WORKING BACKWARDS THROUGH those three categories: I remember Kurt Vonnegut’s smiling, shrug-shouldered, but not unserious admission that “like all writers,” he writes his fiction “in the secret utopian hope of changing the world,” and my wanting to differ, politely: “Not all of us, Kurt; some of us just want to get a story told.” I quite allow, however, that if like Vonnegut I had been a prisoner of the Nazi Wehrmacht in World War II and by the merest fluke had survived the Allied bombing of Dresden during my captivity, I might well approach the fictive page with the same “secret hope” as his.
In a similar humor, Donald Barthelme acknowledged to the room his private ambition to write “a book that will change literature forever.” No objection there, especially as Barthelme was neither generalizing nor prescribing, only confessing — but I’d want it pointed out that ambitions of that sort belong to the general aesthetic of Romanticism, which, while not to be sniffed at, is by no means the only viable aesthetic: Virgil, for example, probably didn’t intend his Aeneid to change either literature or the world, only to demonstrate that he and Rome and the Latin language could hold their own with Homer, Hellas, and classical Greek — no small ambition itself.
And then there was Grace Paley’s spirited credo2—when one of my coachees asked her, back in Vietnam War days, how she managed to get any writing done amid her tireless anti-war protesting and occasional consequent jail-time serving — that “Art isn’t important. People are important; politics is important.” To which one wanted to demur, “Well, yes, of course, Grace, but. .” But one held one’s tongue, out of respect for such principled, selfless courage as hers. As one did likewise when Raymond Carver summed up his literary aesthetic for our Hopkins fiction-writing students in two words: “No tricks.” One knew what that excellent realist-minimalist meant: no O. Henryish trick endings or suchlike jokers in the dramaturgical deck; no stunts; nothing fancy/flashy. Much as I admire Carver’s plainspoken down-to-earthiness, however, I admire at least equally François Rabelais’ unbuttoned verbal and imaginative excesses, and that brilliant trickster Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; what counts, I told those students later, is the quality and relevance of a writer’s “tricks,” not their presence or absence as such. For that matter, to the extent that “no tricks” may be taken to mean “no artifice,” mightn’t it be objected that Carver’s finely-honed narrative simplicity, like Hemingway’s, is as much artifice as Faulkner at his most incantatory or Henry James at his most syntactically baroque? Apprentices especially (I wanted to protest but did not, just then) should be encouraged to acquaint themselves open-mindedly with the literary corpus’s whole bag of tricks while working out for themselves their own next-stage aesthetic.
And how hold one’s tongue when a bellicose John Gardner, fresh from his kneecapping treatise On Moral Fiction, repeated in my seminar his distinction between what he called Primary Fiction (“fiction about life”) and Secondary Fiction (“fiction about fiction”), and made it clear that for him this was not mere taxonomy, but a value-judgment? “King Priam weeping over the bloody corpse of Hector!” Gardner thundered, pounding the seminar table: “That’s literature, damn it! The rest is bullshit!” Really, John? I wondered: What about the same bard’s famous extended description, in Book 18 of the same opus, of the elaborate scenes forged by Hephaestos on Achilles’s shield — scenes that bear poignantly upon the epic in progress and are a literally classic specimen of art about art? Or the fine reorchestration of that riff in Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid, where refugee Aeneas sees in the unfinished frescoes of Queen Dido’s Carthage-under-construction not only scenes from the Trojan War and its similarly unfinished aftermath, but the figures of his fallen comrades and even his protagonistic self? Art about art, for sure; fiction about fiction, including the Homeric fiction with which Virgil’s epic-under-construction is very self-consciously in the ring — but it’s also so affectingly “about life” that Aeneas (his own epic labor likewise far from finished) weeps at the spectacle, and his author is moved to the famous line Sunt lacrimae rerum: “there are tears in things”—even in so-called Secondary Fiction. Insofar as all the world’s a stage and even our selves themselves may be said to be essentially the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are — our Center of Narrative Gravity, as the “neurophilosopher” Daniel C. Dennett puts it — great literature (I wanted to say to the now-late Gardner then and there, but, being his host, did not until a later occasion) can be regarded as being Seldom Simply but Always Also about itself. In that sense, at least, all fiction is secondary fiction, and all “fiction about fiction,” even the most programmatically and/or tiresomely “metafictive,” is also fiction about life.
Got that, John? (Not every neuroscientist, I should add, agrees with Professor Dennett that human consciousness has evolved to be essentially a scenario-making machine; but we storytellers are likely to nod Yes to that proposition — always allowing for the venerable device of the Unreliable Narrator.)
I conclude this first category of my fellow scribblers’ wisdom-pearls with the grand declaration made by Richard Brautigan at the close of his “reading” at SUNY/ Buffalo toward the end of the high 1960s. The author of Trout Fishing in America, The Revenge of the Lawn, and In Watermelon Sugar was at the peak of his literary fame then, a hippie icon warmly received on a campus that prided itself, in those years of anti-war sit-ins and tear-gassing riot police, on being “the Berkeley of the East,” and various doomsayers were declaring the print medium moribund in the “electronic global village.” In that spirit, after my introduction, Brautigan said hello to the packed hall, pushed the Play button on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder beside the lectern, and disappeared into the auditorium’s projection booth, from where — as we-all sat for a very long three-quarters of an hour listening to our guest’s recorded reading — the invisible author projected slides of giant punctuation-marks: five or ten minutes each of a comma, a semicolon, a period, entirely without bearing on the taped recitation. Had it been anybody but Brautigan, that audience would never have sat still for it — but still we sat, until when the eye-glazing hour was done at last, the shaggy, beaming author reappeared from the projection booth, gestured grandly toward the tape machine, and declared, “There you have it, folks: the Twentieth Century!” Whereat one of my seriously avant-garde graduate students sitting nearby turned to me and muttered “Yup: about 1913.”
ON TO MY second category: visiting writers’ obiter dicta to which I readily nod assent and find myself often quoting, but not without some amplification or qualification. I like Dylan Thomas’s (sober, but playful) assertion, for example, that “all trees are oak trees — except pine trees”: It serves to remind early-apprentice writers especially that to say Patsy paused under a tree or Just then Fred’s car zipped by is almost always less effective than specifying what sort of tree and automobile were involved — specificity being one component of sensory texture, and sensory texture being usually a literary plus (but not invariably, I remind them: Don’t forget Beckett). Whence one goes on to suggest — they having in revision paused Patsy under a Norway maple and zipped Fred into a milk-white Camaro — that it were well if those specifications turned out to be not only specific, but relevant. Why a Norway maple instead of a weeping birch? Why a “milk-white Camaro” (Mary Robison) instead of a “gamboge Cadillac” (Frederick Barthelme) or a “high, rat-colored car” (Flannery O’Connor, the mother of automotive specificity in American literature)?