In Defense of A "Modernist Taboo"

Interpretations of experience; once again I tout M John Harrison in ways he probably wouldn't approve of

In The Point magazine, Toril Moi sings the praises of intuitive reading, and lambasts the primacy of formalism in literary analysis. I take issue with this.

From the outside, at least, The Point feels like an inside-baseball sort of outlet, offering criticism about the practice and (crucially) the profession of criticism, and in the main I think we can read Moi’s “Real Characters” in that light. To summate, the essay frames the institutional focus on formalist analysis of fiction (understanding fiction largely by its method of presentation and arrangement, how things are described) over direct character and plot analysis (understanding fiction based on the bare facts and implications of what is described, or as Moi puts it, “treating characters as though they were real”) as an intra-professional phenomenon, which is to say a class phenomenon. The ancient Aristotelian position of plot- and character-primacy is understood in this formulation to be the naive position, the mindset you bring to fiction before the academy trains it out of you, or tries to. The newer formalist position is the received wisdom you supplant the old instinct with. Thus, we understand the orthodoxy of literary analysis as a site of historical (and ideological) struggle.

Moi identifies in modernist critic L.C. Knights movement toward formalist critique a delineation, or creation, of an exclusive class of critics; real, serious critics focus on intangible and deduced theories of what the work is “doing” or what is “happening” between the lines, whereas laymen and vulgarians focus merely (“”) on the mechanics of plot and character on the page, their causations and motivations. We start there.

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I’m not a critic in any professional sense, and with regard to the direction and evolution of that role in the culture industries, I’ll defer to Moi. But she fundamentally posits the critic, the academic, as a propagator and gatekeeper whose ideas about what craft is and how it should be read have considerable weight; it is intimated, through discussion of an earlier essay on the subject by Laura Baudot, that critics following the modernist playbook espouse methods that are cavalier at best and consciously elitist at worst.

Naturally, the bifurcated frame and the subtle(ish) invocations of atavism bring out a certain tinge of the reactionary in Moi’s language. She might as well be talking about the American coasts vs. flyover states, the ivory tower vs, the heartland. In some respects it feels as though we are not more than a few degrees removed from the populist grievance of “let people enjoy things”. There are certainly nuances to the history of modernist critical development that Moi touches on — for example, far from aristocrat-academics in the mold of MR James or JRR Tolkien, Knights and his cohort of modernist partisans were by and large from the lower classes. Despite the clarity of the thesis we, get a sense of how complicated its context could get.

My sense of fiction has been shaped and tempered over the years through writers’ workshops, environments that I’m sure Moi would agree are steeped in the orthodoxy of method she identifies. Writing, as we know, is mostly reading — both in the sense that we reify, if obliquely, style and technique from what we read, and in that the product of writing is not actualized until it is read by an audience. And since I don’t recognize any meaningful delineation between “active reading” as a layman and reading as a critic, this conception of how one should analyze fiction as a critic cannot be cleanly divided from how one should read or write fiction. So when we talk about understanding fiction as a critic, we are talking about understanding fiction, full stop.

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The clarity of Moi’s thesis makes my job easier:

There is no good philosophical or theoretical reason to accept the taboo on treating fictional characters as if they were real.

My counter-thesis is: there are good reasons, actually. Very good ones. And here I must drag out and extrapolate once again from M. John Harrison’s writings on genre fiction, which exist thanks to the Wayback Machine. The arguments I make from them are mine alone; I can’t say whether their purposeful deletion from the extant web indicates Harrison’s evolved feelings, let alone his exasperation with arguing over them. Using them in any form necessarily constitutes a misuse of the text — among other things, Harrison is very clear about the bounds of his arguments which I will now proceed to ignore and probably misrepresent. Such are the dangers of public discourse.

Harrison, as I’ve written about before, denounces the practice of “worldbuilding” in science fiction / fantasy literature, deriving in large part from the ur-example of geek culture universes, Tolkien’s exhaustively detailed Lord of the Rings mythos.

Harrison’s argument is, on the one hand, one of craft on the aforementioned grounds of reading-as-writing. The entire position of worldbuilding, from his perspective, deifies the writer over the reader: The writer defines what the fiction is, what it’s “about”, what things look like, who characters are, where they’re from, etc. In other words the writer creates an object that is “real”, in the sense that it exists apart from him and that its intended characteristics can be positively known by someone else coming across it, even in the complete absence of the author.

The reader, for their part, passively observes the created object, and receives the messages inscribed upon it; they can understand it, or else get it wrong. Harrison plainly considers this to be malpractice on the part of authors, on the grounds that fantasy, in every sense of the word, only lives in the mind of the reader, and only then where the writer cedes control of the fiction. When Moi describes a nominally new wave of writers whose work displays “…preoccupation with what it is like to be alive here and now, what it is like to exist in a specific historical and social moment… [with] a striking capacity to make the reader experience the characters and the world they inhabit as real,” it’s worth questioning whether the conveyance of such experience is meaningfully possible in the sense of a reader’s enlightenment, even when some similar (“”) experiential memory (which is itself interpreted) is readily available from within the reader to compare against. And if that bridge of meaning is not possible, what does fiction achieve when the attempt is made? Can mistranslations and misunderstandings coexist?

