NEW YORK, Jan 16 — US novelists have long complained about the ability of real life to outstrip fiction. In his landmark 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction,” Philip Roth observed that “actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” The figure Roth cites is Charles Van Doren, of quiz-show scandal fame; but place Van Doren next to Donald Trump, and you can measure the change in the nature of credibility over the past half-century.
Van Doren was disgraced when it was revealed that he had been given the answers to the questions on the game show Twenty-One, a contest that television viewers believed was real, not staged. Today an entire flourishing genre of television goes by the name “reality,” yet no one who watches it thinks it is genuinely real — that is, unplanned and unedited. Artificiality is what makes reality television enjoyable, even though these same shows, if advertised as fiction, would appear banal, repetitive and undramatic. Reality is the ingredient that turns a bad fiction into an enthralling one.
This dynamic is part of the novel’s origins. The earliest English novels, from Moll Flanders (1722) to Clarissa (1748), were published anonymously, with titles that implied they were true stories. It took generations to establish the conventions of fiction sufficiently to allow readers to take pleasure in novels that were explicitly untrue. The suspension of disbelief that fiction involves is a late stage in the evolution of taste, and it may prove to have been a temporary one.
The rise of the memoir over the past few decades does not mean that readers are ready to abandon the techniques of fiction; but, like readers three centuries ago, they want the freedom of fiction along with consequentiality of fact.
Author David Shields diagnosed this desire in his 2010 manifesto Reality Hunger: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself un-self-consciously as a novel.” Many fiction writers share this intuition, though they respond to it in different ways.
One way is to make the novel self-conscious, by turning its imitation of reality into an exaggeration, a fun-house mirror. Has our reality since 9/11 felt apocalyptic? Then imagine Manhattan being destroyed by zombies (Colson Whitehead’s Zone One) or a flood (Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow) or civil war and foreign bankers (Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story). Because we know such things “could never happen,” they mark the story as fiction; because we know similar things have happened and will happen, they become truthful fictions.
An alternative approach is to make fiction as close to fact as possible, by reducing its scope to the one subject on which each writer is an unchallengeable authority: himself or herself. Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Tao Lin’s Taipei and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? all seek to convince us that we are reading about the writer’s actual life. These writers are engaged in a sophisticated project, in which the line between truth and fiction becomes harder and harder to make out.
But this game has a built-in fail-safe: Label a book “fiction,” and all is forgiven. A fiction can never be accused of being a lie.
The problem is that, more and more, people seem to want to be lied to. This is the flip side of “reality hunger,” since a lie, like a fake memoir, is a fiction that does not admit its fictionality. That is why the lie is so seductive: It allows the liar and his audience to cooperate in changing the nature of reality, in a way that can appear almost magical. “Magical thinking” is used as an insult, but it is perhaps the most primal kind of thinking there is.
The problem for modern people is that we can no longer perform this magic naively, with an undoubting faith in the reality of our inventions. We lie to ourselves with a bad conscience. When the memoir is exposed as not having “really” happened, we want our money back.
The problem with our “post-truth” politics is that a large share of the population has moved beyond true and false. They thrill precisely to the falsehood of a statement, because it shows that the speaker has the power to reshape reality in line with their own fantasies of self-righteous beleaguerment. To call novelists liars is naive, because it mistakes their intention; they never wanted to be believed in the first place. The same is true of demagogues.
From its beginning, the novel has tested the distinction between truth, fiction and lie; now the collapse of those distinctions has given us the age of Trump. We are entering a period in which the very idea of literature may come to seem a luxury, a distraction from political struggle. But the opposite is true: No matter how irrelevant hardheaded people may believe it to be, literature continually proves itself a sensitive instrument, a leading indicator of changes that will manifest themselves in society and culture. Today as always, the imagination is our best guide to what reality has in store. — The New York Times
