Interviewer: What moves you most in a work of literature?
Javier Marías: Recognition. When I must stop my reading and say to myself: “Yes, this is true, it is just like this. I knew, but I did not know that I knew until I read it here.”
– New York Times, July 28, 2019
Admittedly, it’s easy to confuse them: what people care about and what people think people care about. The joke is that the latter is “the discourse,” when it’s really just a meme. I reactivated my Twitter account and things haven’t changed. People froth at the fingertips to defend genre fiction as if “literary” weren’t its own genre with its own conventions and banalities. People say it’s insulting to laud stories for “transcending genre,” as it would imply that genre isn’t worth paying attention to. This is usually when the word “elitism” gets tossed around like a balloon no one recognizes for a condom.
Someday I’m going to write about style. I keep telling myself it’s important, especially since the daily back-and-forth (mostly back) in quasi-public literary spaces lacks an understanding of style, or even a perception of it. Usually when people say style they mean form. They say “stylistic” when an author’s prose draws attention to itself or when a novel has a conscious structure. This is if people pay attention to form at all, as opposed to content.
Since his death, I’ve been thinking of Javier Marías’s intimation of literature: that it offers recognition. Literature is not literary fiction. When people say that science fiction can be “literary” they do not mean science fiction aspires toward literary fiction; they mean it aspires toward literature. They mean it transcends: it steps out of its boundaries. Another way to say this is that it resists its conventions. It resists what people ask or expect of it, usually by doing more, by being more. There’s nothing wrong with conventions, but there is something wrong with presuming it’s insulting or elitist to aspire to step outside of them. There is something wrong with presuming writers or artists should abstain from style – that is, from the will to resist. I don’t think it’s unusual, either, for these ideas to have proliferated and grown so visible on social media, where it’s not by accident but by design that conventions are reinforced. Structurally, an environment like social media has no use for style. It has no interest in resistance. No need for recognition, for seeing how it really is.
Fiction and what it does is on my mind because of novels – specifically mine. A few weeks ago, I signed a contract with Counterpoint Press to publish my second novel, forthcoming in 2024. I’m incredibly grateful to have found a home for it, this little thing I wrote during the pandemic, and can’t wait until it’s out there. Fiction is also on my mind because I started another novel, or more truthfully returned to an older one. I’d had to set it aside in 2019 because it was beyond what I could do, as a writer. It might beat me again, but so far this time I feel a little more in control. Neither of these novels means I’m thinking about them as literature or as resistance or even in terms of style, but they do mean I don’t take “the discourse” seriously. I don’t think any fiction writer can – at least not without the worry showing up in the work.
Anyway, something a little more fun is that I’ll be in conversation with Will McGrath at Magers & Quinn on Tuesday – inside a real bookstore! – reading from and talking about Image Control and celebrating its paperback release. As I said last month, this will be the first time I’ve read from the book in front of an audience, and the first time I’ve signed any copies (aside from stock, of course). I’m so excited I’m absolutely losing it. With that and the weather and having an actual job to go to for the first time in seven years, it’s hard not to want to celebrate. Thank you all for being a part of that.
Looking forward to "The Future Was Color," Patrick. I'm in the early middle of James Kirchick's "Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington," which means I'm reading about the Red and Lavender Scares of the early fifties, so your novel will fall on informed eyes.
I'm not on the same "quasi-public literary space" as you so it does confound me that categorization is such a hotly contested issue. Maybe for publishers and marketers and well, come to think of it, maybe for authors as well who want to get their books on the shelves. I write short stories and "publish" on WordPress, so I haven't found a need to worry about how my stories will be marketed, and thus just write.
Style, on the other hand, is on ongoing and critical concern for me during the writing process. One of the delights of writing fiction is to give the narrator or your characters voices (and styles) different from your own, style being maybe how the voice views the world, what they choose to express about it, and how. I likely fail at this more than I succeed, but think often of the success Daniel Kehlmann had with this in his novel "Ruhm" where each segment of the novel is written in a different voice and style.
Speaking of which, the book was marketed as "Ruhm: ein Roman in neun Geschichten." Kehlmann talked since about discussions he had with his publisher, who knew the pitfalls in marketing something as a short story collection and thus insisted on the work being a "novel," but one, perhaps at Kehlmann's insistence, that had nine stories!
At any rate, I always enjoy reading your posts, Patrick, and I thank you for them. I always know they will shake me out of any lethargy I've fallen into and make me start thinking again.