Freedom Fiction

What are we talking about?

In her seminal discussion of women and fiction, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf outlines one of the most important characteristics of fiction in general: the existence of a relationship between fiction and reality.  Woolf tells us “Fiction… is likely to contain more truth than fact” (2).  This, I believe, is the crux of the problem with that art of biography and of Woolf’s qualms with trying to impose art upon life rather than creating characters with lives of their own.  I will focus specifically on Woolf’s short story “Memoirs of a Novelist,” written in 1901, in which the narrator is a critic who reviews a biography of a recently deceased novelist.  

Does it matter?

I would say yes.  Contemporary fascination with memoir, biography and the based-on-a-true-story trope has grown to new heights in the wake of the James Frey versus Oprah battle of the titans.

Does anyone agree?

Carolyn Kraus points out in her 2008 article “Proof of Life: Memoir, Truth, and Documentary Evidence,” modern literary theorists – in particular autobiographical and literary non-fiction theorists – have become focused on “exploring the fundamental conflict between psychological truth and factual truth” and “have asked whether it’s really possible to separate the two, or whether objective truth is even desirable” (245).  Questions about the psychological and factual truths that writers like Kraus examine are directly related to Woolf’s theory concerning the connection between fiction and life. 

So, what’s the novel?

Well, it’s a short story.  But it’s perfectly suited to the discussion of fiction versus nonfiction because it narrows the scope considerably.  It brings us to biographical theory in opposition to fiction, and to the true representation of the life of not only a human but of a capital-w-Writer.

The critic in “Memoirs of a Novelist” is disillusioned with the biography of novelist Frances Ann Willatt written by her friend Miss Linsett.  Within the critique, we see Miss Linsett panned, but more importantly the entire concept of biography is criticized. The practice of instituting artificial barriers– chapters, headings, page allotments – do not, according to Woolf’s narrator, belong in a transcription of a human life, especially the life of a writer.  Then, the narrator examines the novels of Miss Willatt and finds makeshift clues about their author that, according to the critic, contradict Miss Linsett’s interpretation of Miss Wallat’s life.  Ultimately, Woolf’s fictional critic concludes that a more authentic representation is evident in the author’s fiction than in the author’s biography.

What have others written about this story?

Frankly, nothing.  However, they have written extensively about Woolf.

In his article “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character,” Ray Monk examines a theme that he believes pervades much of Woolf’s writing on biography.  This theme is a synthesis of the concept that  “real” human life is almost exclusively internal and “therefore (as facts are essentially external) beyond the reach of nonfiction” (Monk 5).  Thus, the novelist has the opportunity denied to other writers: the ability to explore the internal, real life without the restriction of fact, truth, and black-and-white accuracy.  The novelist can exist in a gray area where revelations arise without the restrictions of exposition and cerebral rationality.

What does VW think?

Woolf tackles this issue head on in “Memoirs of a Novelist“, beginning with an inquest into the nature of biography:

“What right has the world to know about men and women?  What can a biographer tell it? and then, in what sense can it be said that the world profits?  The objection to asking these questions is not only that they take so much room, but that they lead to an uncomfortable vagueness of mind.  Our conception of the world is that it is a round ball, coloured green where there are fields and forests, wrinkled blue where there is sea, with little peaks pinched up upon it, where there are mountain ranges. When we are asked to imagine the effect of Miss Willatt or another upon this object, the enquiry is respectful but without animation.” (69)

• Woolf is speaking in general about the “right” of knowing the truth about men and women, and questioning if a biographer can supersede this question of right and actually tell the world something about a person that walked the earth.  
• Woolf posits the writer – the subject of biography – in direct opposition to the rest of the world, or “it,” as she labels the world in her second sentence, further belittling the right said world might have to delve into a writer’s personal life through a surrogate.  
• Woolf persists in using such objective, distanced terms to describe the world.  She uses “this object” and other such labels to illustrate distance and separation to magnify the status of the individual in relation to the world which she calls “a round ball,” creating a cartoonish, animated image of something that is treated as so vast, epic, cosmic and important.  
• Thus, she makes the individual, the writer, the focus of her musings and shrinks the world to miniscule proportions, a caricature of its grand former self when held in comparison to the life of an individual.  

Then Woolf’s narrator tells us that the “enquiry,” or the process of seeking universal truths from Miss Willatt’s life, is “respectful but without animation.” 

• Respectful connotes the grand, noble art of biography, perhaps even the noblesse oblige of literature being that great writers must write haughtily about their compatriots to preserve the standing, the academic reputation, of both biographer and subject.  
• Woolf’s narrator, however, wants us to consider the importance of animation. The narrator views fiction as a more revealing, more freeing means of talking about life and about the reality of people than biography, which is limited by facts that can only be verified by people who knew the subject’s external life.  
• Imitation versus creation is the primary difference between biography and fiction.

