Languages of Truth Page 3

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  I’m trying to make a case in favor of something that is pretty much out of fashion these days. By general consensus, we live in an age of nonfiction. Any publisher, any bookseller, will tell you that. What’s more, fiction itself seems to have turned away from fiction. I’m speaking now of serious fiction, not the other kind. In the other kind of fiction, fictiveness is alive and well, it’s always twilight, people are playing hunger games, and Leonardo da Vinci is just a code. Serious fiction has turned toward realism of the Elena Ferrante and Knausgaard kind, fiction that asks us to believe that it comes from a place very close to if not identical to the author’s personal experience and away, so to speak, from magic. But many years ago, in a famous essay, the great Czech writer Milan Kundera proposed that the novel has two parents, Tristram Shandy and Clarissa Harlowe. From Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa descends the great tradition of the realist novel, while from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, comes a smaller trickle of, well, weirder books. It is the children of Clarissa who have filled the literary world, Kundera said, and yet, in his opinion, it was on the Shandean side—the antic, ludic, comic, eccentric side—that most new, original work remained to be done. (Ernest Hemingway famously chose a different literary parent: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” That is a freer and more mythic work than Clarissa, but it too is a broadly realistic novel. It must also be said that in choosing Tristram Shandy, Kundera ignores the work to which it is deeply indebted: Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Sterne’s Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are clearly modeled on Quixote and Sancho.)

  Kundera was suggesting that the possibilities of the realist novel have been so thoroughly explored by so many authors that very little new remains to be discovered. If he’s right, the realist tradition is doomed to a kind of endless repetitiveness. For innovation, for newness—and remember that the word “novel” contains the idea of newness—we must turn to irrealism and find new ways of approaching the truth through lies. The wonder tales of my childhood taught me not only that such approaches were possible but that they were manifold, almost infinite in their possibilities, and that they were fun. As I said, the purveyors of schlock fiction in books and in films as well have understood the power of the fantastic, but all they are able to purvey is the fantastic reduced to comic-strip two-dimensionality. For me, the fantastic has been a way of adding dimensions to the real, adding fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh dimensions to the usual three; a way of enriching and intensifying our experience of the real, rather than escaping from it into superhero-vampire fantasyland.

  The Western writers I have most admired, writers such as Italo Calvino and Günter Grass, Mikhail Bulgakov and Isaac Bashevis Singer, have all feasted richly on their various wonder-tale traditions and found ways of injecting the fabulous into the real to make it more vivid and, strangely, more truthful. Grass’s co-opting of animal fables, his extensive use of talking flounders, rats, and toads, grows from his absorption in the wonder tales of Germany, as collected by the Brothers Grimm. Calvino himself collected and perhaps partially invented many Italian wonder tales in his classic work Italian Folktales, and all his work was steeped in the language of the Italian fable. In Bulgakov’s immortal tale of the devil coming to Moscow, The Master and Margarita, and in the delicious Yiddish stories of Isaac Singer, with their golems and dybbuks, their possessions and hauntings, we see, as in the art of Chagall, a deep fascination with and inspiration taken from the wonder tales of the Russian, Jewish, and Slavic world. Much of the greatest work of the last hundred or so years, from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the work of Ursula Le Guin to the midnight-black nightmares of Franz Kafka, has come from this blending of the real and the surreal, of the natural and the supranatural worlds.

  Many young writers today seem to start with the mantra “write what you know” pinned to the wall behind their writing tables, and as a result, as anyone who has experienced creative-writing classes can testify, there’s a lot of stuff about adolescent suburban angst. My advice would be a little different. Only write what you know if what you know is really interesting. If you live in a neighborhood like Harper Lee’s or William Faulkner’s, by all means feel free to tell the heated tales of your own personal Yoknapatawpha, and you’ll probably find you never need to leave home at all. But unless what you know is really interesting, don’t write about it. Write what you don’t know. This can be done in two ways. One way is to leave home and go and find a good story somewhere else. Melville and Conrad found their stories at sea and in faraway lands, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald too had to leave home to find their voices in Spain, or the Riviera, or East and West Egg. The other solution is to remember that fiction is fictional and try to make things up. We are all dreaming creatures. Dream on paper. And if it turns out like Twilight or The Hunger Games, tear it up, and try to have a better dream.

  Madame Bovary and a flying carpet are both untrue, and, what’s more, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up. I’m in favor of continuing to make things up. Only by unleashing the fictionality of fiction, the imaginativeness of the imagination, the dream songs of our dreams, can we hope to approach the new, and to create fiction that may, once again, be more interesting than the facts.