On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, Harrison’s argument is political in nature. He identifies as Baudrillardian, and my arguments in support of Moi’s taboo is likewise Baudrillardian. Harrison puts it this way (emphasis mine):

… 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.

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As we emerge from the trailing edge of postmodernism we begin to see how many of its by-now-naturalised assumptions need challenging if it isn’t to become as much of a dead hand as the modernism it revised into existence to be its opposite. The originally vertiginous and politically exciting notion of relativism that underlies the idea of “worlds” is now only one of the day-to-day huckstering mechanisms of neoliberalism. My argument isn’t really with writers, readers or gamers, (or even with franchisers in either the new or old media); it is a political argument, made even more urgent as a heavily-mediatised world moves from the prosthetic to the virtual, allowing the massively managed and flattered contemporary self to ignore the steady destruction of the actual world on which it depends. This situation needs to change, and it will. At the moment, the fossilised remains of the postmodern paradigm (which encourages us to believe three stupid things before breakfast: firstly that we can change the real world into a fully prosthetic environment without loss or effort; secondly that there are no facts, only competing stories about the world; & thirdly that it’s possible to meaningfully write the words “a world” outside the domains of imagination or metaphor, a solecism which allows us to feel safely distant from the consequences of our actions) are in the way of that.

Put another way: Reading a story “as though it were real”, which describes both Harrison’s SFF worldbuilding and Moi’s extrapolation of fiction to a kind of lived truth, presupposes that the story read, inside the envelope of imagination, is less solid and contains less obvious truth value than the “real” world that the reader experiences. If this seems like a ludicrously heady concept… welcome to Baudrillard! I’ll try to explain.

The idea, which also arises in narratological and (especially) linguistic thought from the last half century, is that a description of a thing through language — for example, the lazy or violent tendencies of a race of people, or indeed a stratum of people as a coherent “race” — defines and frames that thing in a way that is not necessarily true, but is digested as fact, as a border of reasonable thought and assumption. When Baudrillard calls out “simulacra” he is talking about a simulation — the interpretation of a thing, a description that is anything but neutral — being laundered as the actual thing, as fact. This is the step from modernism to postmodernism: recognizing the significance of structures below the bare features of an interpretation, then recognizing the uncertainty of what the structure produces, what it’s meant to produce.

In this way we can say that language “defines” or even “creates” what’s even thought possible; for the most part, people can only think of things in the context of their description, until some experience of the world repaves their synapses. If you take this phenomenon seriously, you begin to understand the potential power of a story.

The word “propaganda” is extremely charged in public discourse, at least in the US (where charlatans are envied far more than they’re despised), but in at least some academic circles it’s viewed neutrally, as any kind of narrative makes an argument about the state of the world and its possibilities. Arguably every story is “propaganda” in one way or another. That this is not agreed upon as fact might stand as evidence of how some stories have become so successful that they’re no longer recognized as stories. A definition of reality: The story that cannot be, in any way, fungible, that can only ever be understood one way, the story whose truth value you can trust implicitly.

It’s precisely this power of stories to suggest and define possibility which so repulses Harrison; he sees a world in which no meaningful action can possibly be taken against climate crisis, specifically, as a world created by stories that we tell. And it’s that sort of power to limit possibility which makes reading reality in fiction, as a thing that could be desired or prescribed, at least a little bit alarming.

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So all of this is entangled: The anti-worldbuilding understanding of writing craft from Harrison, the postmodernist construction of political possibility; the reactionary urge to place trust in a reader’s capacity to recognize and parse reality in fiction, the like urge to trust in a writer’s capacity to describe and transmit a true reality to be recognized and parsed. Positivism — calling a spade a spade, the thing that pre-exists and can be known; relativism — the spade as many possible things, the thing that is made and can only be interpreted. All of it is a matter of trust and assumption.

All of which is to say: There are good reasons not to treat fictional characters as though they were real! The implied arguments about what real means and the authority it gives to assumptions within and without the story are weighty. Prima facie judgments about what a story must produce in the reader — the value of that production, the derivative assumptions rendered from it — leaves that reader open to all sorts of laundered ideas about the world, the conditions and possibilities of human existence. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but not something to be taken lightly either.

I don’t believe it’s enough to expect that a reader should imagine counterfactuals to a text. For that matter, I don’t believe an author has any real control over the lessons imparted by their work (see: The Wachowskis, The Matrix and the “obvious” meaning of its pills; neoreactionary interpretations seem closer to a “traditional” bare reading of the text than a modernist or postmodernist reading). The postmodern perspective on narrative has it mired in shell games, discord and trickery. The reader should always be skeptical of what they consume and what’s to be absorbed from it. If we are to, as Moi admonishes, “…try to acknowledge, as far as possible, what our own investments in a topic are,” we have to do that by deepening, rather than abandoning, our interrogation of intuitive readings.

It may be that this is all an extension of, rather than a rejoinder to, Moi’s arguments; Baudrillard was the quintessential postmodernist (second only to, perhaps, Foucault) and Moi largely leaves postmodernism out of her essay’s scope, except to say that the “existential turn” in contemporary fiction, as she calls it, is produced from its inadequacy and exhaustion. But I’m not convinced we’ve been made free from the anxieties of postmodern reading.