What’s the big deal with biography?

Even I didn’t know Woolf had written so extensively about biography, so don’t feel bad.  It makes sense, though, as her father, Sir Lesley Stephen, was arguably the most prominent Victorian biographer.

The belief that the importance of external facts within biography is what prevents biography from realistically transcribing human life is a belief of Woolf’s that infuses much of her criticism.  Woolf discounts fact not out of distrust for truth but of truth that can only be verified by others.  In “The New Biography,” Woolf tackles the idea presented by Sir Sidney Lee that “the aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality” (Lee qtd. in Woolf 229).  According to Woolf, this is exactly the reason why biography – or, for our purposes, any non-fiction representation of a human life – is doomed to fall short.  Woolf elaborates,  

On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality.  And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it. (“The New Biography” 229)

It is not biography itself that Woolf contests but the process of, as she calls it, welding fiction and biography into a “seamless whole.”  Woolf does not discount biography as a means of chronicling facts but discounts poorly constructed biographies because they fail to “choose those truths which transmit personality” (“The New Biography 229).  Woolf calls on fiction to support her point by pointing out that “each of us is more Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, than he is John Smith of the Corn Exchange” (“The New Biography 234).  Thus we return to the fact that in order to have the freedom to choose facts that transmit personality and create a seamless, lifelike whole he or she must rely on fiction.

So what?

We as readers need to question if fact and documented truth is more important to us now than well-crafted fiction.  For this reason I have chosen Woolf, the consummate novelist and essayist, to explore the distinction between biography and fiction, to uncover their benefits and shortcomings, and to ultimately examine each genre’s relevance in the life of the author.

Last post on Mitchell

I feel like I couldn’t devote my full readership to Cloud Atlas this semester.  I felt I had to keep a certain amount of distance between me and this novel or I’d get spun around, spat out and left feeling confused and almost bitter.  This started with the Adam Ewing chapter, of course.  It felt so gimmicky to me.  Forced, satirical, absurd are words that come to mind.  I understand the function and message of this novella, but it doesn’t change that I felt like I was beginning on a journey that wasn’t going to teach me anything without making sure I knew exactly how brilliant the novel is, how morally sound and historically informed its message is and how versatile and how genius a writer it’s author is.

Perhaps this judgment made me miss out on an awesome novel.  I plan to revisit it at some point in my life when I can afford to be made bitter by a novel (this was not the time in my semester/life for any more bitterness) because I firmly believe that whether you love or hate a novel, every response is useful.  Knowing what you don’t like is as useful as know what you do.

I’d like to read another of Mitchell’s novels to see if I feel the same way.  Maybe I’m truly jealous that Mitchell did something pretty unique and contemporary.  I also seem to be personally drawn towards novels where I can “see” the author, trace the influences of the author’s life, and read characters as if they were someone the author might have known in reality.  This is a strange habit that I didn’t really know I had until this semester, so disagreeing with me on this point is wholeheartedly encouraged.  But I couldn’t find Mitchell in this novel; I didn’t see him in Ewing, Frobisher, Sonmi, Sloosha, Cavendish, Louisa Ray.  I couldn’t find real life for real life’s sake, it was all to serve the purpose of Mitchell’s novel.  Is this a bad thing? I don’t know.  Is it a personal preference that is now more clearly defined because of Mitchell? Definitely.

Ultimately, I felt like this novel was force fed to me in more ways than one and for more reasons than one.  I think the general consensus of the class is that Cloud Atlas was worth reading.  But for me, in comparison to the other novels we’ve read, I was unenthused but also intrigued, frustrated and puzzled, angry and hungry to understand.

If David Mitchell and I were in a relationship in facebook, it would be “complicated.”

Apologies

A very late, very scattered blog post for this week. My poor poor paper has taken a massive back seat to the mayhem of halloween and, of course, THIS STUPID ELECTION. I can’t wait until it’s over. Anyway, here’s my scattered post, late and rambling. Many apologies.
1) -Keywords: truth, fiction, reality-based, life-based, character based
-Themes: readers’ clinging to memoir/autobiography/non-fiction in contemporary America; possible time-frame post 9/11 America. Or, comparing/contrasting to other trends/movements in literature [surrealism/magical realism, stream of consiousness?]. Or, blurring the lines somehow between fiction and non-fiction.
-Approach: Cultural studies? dare I say, structuralist? This area is sooo cloudy.
2) Haven’t ruled out Woolf. If I chose Woolf, I’d probably work with her essays about the craft of writing. I found some dynamite quotes:
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
At least me and V are somewhat on the same page. I’m still deciding between Frey’s A million Little Pieces and Capote’s In Cold Blood as my primary texts. I hope some of you who’ve read either piece can point me in one direction or the other. The other one that I don’t pick will certainly get honorable mention in my piece. Would using both as primary texts be out of the question?

