The Decline of Fun

[Werner Presber]

George Blecher
The Decline of Fun

In a fascinating addendum to Native Son (1940), the novelist Richard  
Wright talked about "the deep fun" of writing the book, and his sense  
that the nightmarish but weirdly comic saga of an illiterate black  
killing an upper-class white was universal: "I made the discovery  
that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too, and  
there were literally millions of him, everywhere." But this didn't  
mean that Wright thought of his character as a cipher: on the  
contrary, Bigger had to be individualized because "the main burden of  
all serious fiction consists almost wholly of character-destiny and  
the items, social, political, and personal, of that character-destiny."

Wright's essay could stand as a credo for all fiction writing,  
especially the best American character-driven narratives (Huck Finn,  
Gatsby, Moby Dick) with their peculiar blend of naturalism and  
American Absurd. (Think of the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg in Gatsby, the  
long disquisition on a whale's foreskin in Moby Dick!) One can  
understand why such a book–and Native Son belongs in that category–  
would be great fun to write. (But not funny haha, a purer, deeper  
kind of fun: the fun of putting one's ego aside and being swept along  
to places one has never been.) While one doesn't exactly laugh when  
Bigger Thomas suffocates Mary Dalton and stuffs her into a furnace,  
one may chuckle ruefully: there is something satisfyingly macabre,  
almost Poe-ish, in this tragedy of two people separated by a gulf of  
misunderstanding.

Whatever else that might be said about American literature of the  
last 30 years, it didn't produce a single memorable character, not a  
Bigger nor a Gatsby nor a Holden Caulfield, or offer us a novel or  
play that exemplified Wright's complex sense of fun. As a group,  
satirists like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo came closest.  
They certainly tried to make their work all- inclusive as well as fun  
(at least in the sense of odd and macabre), but their humor seemed  
strained, self-conscious; instead of being transported by characters  
playing out their destinies, one felt manipulated by the novels'  
grand designs. In fact, not even TV or movies produced many fictional  
cultural icons during this time: Elvis, Muhammed Ali, Janis Joplin,  
Lee Harvey Oswald, Richard Nixon, Malcolm X., Bill and Monica  
preoccupied us much more than any invented characters.

But if not character, what did drive the literature of the last 30  
years? Style. Narrowness. Caution. Instead of attempting to be  
inclusive, most writers (and "serious publishers") focused on a  
single gender, minority, social class, cultural or ethnic group. They  
may have done it out of despair over a dwindling readership, an eye  
to the niche market, laziness, lack of talent, lack of experience, an  
atmosphere of cultural separatism (a sad byproduct of the 60's)–or  
all of the above. Most novels, stories, poems degenerated into thinly- 
veiled autobiography, with only token fictional gestures, until even  
the pretense of writing fiction was dropped, and writers just out of  
college flooded the market with their memoirs. By the end of the  
century, Wright's belief in the possibility of a universal fiction  
was not only old-fashioned, it was politically incorrect. And, though  
written with porcelain-like fineness, most of the work that was  
produced (even when funny) wasn't much fun at all.

If "literature" became style-driven, best-sellers of the last 30  
years became formula- driven. Since World War II (and probably long  
before), a gap existed in American letters between High and Low  
Culture, but it was in that gap that most notable American writers of  
the past flourished. I'm thinking of authors like Hemingway, Cather,  
Steinbeck, Faulkner–essentially realistic writers who nonetheless had  
recognizable styles and even a taste for Large Themes (the movement  
of Time, History) that they tried to integrate into their narratives  
without too much clumsiness. In the last 30 years, despite attempts  
by writers like John Irving and Tom Wolfe, no one was able to fill  
that gap. As literature descended into diary writing, best-sellers  
removed themselves farther and farther into fantasy; borrowing a  
little from TV soap operas, a little more from porno and mysteries,  
they ultimately became vessels for simplified versions of our  
national dreams (and nightmares): horror, wealth, crime, paranoia,  
sex, celebrity.

You might say that during this period, America lost its capacity to  
imagine convincing narratives about itself; life became too tense and  
complicated to provide the necessary dreaming-space. Or maybe the  
reasons were a lot more practical.

