From these premises, Picaro says, we then moved to the ground where fiction (heightened language) and non-fiction (ordinary communication) meet. How do they inform, shape, deform, imitate or deflate one another? What both share may be the fabrication of lies, either dull or subtle, and the elaborate making of disguises.
The Transgressions in the course title was meant to indicate that we would be crossing genres and categories — for instance, by looking at poetry as non-fiction; or to observe how, in poetry as well, there can be movement and a tension between the so-called ‘real’ (the lived experience, le vécu) and ‘projection’ or ‘imagination.’ Transgression, exactly, because we expect to find few hard and fast distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, obviously with the exception of some scientific texts on the mating habits of bugs — and even there (Picaro claims), we soon find that narrative creates truth. And then we tried to see whether using the same techniques could establish connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among these: the uses and the effects of projection, imagination, tense, points of view, voice, the narrative arc, pattern making, rhythm or breath, “the relativity that is indispensable to novelistic space,” etc.
Beyond that, Picaro admonishes his students, we intended to consider notions of ethics — that is, the role writing can play to be ‘good’ in itself and within larger contexts.
“. . the need arises concretely of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons.”
A New Type of State, Antonio Gramsci
Fiction/Imagination is an unveiling of what we didn’t know we knew. It is not possible, as far as we know, to think the ‘unthinkable.’ Imagination pre-figures its implementation by shaping the thinkable. We write into the pre-existent pool or underground of images, memories, thoughts, etc. — if only because the words we use connote meaning or morph into metaphors. This ‘pool’ will to a large extent be collective and to some smaller degree personal. “I, Picaro Wordfool, go into the mirror to exist.” It is an ‘unknown’ continent we may wish to explore (or sail across with closed eyes) — but also a continent in progress so that we may never chart its outlines and features once and for all. ‘Uncovering’ the shared Atlantis of the imagination does not imply that it is fixed. (Note: he’s not referring to the Freudian ‘sub-conscious’ although there are obvious similarities.) Because it is pre-existent, ‘out there,’ we may say we are but reporting (bringing back) from what is shared and thus not inventing. We are describing non-fiction. Fiction resides in the ambiguity of lineage.
Story (when it articulates effectively!) modifies perception even about the verifiable existent. It becomes part of the substance of non-fiction. The stones brought back from the moon by the astronauts turned out to be green cheese.
Milan Kundera goes further. He postulates an aesthetic effect to the search for meaning by means of creative fiction. In The Art of the Noveclass="underline" “Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful.” And: “Beauty, the last triumph possible for the man who can no longer hope. Beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said.”
Non-fiction/reporting, Picaro argues, depends for its effectiveness, perhaps even accessibility, on means and methods we usually associate with fiction writing: the shaping through choices and presentation, the ‘making-story’ in order to obtain traction. “Oneiric narrative; let’s say, rather: imagination, which, freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought.” (Kundera)
Maybe this is the only way we can encounter and extend consciousness. Even when transmitting a thought, as in non-fiction, it has to be ‘storied’ with its rise and fall to be accessible. Similarly, we both need to encounter and abide the reader’s attention if we wish to enter her or his mind. And we only exist in the minds and the imaginations of others. At this point he could have suggested to them how he came to live in the clothes of Simon Snow, or how much he would like to penetrate Reader’s mind and her mother-mouth — but this, he thinks, is too personal to unwrap; it could provoke shyness. Truth, in order to exist, must leave a part unsaid. That is why veils and hats are so alluringly important. “The dark inside the mind/ lies hidden” (The Art of Writing, Wen Fu).
A person wearing a hat in a story has certainly an unavowed life to hide or display (or not). And that is why Carver’s stories seemed so ‘real’ to us in class, Picaro concludes this section of his recapitulation.
Imagination gives access to ‘meaning.’ Story telling is a system of knowledge; the very act of narration carries a presumption of truth. It would seem that we are hardwired to see intention in the world, Picaro observes. We are predisposed to the art of learning causal maps: that is, disclosing by intervention. We become by making. We realize ourselves through acts of transformation. “Here we are.”
‘Writing’ is thus both the translation of an opening to non-fiction, and — through fiction — the bringing about of non-fiction. If you were to imagine yourself a woman out walking with a dog (Picaro says), the mere sniffing at the soil by the animal will expose the bones of a story.
“. . the very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.” (The Content of the Form, Hayden White)
Look at how Sebald in his Austerlitz promotes the transgression between ‘fiction’ and ‘fact,’ Picaro says, obviously taking cover behind an established author’s coattails; how he melded and moulded the two: merging the voices as one would expect in non-fiction mainly through the effacement of the I (in any event a close invention); in creating distance, as one would expect, by dint of his use of an apparatus of footnotes, pictures, French. See how he employs in his work of fiction the effects and the artefacts of non-fiction: the quasi-scientific lists from botany, astrology, entomology and architecture. Watch how he brings real people into the narrative, like Darwin, and have them lift their veils to shake hands with the population of his mind; how he mixes real sites with imaginary ones, all bathed in the same luminescence of gloom, until we take the made-up for real. Topography, where the illusion of precision is created, seems particularly important to him, Picaro points out. The real is an ever evasive, evanescent entity. That’s why it bothers us. Look at how he equates the labyrinth with forgetting, and that with cruelty. In his instance (Sebald’s, but also Picaro’s) one could hold that ‘imagination’ (as close and as buried as that living death we call ‘memory’) is a matter of focus. We sense throughout the despair of trying to be. “Moreover, I had constantly been preoccupied by that accumulation of knowledge, that which I had pursued for decades, and which served as a substitute or compensatory memory.” Words, words, words over the palimpsest of words meant that “everything was fading before our eyes.” The quotes are from Sebald.