3) Plat of attack: Yikes. I am so unprepared. I need major input. I should have wrote this blog earlier. Melt down. Ummm, I suppose figuring out what the hell I want to talk about would be a good place to start. I think Middleton is going to be scheduling a meeting with me right quick. At least I’m being honest, right? After that, I know the argument I want to make but I don’t know who, if anyone, would support me out there in the literary world. I want to argue that there is a distinct craving for non-fiction/fact based literature in contemporary America, thus the dawning of creative non-fiction, and I want to talk about how this changes the novel. How does this change the novel? Good question. That’s the next step. I’d say it leaves little room for disconnected, fractional narratives within the 21st century literary construct. What is a fractional narrative? God I’m having a Vaneeta-define-your-terms moment so hard right now. Maybe what I mean is people don’t want to read about people with perfect lives anymore. Perhaps a good starting point would be the stream of consciousness movement since it started to try and imitate the actual thoughts of real people. Yes, that’s what I’m going with for now.

Questions about CA

• Would these novellas have the same effect if they were full length novels?
• Would we accept the characters as unquestioning as we do in a novella?
• Would we find the plots believable?
• Would it hold our attention? (I know Adam Ewing wouldn’t)
• Would Mitchell still be lauded as a genius if the novel was longer?
• Is the length of the novella’s crucial to the novels succes?

• What is Mitchell trying to say by including at least one homosexual/bisexual character in each novella?
• Is Mitchell biting off more than he can chew, you know, traveling all throughout history and all?
• What’s with the clouds?
• Do you think the dialect in Sloosha’s Crossin’ adds to its verisimilitude, or do you find it laughable?
• What is an Orison?

• Do you think each story could be stand on its own outside the context of the novel?
• Have you any read anything similar to this novel?
• Is this even really a novel?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.  They’re rolling around in my head as I read, distracting me and perhaps taking away from my enjoyment.  Perhaps I’m missing the point.  As a reader, this novel frustrates me because I feel it places itself “above” other traditional.  Sometimes I feel Mitchell wrote this novel in this form just for the sake of being different, whick irks me.  Other times, I feel incredibly envious and (dare I say it) awed.

I can’t discern any definitive answers about this novel, which is also how I felt about Myra Breckinridge.  But, I loved Myra Breckinridge.  Not so much Cloud Atlas.  But this must mean the two novels have something in common, right?  Anyone have any ideas?

Cavendish

Twenty first century London.  Award ceremony.  Dermott Hoggins, the author of the Knuckle Sandwich (“a gusty, well written fictional memoir”), knocks out the critic Felix Finch.  The publicity ensures the book will become a best seller.  Cavendish is the publisher.  The author and his “posse” want more money from Cavendish.  Cavendish appeals to his brother but his brother essentially says screw you.  Cavendish waits in a queue, on his way to Hull, but is ordered out to buy another ticket.  Wakes up in Aurora House (based on his brother’s suggestion), not in his right mind (due to a Rastafarian’s sinister cigar) and signs into the AH thinking it’s a hotel but it’s essentially a nursing home.  We leave Cavendish medicated, pushing around cold peas.

Literally about a publisher reading a book, editing books, deciding what’s including and what’s excluded.  The publisher faces a pretty sticky fate.  Luisa Rey is mentioned as a manuscript that needs editing.  The author is publishing the publisher character.  It also suggests that readers are more concerned with sensationalism and publicity, judging from the fight fight that ensures Knuckle Sandwich is a best seller.  Sort of presents the entire literary scene as scandalous, comical, wacky.
Civilization: Aurora House: people love it.  He’s trapped there.  Cavendish plans to sue.
-Pigeon holes the literary scene as an extension of 21st century frivolity.

