I’m not suggesting for a moment that you ought to be writing about ‘the big issues.’ Your only authority (and authorship) lies after all in exercising and presenting consciousness located by the experiences and apprehensions of your own heart-mind. From the effort at extending consciousness — through invention, imagination, structure, detail, texture — a conscience about the implications and perhaps even the imperatives of being alive at a particular time among specific people may or may not flow. This exercise need not be universal to be effective; it can be personal, private and apparently intimate. It will, however, imply a choice of position and approach. The writer can, I think, through her words and images and characters and stories, transmit and translate many of the tensions we live with. The writer is giving voice to the inchoate and the incoherent, even when only in an idiosyncratic and partial way. That voice is not an antidote to violence and madness and idiocy, but it may help us turn around and see the terror as also the beauty.
Is a story a slice of life, a raw slab of meat on the counter still seeping blood that can be equated with words? Or is it a construct consisting of condensations and cadences, patterns and artifacts that will give it the verisimilitude and veneer of life and the slightly metallic odor of blood? Must the ‘imitation’ exercise choices of ellipses and repetitions, shifts and breaks, in order to be like the ‘original’? Isn’t awareness brought to the surface of self-telling already the establishment of a text? Is it at all possible for reflection to present itself other than as narrative? Do we not, the moment we stop to think about ‘life,’ fictionalize ourselves irredeemably? I suspect we do. In fact, I don’t imagine one can locate and identify ‘self’ except through narrating, and thus at least partly inventing it to the self. And as you mark, so you rub out. That is why I prefer to talk of the fiction of self.
On the other hand, can we propose that life is (only) a story? We tend to assume that a story is less determinate and more innocuous than life. Is this true? Robert Alter, in a discussion of Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading, saw the author’s crucial point as: “it is life rather than art alone that is inexhaustible, and that art’s ability to renew itself, to be infinitely various and captivating, finally depends on its necessary inadequacy in the face of the inexhaustible enigma of conscious life.” Of course, the story of life is larger than the story of words, but we can only appropriate the first (if such should be our goal) by means of the second, by endorsing their twinness. And look at how extensively we inflect our lives by the narrative structuring of our daily existence, exactly as we’d do in fiction through plotting, directing, anticipating character development!
The word-web we spin is as close to life as a hide — hide as in skin, but also as a place of dissimulation and protection. The process of apprehending life (imitating it, recreating it) through telling must surely correspond to the very profound human urge and need to visualize, imagine, project, direct or re-direct, disarm, obfuscate, empower, delete, escape, exorcize, destroy even.
To move and be moved. By re-living and re-inventing we hope to take the fear out of the unknown and break down the unacceptable.
Where do these deep impulses originate? It must be survival instinct, but also the visceral need to go beyond our limitations. Projecting ourselves beyond our limits is a survival strategy, even though we know it to be foolish and that there can be no prolongation or birth on the other side of demise. Those will remain unwritten pages. In the meantime, we understand ourselves in terms of what we want to be. Perhaps we know all things — and then the telling, the creation of beauty and the allaying of fears will be ways of dissimulating the fact that we have already come to terms with the mysterious absurdity of our mortality and /or the modalities of our immortality, which includes effacement and dissolution of the self.
Maybe, at heart, we are at ease with the untold! Are we just going through the motions, Reader? With such passion?
We measure the world — or what we can experience of it, that which we call ‘life’ — by the reach and limitations of ‘self,’ which is consciousness in process. Which is word. And when that self disappears, will life be one endlessly unfolding but invisible text with neither head nor tail? For now we know that the elements and mechanisms of life and writing (mirage and mirror) are alike: a patternmaking of understanding, recognizing that textures and colors as surfaces of awareness are needed to make reflexability tactile. Thus are we tied to living. We cannot let go (if such should be our intention) until and unless we know how inextricably we are tied to continuation by our senses, by the breath of shaping through structure and rhythm, by this long dialectical dance of completion / extinction.
So, the link (the sameness of process) between ‘story’ and ‘life’ (or fiction and fact if you prefer) is in the telling: self-telling, telling the time and the temperature, telling it on the mountain. The self as transit point of awareness is a tale. To recount a fact — or advance an opinion, as in an essay, and we mostly take our opinions to be facts, particularly when they figure in an essay! — is to be entering a process of fictionalization. Not only because the contours of ‘facts’ are delineated by our situation and approach, depending on who we are and from what culture, and not only because the hardest fact must still be put in its historical relativity and will then be seen to be evolving — but also, as I suggested earlier, because the tools of apprehension are means of creativity and thus of metamorphosis. The first location of a thought, as carried through the essay, for example, is after all language. Seeing is shaping.
This way of looking (defined by the modalities of perception and the traditions of understanding) will constitute its own presence. That is why I prefer to talk of the self of fiction. The discourse has a face that will start pulling faces. This may well be what we mean by ‘voice.’ And so, without blurring the demarcations any further, but in recognition of the many ways in which fact and fiction interact and temper one another, I wonder whether we shouldn’t modify the categorization to fictionality and factionation: ‘fictionality’ with its echoes of ‘finality’ and ‘rationality’ and even ‘nationality’; ‘factionation’ with its associations of ‘fascination’ and ‘imagination’? Thereby allowing fiction to be more fixed and fact to be more fluctuating or factitious, maybe facetious, to be the de facto nation (or station) of fictions?
What remains of the differences between fact and fiction? Certainly there’s much less of a contradiction between these two ‘opposites’ than we’re led to assume. For starters, we need to imagine (visualize, format, relate and situate) even the simplest fact in order to grasp it. Making sense necessitates a constant telling to self of the observed phenomena, and thereby it becomes a story. Furthermore, the fiction will establish a presence, leave an imprint, act as fact with its surroundings. It is nevertheless useful to keep the two poles alive so that we may, in the process of teasing out differences and incompatibilities and similitude and sameness, hone our skills of perception and interpretation.