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  In the novel I wrote for my then ten-year-old son, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an annoyed ten-year-old boy shouts at his storyteller father, “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” The book that followed was an attempt to answer that question, to examine why it is that we need such stories and how they fulfill us, even though we know they are made up. It’s a subject I seem to have been thinking about for most of my writing life: the relationship between the world of the imagination and the so-called real world, and how we travel between the two. Five years before Haroun, I wrote about N. F. Simpson’s play One Way Pendulum, one of the very few competent British contributions to the Theatre of the Absurd. In this play, a man receives by mail order a full-size replica in do-it-yourself kit form of a courtroom in the Central Criminal Court in London, known as the Old Bailey; he assembles it in his living room and shortly afterward finds himself on trial in it. A clerk states that on a certain day the defendant, our hero, “was not in this world.” “What world was he in, then?” the judge demands, and the answer comes: “It seems he has one of his own.”

  (Parenthetically: Those who have not read Haroun and the Sea of Stories will no doubt be impressed to know that it was featured on the TV series Lost, where it played the part of the book being read by the character Desmond on Oceanic Flight 815 during the flash-sideways timeline. I really hope some readers will understand what that sentence means, because I certainly do not. “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” is a question that could no doubt form the basis of an interesting lecture about Lost.)

  Even if we do not live wholly in our imaginations, we all like to make journeys therein. In Jean-Luc Godard’s film Alphaville, the private-eye hero Lemmy Caution travels across interstellar space in his Ford Galaxy. Dorothy Gale arrives in Oz riding a whirlwind. How and why do the rest of us make the trip?

  We are born wanting food, shelter, love, song, and story. Our need for the last two is not less than our need for the first three. A friend of mine, researching the horrific treatment of orphans in Ceausescu’s Romania, has found that these children, given food and shelter but denied the rest, do not develop normally. Their brains do not form properly. Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them. And while there are other creatures on earth who might be described as singing—I’m thinking of the trills of songbirds, the howling of wolves, the long slow song of the whale in the ocean’s deeps—there is nothing that swims, crawls, walks
, or flies that tells stories. Man alone is the storytelling animal.

  Song is the human voice used in an unnatural way—a way that not all human beings, myself included, can use it—to create the kind of meaning that beauty instills in us. Story is the unnatural means we use to talk about human life, our way of reaching the truth by making things up. And we are the only species that, from the beginning, has used stories to explain ourselves to ourselves. Sitting in Plato’s cave, men told stories about the shadows on the cave wall to guess at the world outside. Unable to understand their origins, men told each other stories about sky gods and sun gods, ancestor gods and savior gods, invisible fathers and mothers who explained the great matter of our origin and offered guidance on the equally great matter of morals. In myth and legend we created our oldest wonderlands, Asgard and Valhalla, Olympus and Mount Kailash, and embedded therein our deepest thoughts about our own natures and our doubts and fears as well.

  Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a fable about language and silence, about stories and anti-stories, written, in part, to explain to my young son the battle then swirling around his father about another novel, The Satanic Verses. Twenty years after Haroun, another son demanded, “Where’s my book?” There are two answers to this question. The first answer is, “Kid, life ain’t fair.” It’s not a nice answer, I agree. The other answer is to write the book; so I wrote Luka and the Fire of Life, and as a result spent much time wandering around wonderlands once again, the imaginary worlds we love to inhabit as children and as grown-ups too.

  When I began work on Luka twenty years after Haroun, I thought a good deal about “Lewis Carroll,” the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the creator of Wonderland, and I learned this from him: The best thing about his second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass, is that it is not Return to Wonderland. Six years after publishing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he set himself the considerable challenge of creating an entirely different imaginary world, with its own internal logic.

  Don’t go back where you’ve already been. Find another reason for going somewhere else.

  I decided to challenge myself to do the same thing. Commercially speaking, this may not have been the smartest move. As my son Milan advised me when he was twelve years old, “Don’t write books, Dad. Write series.” In the age of Harry Potter and Twilight, he’s obviously right.

  A few words more about Through the Looking-Glass. By the time it was published, the first Alice book had become immensely popular, so the danger of publishing a sequel that disappointed the earlier work’s admirers was very great; also, Alice herself—Alice Pleasance Liddell—had grown up and was no longer that child who, on July 4, 1862, on a rowing trip with her two sisters and the Reverend Dodgson, had asked for a story and been told the tale of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the story that was published three years later in much expanded form as the book we now colloquially know as Alice in Wonderland. Many of the greatest works of children’s literature were created with particular children in mind: J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan to please the Llewelyn Davies boys, A. A. Milne wrote Winnie-the-Pooh about his son Christopher Robin Milne’s favorite toys, and Lewis Carroll wrote Alice for Alice. But by the time of Through the Looking-Glass, he had to write for the memory of Alice, that imperious little girl who seems always to be scolding people, who remains certain of the rules of life and proper behavior even in a world whose rules she cannot know.

  The Alice he had created for himself, however, continued to fill his dreams: “Still she haunts me, phantomwise,” he wrote, “Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.”

  My task, as I wrote Luka and the Fire of Life, was easier. I had a new child to write for and to be guided by. And I was fortunate, I am fortunate, that I had grown up steeped in the tradition of the wonder tale, including the heroic myths of the warrior Hamza and the adventurer Hatim Tai, wanderers who married fairies, fought goblins, slew dragons, and sometimes faced enemies who flew through the air riding on giant enchanted urns. From my earliest days, I have been—and I still am—a traveler in wonderlands.

