MDMD: Am I still dreaming?

[Paul Nightingale]

Writing, therefore, is an attempt to civilise the wilderness. Writing that
is realistic seeks to reproduce the real world unproblematically (eg not
Pynchon). It is a kind of fetish: it stands in for that which is absent.
Realism will succeed if it can make the reader believe the absent world is
in fact present. This is what we mean when we refer to the reader's
suspension of belief. Non-realist writing draws attention to the narrative
as something that has been constructed: this is one of the functions of the
unreliable narrator, to emphasise the process of selection that realism
would render invisible. Do we believe that behind the fetish is the real
world (Freud) or another fetish, and then another and so on (Nietzsche)? If
the former, we praise the writer's skill in describing the scene, or making
their characters 'life-like'. We praise the imitation. If the latter, our
attention is drawn to that which cannot be described. I don't think Pynchon
has written 'How to ...' books for those who wish to say that war is bad;
his work is part of the dialogue with, for example, those media commentators
who have spent the last couple of weeks giving Bush's 'performance' marks
out of ten.