The Future of Fiction

In its July/August number (30:5) the American Book Review asked 64 writers, mostly innovators (ABR is a great champion of innovative writing), to explain briefly what the future of fiction is, and 13 of those to elaborate their response. ABR's editors left open the question of the sort of fiction meant (mainstream or innovative), how "fiction" is to be defined, and whether it was a prediction of what fiction's future was likely to be, or a recommendation of what fiction would have to do or become in order to be a useful, meaningful practice. Respondents combined these variables as they pleased, and so the results did not form a consensus. Some recurring themes were the persistence of story-telling, the increasing importance of independent literary presses, the need to deal with, or to resist, electronic delivery systems and compositional tools, the increasing importance of collaboration and anonymity and recombinant texts (and by implication other sorts of constrained writing).

Here's my manifesto, to wrap up this series of posts on innovative fiction.

1. In the future fiction writers must place a higher value on prose and prosaics. They must invent and deploy a diction, a phrasing, a sentence more expressive than the default gesture of American demotic speech that too many writers use in order not to seem pretentious, and equally must distance itself from the stilted stylistic "literary" flourishes imitated from European literature in translation. I am not calling for a single American prose style. We have operated long enough with the Hemingway-Carver Elliptical Gesture to want to find some real alternatives, a lot of alternatives. Parataxis is good, syntaxis is good, the Attic and the periodic still survive, but could we call some other taxis now? We need to renew the fleet.

2. It must be readerly, that is, it must engage readers who read as creative collaborators, instead of offering to fiction-consumers no more than entertainment and information, the combination of autobiography and journalism that marks so much mainstream writing. Leave the MFA the-reader-must-relate! tricks to nonfiction. They use them more effectively anyway, if sales are any indication. If all the fiction writers in America were to down pens for a year and instead read in all the Englishes that have ever been written, from the Scottish Chaucerians to the Guyanese, we would see a surge in the level of American language-consciousness. Herman Melville read Sir Thomas Browne; we have to find our Urne-Buriall.

3. Fiction can no longer be taught in the universities and colleges. Whatever good MFA programs may do to the apprentices who enroll in them, they are poison to the writer who teaches in them, who must articulate and apply canons of correctness. Instead, let a scholarly professoriate be trained to teach literature defined as broadly as possible, to redouble the energy with which prose and poetry and drama and nonfiction are read and studied, so that BAs graduate having read a few books and with some sense of the possibilities that language might offer a writer. And how about requiring the study of other languages and literatures?

4. Fiction can no longer be thought of as a commodity in the possession of an author, to be sold and paid for in royalties, celebrity, grants, fellowships, residencies, prizes, and professorships. Fiction writers must make their living doing something else. Fiction, like most of the arts, belongs in the gift economy. For gifts made in good faith, without expectation of reward, there will be a return.

5. Fiction must be a telling and a teaching. Tales differ from stories by making the teller present in the narrative, and fables extend tales by proposing a teaching. Fiction should be fabulist: not "new wave fabulist" in the mode of some recent anthologies, where most of the work is mimetic lifestyle-realism with a few elements of magic, fantasy, or horror. It should function as a fable, and its agents, if not animals, should be creaturely. Its prose should be creaturely. Writers working in New Media won't be able to practice this kind of writing, but then what such writers produce is more poetry than fiction.

I don't know if this will be the future of innovative fiction, but most of the other avenues don't offer much hope, if narrative prose is to keep evolving and make itself useful and desirable. Steve Katz, surely one of the sanest and freshest voices in American fiction today, wrote two entries, one short and one long, in the ABR, deploying in both an extended metaphor drawn from nanotechnology:

I write this from among the tubules, where the nanoguys assemble themselves into organizations sometimes useful.… Though miniscule in my expression of myself, I am not diminished. Fiction is my citadel and its future my obsession. I see God in these nanotubes, and realize that is where It sequesters these days. There the future of fiction abides.…One thing I've observed about the nanocritters is that all their molecules are on the surface. How to translate that into the production of fiction is a conundrum, since authors' molecules are invariably found at differing depths. Nanos are almost impossible to influence, particularly into useful thicknesses and functions..… Fiction is their priority. They have many priorities, and fiction is one of them. (12)

Steve has composed a fabulist fiction here, and it remains for us to decide what the molecules are and how the nanoguys can be harnessed to their task, or simply allowed to perform it on their own or in collaboration with "authors." Deleuze and Guattari's distinction of the molecular from the molar may help, for those who have had the patience to tackle A Thousand Plateaus. But surely those molecules have to do with language, with the combinations of language-phenomena, so rarely entirely within a writer's control yet so necessary to respect.

By hanging with the nanos, although I can hardly say I've hooked up, I can't but present great hope for the future of fiction.