Since I decided to begin doing Shout It Out Monday I am ever on the alert for an interesting quote. Now here’s the thing, and this would happen to me even before I decided to start sharing a weekly reading quote, I’ll save a quote that when I read it seemed so amazing and then a day or two later when I read it again it has lost its sparkle.
That’s what has happened this week. I was reading Claire Messud’s review of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and came on this:
The novel form, capacious and elastic as it is, nevertheless requires that ideas and emotions—all abstractions, really— be pressed and transformed, passed through the fine sieve of the material world and made manifest in action, conversation, and concrete detail. Fiction is created out of T- shirts and tomato plants, oven fries, chalk dust and rainfall, out of snarky exchanges and subtle glances. Constructing a world out of these apparently random bits—“the nearest thing to life,” as George Eliot put it—is a matter of meticulous imagining and careful craft. Making this fictional world come alive is a matter, as Martha Graham put it, of the life force.
In the moment it made me warm and glowy inside, yes, oh yes so perfectly true! But now rereading it I feel differently. It is still a good quote but it implies that fiction is supposed to be realist. It doesn’t leave room for anything else. And that put out the warm and glowy because I recalled what Amitav Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement about how reproducing the world as it exists doesn’t need to be the project of fiction. That in fact, such an approach shuts down possibilities more often than not and limits scope and imagination. How about a Messed – Ghosh cage fight? Who do you think would win?
Messud is likely trying to make a point that it’s the little details that matter, those small and seemingly random bits are what give fiction life. But at the same time it seems she is singling out this fiction but not that fiction and that matters to me.
Perhaps I am reading more into it than there actually is. I am very sensitive to words these days and what might be hiding in and behind them.
I see why these words might give you pause, but even that definition of fiction feels elastic. I think back to my feelings of Trudi Canavan’s fiction, fantasy of the highest order, but how humans emote, how they interact, those details are so real you can taste them. I think those small details can lend reality to the most fantastical tale, and help people imagine things that do not exist in our world as real, simply because the words used to describe them stimulate the senses by which we understand our world. Your simply giving them something new to sense. If its something that cannot be detected by those senses, then what you get is Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space- something horrific for its invisible, indefinable nature. It exists, yet the characters cannot perceive it, only its effects.
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Kathryn, oh yes, I agree, the abstract definitely needs to be made concrete and that can be done even with things that don’t exist like sentient space ships and dragons and Westeros. It’s Messud’s choice of details that bothers me and that George Eliot quote that implies it is the everyday things that give fiction life and force and somehow makes it authentic.
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As someone who has taught both creative and academic writing and now teaches a class on how to teach writing, I would like to say that it is my experience that every writer begins trying to teach writing with a concerted attempt to guide the student towards being able to write just like he does.
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Jeanne, haha! Oh that explains a lot! 🙂
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I’m with you.
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😀
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I am voting for Ghosh. Agree that fiction should be realistic, but that cannot be the only criterion…In fact saying fiction is realistic is kind of limiting and somehow seems to nullify it’s very being – i.e. being a work of imagination. It is this figment of creativity that is key to fiction and differentiates it from other genre. So it can be realistic, but that is not necessarily a mandate!
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cirtnecce, I’m with you and Ghosh. I do like realism but it shouldn’t be the only “legitimate” form of fiction and I think that attitude is still far too prevalent.
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Whatever about ideas, the notion that emotions are non-material abstractions is impoverishing and in fact unrealistic. The fiction resulting would be very flat. There are some interesting reviews of the new Zadie smith around.
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I want different fictions to encompass both realist and non realist ways of looking at the world. I don’t have a problem with “realist” fiction at all – as long as it doesn’t assume that it has an automatic primacy in the world of fiction. Of course even a seemingly ultra realist/naturalist text like Dreiser’s An American Tragedy has some surprisingly non naturalist aspects (some surprising affinities with Bunyan).
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Ian, maybe I should put you up as a Monday quote sometime, you expressed exactly what I was thinking so well! 🙂
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Maggie, oh what an interesting point you make about emotions! They are a completely embodied thing and not abstract at all. Smith’s novel has been getting some interesting reviews which have been serving to make me really curious about it.
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Maybe this is how Messud works her fiction and how she sees Zadie Smith’s writing? It is tricky since I think there are as many interpretations for something like this as there are writers. But the quote is nice–from a first time reading it perspective. Now you need to find a Ghosh quote for the other side of the coin! 😉
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Danielle, there is a perfect Ghosh quote at the other end of the Ghosh link after Messud 🙂 You are right though, Messud can be interpreted in a variety of ways and just because she elevates the realist in this quote doesn’t mean she disparages everything else, you make a good point about that! 🙂
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I had to read and reread that quotation a few times, and I’m still not sure I understand what she means, exactly. But perhaps she referring to authenticity? That yes, concrete details lend authenticity to a story but even more so, the emotions, conversations, and actions have to “feel” real, even if it’s set in a fantastical world. That’s where the “life force” comes in. Maybe? Maybe I’m totally off. 🙂
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Laila, yes authenticity for sure. I think she is also talking about how fiction needs to be concrete rather than abstract, that in order for it to have life, it has to be built up from specifics, from details like t-shirts and over fries.
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I think it’s still okay. I vote that it’s still okay, what Messud said! Because I don’t think we’re meant to understand that only fiction that functions in this way is valuable. Messud says that fiction does X thing, but I don’t think what she’s saying precludes the possibility that fiction also does Y and Z things. Right? I think!
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Jenny, yes I am starting to think it might be okay. I think you are right that just because she says fiction does X she isn’t saying it can’t also do Y. She does after all call it capacious and elastic. I think I just keep getting hung up on the details she chooses to name and on the George Eliot reference, Eliot being an incredible realist. So I’m softening. A little 🙂
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I’m not sure that she ONLY means realist though I can see how it might read that way – because of the examples she uses which are very concrete and, well, “real”. Perhaps if we read fairy dust instead of chalk dust!!?
Whatever, I do like the idea of “meticulous imagining and careful craft”.
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whisperinggums, the more I read it and hear other people’s thoughts on it the less growly I feel about it. She totally should have said fairy dust instead of chalk dust! 😀 I do like that phrase you pulled out too because no matter what sort of fiction a writers creates, readers want that “meticulous imaging and careful craft.”
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