The Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction

Conclusion

CONCLUSION what i’ve said here changes nothing, of course. Tomorrow I will pick up a novel and begin to read, and no matter how full my head of the uncertainties I’ve just laid out, I will read exactly as I always have, never doubting the perfect knowability of the thing I have before me. You will do the same, if you’re lucky enough to pick up a novel tomorrow. Throughout this book I’ve been arguing that fiction is at once open and closed, solid and liquid, but I should add that it needn’t in any way matter if it’s a solid or a liquid or both. Fiction resists definition, I’ve been claiming, to which I should add that it resists my definition no less than anyone else’s. Say what you like about the nature of fiction, but never forget that no matter what you say, fiction will always escape your grasp, as it escapes mine. Call a novel a force, and it reasserts itself as an object; call it a solid, and it stubbornly reveals itself as a liquid. And no matter what you call it, it goes on doing its mysterious work as if you’d never opened your mouth at all. No doubt this was all once much simpler. Before the advent of print, I imagine, we accepted the fluidity of stories as a matter of course; a tale could be told and retold in a thousand ways, and there was nothing disturbing about it—although I wonder just how much liberty a 257 258 conclusion medieval jongleur really had to rework the well-known tale he or she was reciting, and I assume that it was a limited liberty. But once books began to be printed—and particularly once copyright law was established—a story became conflated with the specific words used to narrate it. And with this conflation comes, paradoxically, a sort of scission: the book is now partly events or ideas and partly words, partly a force and partly an object, and—barring the (I dearly hope) unlikely possibility that print culture might one day vanish forever—there is no turning back. That scission happened, I would venture to guess, without our really knowing it, without our thinking about it. In its earliest days, print must have been thought of simply as a means of making the ephemeral permanent, of recording speech or something very like speech, on the model of the manuscripts that preceded it. Soon people began to write books specifically for the purpose of being printed, but I don’t think anything changed at that point: the printed page remains essentially a recording of something (as Bateson, well into the fifth century of print’s existence, explicitly tells us). This isn’t always true, of course—no one would claim that Finnegans Wake or Un coup de dés is a reproduction of something spoken—but it remains a kind of default model for our approach to a text (hence the use of the word “voice” to describe an author’s individual style). But at the same time, print, and particularly copyright , enforce a recasting of the book’s nature, making of the words of the text not simply a recording of something, but something in themselves. The collection of words becomes an object, and with this comes the possibility and indeed the inevitability of the other book, for that object—ownable, breakable, reproducible—is now at least in part something other than the tale itself. In other words, we started out simply telling stories, and then at some point our stories began to exist independently of their tellers or their telling—to exist independently of us, to (as I hope to have shown here) escape our attempts to define or delimit or tame them. conclusion 259 This is not the sign of a failing on our part, not a reminder that we have to find some better way of defining or delimiting literature. It is rather a glimpse of an extraordinary truth: in literature, we invented a thing whose workings we cannot exactly grasp. We might not much like that idea—for very good reasons, our brains are fixated on knowing and knowability—but if we can simply accept it, we might find something else dear to the human mind and heart: beautiful, impossible mystery. For much of the twentieth century...