Motifs, themes, etc.
-Description of the room at this “rest home” as a locked prison cell.  Comforts confine him.  Other people see it as a vacation.  The need to be forced to relax under lock and key.
“A house is made my hands but a home is made by hearts”
“All my loved ones are dead or bonkers or at the BBC, except my prankster brother!”
“I was a man in a horror B-movie asylum.”
Solitude versus society
“The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, if you will.  Now that is a snappy title.” First time the text is mentioned as something that can actually be edited and changed (Luisa Rey).  Everything else is letters/malleable texts.
“Half Lives- a lousy name for a work of fiction- and subtitled The First Luisa Rey Mystery.  Lousier and lousier.  Its lady author, one dubiously named Hilary V. Hush…”

Mitchell and Lukacs, get ready

Here’s a geometric/structured/algebriac breakdown of the relationship between Luckacs and Mitchell:

Let Lukacs = L,
Form = f, content = c
Mitchell=M

Let f be directly proportional to c [f:c]
If L + M(f x c)= Cloud Atlas, then Cloud Atlas= L + M/(f x c)

In English:

If Lukacs is sprinkled in with Mitchell and we are to believe that form is a direct result of content, then Cloud Atlas is Mitchell, and additionally Lukacs, divided by the relationship between form and content.  Thus, Mitchell is at once directly playing with the idea that form is dependent on content and rejecting the notion of cohesive novel form altogether.

What I think I’m trying to say is, Mitchell is somehow working at two ends of the spectrum.  He is writing a novel using a very specific form because of the unusual V-shaped narrative structure we discussed in class, but at the same time it could be argued that he’s not writing a novel at all but a series of novellas or short stories with subtle ties to similar histories and characters.

Anyway…

I’ve been reading about David Mitchell because I’m a hater (and I never use that term, I hate the term hater, but there’s no other way to describe it).  He seems to me at once an pretentious prick and a genius.  Ugh.  But I found it interesting that one of his more frequently repeated quotes from an interview with BBC radio is concerning Cloud Atlas is his take on what the book is really about:

“The book’s theme is predacity … individuals prey on individuals, groups on groups, nations on nations.”

First of all, I’m not positive predacity is a word, but that’s beside the point.  The point is I don’t know if I would have picked up on this overall theme myself, or if I would have decided this was the overarching theme at all.  I guess I can’t really disagree with freaking David Mitchell since her wrote the damn book, but I find this characterization puzzling.  I obviously haven’t finished the book yet, but if I had to say at this point, I’d say the theme of Cloud Atlas is cause and effect.  We see the fruits and damages of human interaction, but not all of the results (thus far in the novel) are negative.  Predacity has an incredibly negative tone, and I understand the novel eventually turns into a dystopic, post-apocolyptic novella so perhaps I’ll change my mind, but I didn’t feel like Cloud Atlas was a hopeless novel.  Predacity = hopeless, in my twisted algebra that seems to be the only way I can communicated today.  Is it just me?

Accentuate the Positive

We did a fair aount of hating on Mitchell and Cloud Atlas on Tuesday so this blog post is devoted to the positive aspects of Mitchell and his novel.

That being said, I believe the amount of attention and critical research Mitchell must have had to do in order to write Cloud Atlas is daunting.  I don’t think I’d have it in me to do so much research for the sake of fiction.  For that reason, I am a hater in the best possible way because Mitchell clearly bows down to the finer, more complex points of fiction.  As a writer, he’s a master.  As a researcher and a crafter of stories, he’s a genius.

Look at the freaking outline I found on Wikipedia for the book he’s currently writing:
‘Mitchell’s next book, currently known as “NAGASAKI”, will be an historical novel about Dejima, the man-made island in the middle of Nagasaki Harbour that was built to house Dutch traders in the 17th century. Having just finished five months of research in the Netherlands, Mitchell says that the biggest challenge will be what to omit from this complex story. “For over two centuries”, he said, “the Dutch were the only white people allowed to see inside Japan”. No one was allowed on or off the island except for tradesmen, translators and prostitutes. “Except”, he said, “every four years when the head of the trading post made the trek to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to pay his respects to the Shogun.” Mitchell plans to contrast Shogunate Japan with the Napoleonic era in Europe, he said. Of particular interest is the fact that while the Netherlands ceased to exist for a while after Napoleon annexed it, the Dutch flag still flew in Dejima.’

All I can say is: What?

I think the structure of this novel is really where it’s brilliance is, if we’re going to use that term to describe Cloud Atlas. Being a person who is more drawn to character based, or should I say people based narratives, Cloud Atlas doesn’t overly thrill me.  For example, today I wrote an essay about body hair.  I’m slowly accepting that that is the type of writer/reader I am.  CA and its intricacies are thrilling but they don’t sing for me.  I regret saying that I categorically didn’t like the Pacific Journal because that’s not really what I meant.  What I meant to say was, I didn’t feel as if I was bettering myself or my relationship with the novel while reading Cloud Atlas.