  If the realist tradition has been the dominant one, it is worth spending a few moments to defend the alternative, the other great tradition. It is worth saying that fantasy is not whimsy. The fantastic is neither innocent nor escapist. The wonderland is not a place of refuge, not even necessarily an attractive or likable place. It can be—in fact, it usually is—a place of slaughter, exploitation, cruelty, and fear. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a tragedy. Captain Hook wants to kill Peter Pan. The witch in the Black Forest wants to cook Hansel and Gretel. The wolf actually eats Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Albus Dumbledore is murdered, and the Lord of the Rings plans the enslavement of the whole of Middle-earth. The flying carpet of King Solomon, which, according to the stories, was sixty miles long and sixty miles wide, once punished the great king for the sin of pride by beginning to shake, so that the forty thousand people upon it all tumbled to their deaths. (Not for the first time, ordinary people suffered for their rulers’ sins. Wonderland can be as flawed a place as earth.)

  We know, when we hear these tales, that even though they are “unreal,” because carpets do not fly and witches in gingerbread houses do not exist, they are also “real,” because they are about real things: love, hatred, fear, power, bravery, cowardice, death. They simply arrive at the real by a different route. They are so, even though we know that they are not so.

  Before the modern literature of the fantastic, before wonderland and fairy tale and folktale, there was mythology. In the beginning, myths were religious texts. The Greek myths were originally the Greek religion. But perhaps it’s only when people stopped believing in the literal truth of these myths, stopped believing in an actual Zeus hurling actual thunderbolts, that they, we, were able to start believing in them in the way in which we believe in literature—that is to say, more profoundly, the double belief/unbelief with which we approach fiction, “so and not so.” And at once they began to give up their deepest meanings, meanings previously obscured by faith.

  The great myths, Greek, Roman, Nordic, have survived the deaths of the religions that once sustained them because of the astonishing compression of meaning they contain. When I was writing my novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I became enthralled by the myth of Orpheus, the greatest poet who was also the greatest singer, the personage in whom song and story became one. You can recount the myth of Orpheus in a hundred words or less: his love for the nymph Eurydice, her pursuit by the beekeeper Aristaeus, the snakebite that killed her, her descent into hell, his pursuit of her beyond the doors of death, his attempt to rescue her, his being granted by the lord of the underworld—as a reward for the genius of his singing—the possibility of leading her back to life as long as he didn’t look back, and his fatal backward look. And yet when you begin to delve into the story it seems almost inexhaustibly rich, for at its heart is a great triangular tension between the grandest matters of life: love, art, and death. You can turn and turn the story and the triangle tells you different things. It tells you that art, inspired by love, can have a greater power than death. It tells you, contrariwise, that death, in spite of art, can defeat the power of love. And it tells you that art alone can make possible the transaction between love and death that is at the center of all human life.

  There is one story that crops up in several mythologies: the story of the moment when men have to learn to do without their gods. In Roberto Calasso’s great study of Greek and Roman myth, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, he tells us that that occasion, the nuptials of Cadmus, the inventor of the alphabet, and the nymph Harmonia, was the last time the gods descended from Olympus to join in human life. After that, we were on our own. In Nordic myth, when the World Tree, the great ash Yggdrasil, falls, the gods do battle with, destroy, and are destroyed by their appointed foes, and after that they are gone. The death of the gods demands that heroes, men, come forward to take their
place. Here, in ancient Greek and Old Norse, are our oldest fables about growing up, about learning that a time must come when our parents, our teachers, our guardians, can no longer command and protect us. There is a time to leave wonderland and grow up.

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  The children of Tristram Shandy, to use Kundera’s term—or the children of Quixote, or of Scheherazade—may not be as plentiful as those of Clarissa Harlowe, but you will find them in every literature, in every place, in every time. From the bedeviled Moscow of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita to the dybbuk-ridden villages of Isaac Bashevis Singer; from the French Surrealists to the American Fabulists; from Jonathan Swift to Carmen Maria Machado, Karen Russell, and Helen Oyeyemi, they are everywhere, forming an alternative, joyous, carnivalesque “great tradition” to set alongside the realistic one. The best-known such writers in recent literary history were the South American practitioners of so-called magic realism. The term “magic realism” is valuable when it’s used to describe the writers of the Latin American Boom: Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, and, of course, Gabriel García Márquez, as well as perhaps their forebears Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Machado de Assis. But it’s a problematic term, because when it’s used, most people equate it with the fantasy fiction genre. And, as I’ve been trying to argue, the literature of the fantastic is not genre fiction but, in its own way, as realistic as naturalistic fiction; it just comes into the real through a different door. A naturalistic novel is entirely capable of being escapist: Read a little chick lit and you’ll see what I mean.