison, lambasting secondary world fiction:
This aspect of the contemporary relationship between readers & fiction is complicated further by the fact that, prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment (in EO Wilson’s sense). The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the wor(l)d “L’Oreal” already exists well upstream of any written or performed act of fantasy. JK Rowling & JRR Tolkien have done well for themselves, but–be honest!–neither of them is anywhere near as successful at worldbuilding as the geniuses who devised “Coke”, or “The Catholic Church”. Along with the prosthetic environment itself, corporate ads & branding exercises are the truly great, truly successful fantasies of our day. As a result the world we live in is already a “secondary creation”. It is already invented. Epic fantasies, gaming & second lives don’t seem to me to be an alternative to this, much less an antidote: they seem to me to be a smallish contributory subset of it.
This argument, by necessity, casts the same jaundiced eye on Jonathan Franzen, or indeed David Brooks, as it does on obsessive architects of genre like George R.R. Martin or James S.E. Corey.
As a Baudrillardian, Harrison seems repulsed by the worlds of fiction because the way that they are explicitly held at arm’s length has an equal-but-opposite reaction of pulling the created worlds of capital we live in, where suffering and ecological collapse are marginal and unavoidable, closer to us, making them more “real” by comparison. Mistaking the hyperreal (Baudrillard’s term for a constructed image adopted as the truth) for the real, to a Baudrillardian, deadens us to possibility. What’s real must also be concrete, immutable, undeniable.
Therefore Harrison, like Brecht before him, identifies a moral obligation in the artist to disrupt the soporific effects of narrative. But where Brecht broke the fourth wall in order to break the spell of fiction, Harrison’s tack is to turn craft against itself. He’s only become more strident about this with time.
In a blog post of his from a few weeks ago, Harrison seems to list out writing stratagems for destabilizing the creation of hyperreality. The source text is unnamed:
…the refusal to site fiction within the epistemological and ontological biases of Hollywood-derived narratology & MBA structural definitions. No subversion only vandalism. Avoid formalist demonstrations of non-formalist propositions. Obstruct Pavlovian reading. If you give one reward for Pavlovian reading, deny the others. Reject editorially driven overcueing. However it looks at the outset, to enter the story requires a one-shot episteme to be constructed by the reader. What you see is what you get. What the character does is the character of the character, character is not a blueprint out of which the character’s acts inevitably arise. The story is what happens. The story is not a blueprint of motives & causalities out of which its events arise. One-sided analogies. Incomplete & false correlatives. Oblique & false or undecodable epihanies. Symbols represent emotional states only partially disclosed. Intense “worldbuilding” in incomplete, mismatched or out-of-focus contexts. Incomplete or broken structures & forms offer the story as a failed or abandoned archeological excavation of itself. Apply tonal variation at will; shift between registers. Irony saturated to the degree that it becomes difficult to tell if irony is present…
I actually recommend reading Harrison’s fiction to anyone, as dense as all this might make him seem. Harrison’s prose is beautiful and clear, almost punishingly so – he is, for the most part, very easy to read – but he refuses to indulge the structures of popular fiction, its delivery of messages and catharsis.
As somebody whose mystification at the lack of these things in his own work has long dogged him, I really vibe with Harrison’s mindset. On many occasions I have brought short stories to a group and there would be some point of contention, some question about what will happen or about what something means, and my answer would be “I don’t know!” I would be advised to work on these things. But the mystery to me as the writer was exciting. Another thing they tell you about writing: If you feel something when you write, the reader would too. And clarifying my stories mostly made me tired. I do not want to tire my readers.
The spirit of Harrison’s conceptual-activist bent, and his success in writing things I want to read, is galvanizing. I had been writing a novel, off and on, for about six months, and it was extremely slow going, 150 words on a good day from very difficult sprints. My mentor pointed out to me that I put myself in a bind in which I was allowed to obsess over how the reader would digest the work; it was a period piece, and so I became hypervigilant to period detail, something like accuracy, restraining the magic of the story with rules and consistency to “pull it off”. And while I appreciate the effort that goes into hyper-realism and “hard” science fiction and simulacra of place and time, I don’t much enjoy reading it. So I dreaded sitting down to write it.
My solution has been to divert — the period draft is in a trunk, so to speak, for the moment — and follow Harrison’s example on a new novel. I suspect that Harrison lacks a structured process to writing, so I don’t feel like I need one either: I care about craft, about coherence on the level of the sentence. But I am writing against harmony in the gestalt, writing in spirals and jagged structures that I hope will resonate with one another strangely, the way that surrealism takes clusters of disparate things and makes them hum in relation to one another. If it feels accidental, all the better. If I have an impulse, I follow it, and decide if it belongs later.
Maybe this is all indulgence, my attempt at finding ostensibly good reasons to avoid best practices I’m too lazy to pursue. But I love weird fiction, I love surreal and sinister things, and the more I write toward them the more I’m convinced that you have to intuit your way toward them. They are purposefully broken.