Theory Shmeory

My eternal dilemma with theory is as follows; I think literature is “the bomb,” if you will, because it encompasses essentially every other aspect of life.  You can have literature with a side of history, a sprinking of science, a dose of religion, a glass of gender studies, and I don’t even feel the need to mention Freud and psychoanalysis after our experiences with Julavits.  However, at the same time, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by these possibilities.  Some part of me wants to be in and about BOOKS. I guess this could be a structuralist tennant?  I don’t really think so though.  But this is my dilemma: I love the umbrella that literature provides for all other branches of study, but I also hate it.  Part of me is Gore Vidal and I am laughing at academics who treat literature as a branch of science, scoff at research grants and absolutes.

As far as out class in concerned, I think Lukacs’ argument about the relationship between form and content is at once somewhat simplified and dead on.  I would ideally love to do a similar type of examination of historiacal context in the vein of Jeamson on a novel like The Uses of Enchantment because I find it absolutely fascinating and exciting that there are FINALLY people writing about the 80s/90s/00s.  Reading Rachel Shukert’s essay collection Have You No Shame? in Creative Non-Fiction this semester was so freaking exciting because it’s absolutely the first book i’ve read that takes place fully in the years in which I was alive!  I would be incredibly compelled to examine some novel, any novel, possibly Julavits, in a contemporary historical context.  How awesome would it be to do an 80s/90s centered reading?

The prospect thrills me in strange ways, but I’m not exactly sure how it would work/what it would look like/how much mileage such an idea would have.  Would Jameson help? Or maybe Hutcheon and metafiction is more what I’m looking for?  I feel like I have an incredibly rough, grandiose idea that needs to be pared down, smaked in the face and straightened out.  It basically couldn’t be more broad.  My idea is basically contemporary history.  Crap. Help?

I’ve been thinking about this post…

And I wanted to finish the novel before I blogged for this week.  Now that I’ve read the conclusion of The Uses of Enchantment, I’m probably no more qualified to take on this week’s challenge, but what the hell.

A novel should make the reader judge its characters.  This sounds strange, but perhaps this is the first time I’m being completely honest about the guilty pleasures of the novel.  Fictional characters have to withstand the same rigorous judgments of character as actual people.  We all agree that when you read an excellent novel, you are physically in the world of the novel, so it only makes sense to say we feel like we know the inhabitants of the novel.  I think this is why people have pretty extreme reactions to characters in novels, and novels themselves.  If a writer creates a really phenomenal, exceptional, unique character (Holden Caulfield, Harry Potter, Ahab, Sethe, Humbert Humbert, Jesus Christ?) the results are explosive.  Readers identify with and cling to that character more completely and innocently and intimately than probably most people they encounter in the real world.  And when the characters fail and are flat, boring, predictable, simple, and unconflicted, the novel might still be a decent read, but it does not (for me) have the same literary staying power.

It goes without saying that I agree with Virginia Woolf so I won’t bore you talking about her.

I would argue that William Lyons Phelps’ definition of “a good story well told” is grossly simplistic and will allow many silver medal “stories” to invade the upper echelon of gold medal novels (get it?! PHELPS! hahaha).  People like Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Agatha Christie have talent and are successful and should not be belittled, but the reason their novels all blend and meld into the same indistinct group is because their characters cannot shine through the plots.  They are good stories well told, but their characters can’t carry the story.

There’s something about Mary…

Here’s a thought:  Why was Freud such a fool and why does everyone still buy into all of his outdated, mysoginistic, one-sided theories?  This crap that Dr. Hammer is writing in his notes about a daughter acting out her sexual attraction to her father and feeling like her mother is her sexual competition seems so twisted.  I know that Freudian psychoanalysis is an intricate part of psychoanalytic theory as well as (for whatever reason, I don’t pretend to understand) literary theory, but the more I learn about it in my post-ENG 330 life, the more disgusted I am.

Having said that, I want to think about Mary and specifially how this novel would be different if there were any first person narration from Mary’s point of view.  Ever since we first discussed on the first day how difficult it is to write using a third person limited omniscient narrator, I’ve wondered how this changes the novel and our reaction to the novel.  Frankly, Mary bothers me.  I pity her and I feel that I can understand where she was coming from in her intentions– feeling stifled, ignored, useless, confused in adolscence is not uncommon.  We can all probably admit we’ve experiences this somewhat in our own lives.  And I also realize that Mary Veal is not a real person, but I’m trying to imagine how I’d treat her if I ever encountered someone like her in my life.  I feel like I’ve known a lot of people like Mary also, and I’ve pretty much hated them.  This is probably a very immature reaction to have to a novel and I know it does exhibit any amount of critical thinking, but I also think this reaction relates to our larger question about why young girls might fake abductions.  Or I hope at least.