Consider the Allegory of Publishing and Commerce. By now, the story  
is familiar: How an aggressive, uncouth (yet vital) young man named  
Commerce, who made his fortune selling products like toilet plungers  
and toothpaste, pursued the noble, impoverished, neurotic virgin  
called Publishing. Before the late 1960's, Commerce had hardly  
noticed her–she was too quiet, too distant– but now, maybe because he  
was bored with easier conquests, he fell madly in love. In his heart  
Commerce knew that books could be sold like toothpaste, if only  
Publishing would be his. Not inattentive to his advances, Publishing  
was in a quandary: should she retain her purity and live on praise  
and modest sales, or submit to Commerce and produce books directed at  
the, gasp!, masses?

At first she resisted. I like you, she told Commerce, and your big  
advances, plush offices, glitzy book covers, movie deals. I'm  
attracted to your energy, I want to make money, but I don't know if  
I'm... ready. My authors work slowly; they need time, time, time.

Commerce didn't understand. Hadn't he showered her with money and  
respect? Why wasn't she equally devoted to him? Couldn't she insist  
that her authors produce blockbusters fast, now that books really  
were beginning to sell like toothpaste in supermarkets, airports,  
chain bookstores and over the Internet?

Under pressure, Publishing went a little schizo. She put most of her  
efforts (and Commerce's money) into developing books that retained  
some of the qualities of realistic fiction–especially the attempt to  
describe, however superficially, a cross-section of society–but she  
also recognized the public's need for fantasy, for a lack of  
originality, for the comforting repetition of a good guys/bad guys  
fairy tale after a hard day at the office. To this end, she promoted  
authors like Stephen King and Robert Ludlum and Danielle Steele,  
until their sales grew so hypertrophic that they took up nearly all  
the shelf space once reserved for a variety of more "serious"  
authors. But she couldn't give up literature completely. And Commerce  
didn't want her to; after all, didn't he love her? Of course she  
could have her literature, as long as it was ethereal and small- 
boned, published in minuscule editions, a literature as delicate and  
pretty (and innocuous) as her diary.

Of course it wasn't this simple. And of course during the last 30  
years the U.S. produced some good authors and good books. (My list  
includes Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis, Grace Paley, Maxine Hong  
Kingston, Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, the playwrights Sam  
Shepard and David Mamet; yours no doubt includes those I've  
overlooked.) The brutal truth is, in the last 30 years remarkable  
work hasn't emerged in any of the arts, including those that  
supposedly stole literature's market-share of public attention. No  
matter how many explanations one has for this, none quite works. Did  
the political radicalism of the late 60's translate, not into Walter  
Benjamin's hoped-for artistic radicalism, but into artistic  
conservatism, a distrust of the individual voice? Did Art lose its  
vitality because the Western world swung to the Right in the 70's and  
80's, bringing with it what might be called Capitalist Realism? Did  
Commerce kill Art, or was it suicidal? Has sped-up cyber-time made it  
impossible for us to concentrate on a jazz solo, a long tracking shot  
in a film, a novel in which characters speak for more than two  
sentences at a time? Or is my 15 year old son right when he says that  
the Art is in computer graphics and commercials? The only thing we  
seem to have learned at the end of this exhausting century is that no  
theory fits all the facts: all we have left are questions.

And yet literature doesn't want to die. In the U.S. small publishers  
keep popping up, thumbing their noses at the conglomerates. Poetry  
readings draw hundreds, if not thousands, of young people. Hiphop  
reflects a love of the sound of words, if not always their meaning.  
And even the fun of writing seems not to go completely unnoticed. In  
a recent essay called The Nature of the Fun, the novelist David  
Foster Wallace described the development of a fiction writer.  
Initially writing stories to amuse himself and mask his weaknesses,  
he soon learns that it's only by revealing the most painful sides of  
himself (as Wright did in Native Son, as any major writer does) that  
he can tap into the real fun:
The fact that you can...sustain the fun of writing only by  
confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you'd first used  
writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn't  
any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and  
compared to it the rewards of strangers' affections are as dust, lint.

Wright would have liked that.

Text source: eurozine
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