SLSL Intro "'Seriousness' in Fiction"

[Dave Monroe]

N.B.: Murthy suggested I repost this 'cos, despite the
fact that I received responses to it, for whatever
reason it never made it into the archives.  In the
interest of keeping the record complete ...


"When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction ultimately
we are talking about an attitude toward death--how
characters may act in its presence, for example, or
how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. 
Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever
brought up with younger writers, possibly because
given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is
widely felt to be effort wasted.  (I suspect one of
the reasons that fantasy and science fiction appeal so
much to younger readers is that, when the space and
time have been altered to allow the characters to
travel easily anywhere through the continuum and thus
escape physical dangers and timepiece inevitabilities,
mortality is so seldom an issue.)
   "In 'The Small Rain' characters are found dealing
with death in pre-adult ways.  They evade: they sleep
late, they seek euphemisms.  When they do mention
death they try to make with the jokes.  Worst of all,
they hook it up with sex.  You'll notice that toward
the end of the story, some kind of sexual encounter
apears to take place, though you'd never know it from
the text.  The language suddenly gets too fancy to
read.  Maybe this wasn't my own adolescent nervousness
about sex.  I think, looking back, that there might
have been a general nervousness in the whole
colege-age subculture.  It was also the era of Howl,
Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, and all the excesses of law
enforcement that such works provoked.  Even the
American soft-core pornmography available in those
days went to absurdly symbolic lengths to avoid
describing sex." (SL, "Intro," pp. 5-6)

Cf. "if through some as yet undeveloped technology I
were to run into him today" (p. 3) ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72329&sort=date

NOTE: Reposting this 'cos, despite the fact that I
received responses to it, for whatever reason it never
made it into the archives

>From Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American
Novel, rev ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966 [1960]),
Ch. 1, "The Novel and America," pp. 23-38 ...

   "There is a real sense in which our prose fiction
is immediately distinguishable from that of Europe
....  In this sense, our novels seem not primitive,
perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way,
almost juvenile.  The great works of American fiction
are notoriously at home in the children's section of
the library, their level of sentimentality precisely
that of a pre-adolescent.  This is part of what we
mean when we talk about the incapacity of teh American
novelist to develop; in a compulsive way he returns to
a limited world of experience, usually associated iwth
his childhood ....
   "Merely finding a langauge, learning to talk in a
land where there are no conventions of cvonversation,
no continuing literary language--this exhausts the
American writer.  He is forever beginning, saying for
the first time ....  He faces, moreover, another
problem ....  Our great novelists, though experts on
indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend
to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man
and woman ....  Indeed, they rather shy away from
permitting in their fictions the presence of any
full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters
of virtue or bitchery, symbols of rejection or fear of
sexuality." (p. 24)

   "The figure of Rip Van Winkle presides over the
birth of the American imagination ....  Ever since,
the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a
man on the run ...--anywhere to avoid 'civilization,'
which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman
which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and
responsibility.
   "Rip's world is not only asexual, however, it is
terrible: a world of fear and loneliness, a haunted
world; and the American novel is pre-eminently a novel
of terror...." (pp. 25-6)

   "The enemy of society on the rtun toward 'freedom'
is also the pariah in flight from his guilt, the guilt
of that very flight; and new phantoms arise to haunt
him at every step.  American literature likes to
pretend, of course, that its bugaboos are all finally
jokes....  But it is all 'humor,' of course, a last
desperate attempt to convince us of the innocence of
violence, the good clean fun of horror.  Our
literature as a whole at times seems a chamber of
horrors disguised as an amusement park 'fun house,'
where we pay to play at terror and are confronted with
the innermost chamber with a series of
inter-reflecting mirrors which poresent us with a
thousand versions of our own face.
   "In our most enduring books, the cheapjack
macvhinery of the gothic novel is called upon to
represent the hidden blackness of the human soul and
human society....  However shoddily or ironically
treated, horror is essential to our literature.  It is
not merely a matter of terror filling the vacuum left
by the suppression of sex in our novels, of Thanatos
standing in for Eros.  Through these gothic images are
projected certain obsessive concerns of our national
life: the ambiguity of our relationship with Indian
and Negro, the ambiguity of our encounter with nature,
the guilt of a revolutionist who feels himslef a
parricide--and, not least of all, the uneasiness of
the writer who cannot help believing that the very act
of composing a book is Satanic revolt." (pp. 26-7)

   "Moreover ... our classic literature is a
literature of horror for boys.  Truly shocking,
frankly obscene authors we do not possess ...." (p.
29)

   "Perhaps the whole odd shape of American fiction
arises simply .... because there is no real sexuality
in Ametican life and therefore there cannot very well
be any in American art...." (p. 3)

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