Foreword

FOREWORD There is a shadow theme to this open issue of the MR—one which I believe reflects trends in contemporary literature. It isn't unusual for our fiction to be informed by story, but in this issue the poetry and essays share something of that trait. Will Baker shows how very close to fiction an essay can come in his wonderful tale about the folly of love in youth and age. Roger Kamenetz contemplates death in the true narrative of one person's death. Many of this issue's poems—rather than being about the mind moving alone in psychological or meditative space— share the primary elements of story: they are about characters in particular places undertaking actions which lead to recognitions. Thus, this is largely an issue of stories, some told in poetry, some fiction, some nonfiction. In our conversation with Jim Harrison, we talk with an author equally accomplished in poetry and fiction, who is a master of the muscular, fearless, story-filled narrative. There is a distinct tendency in the 1980's away from psychological and formal obsessions toward the reemergence of narrative as the base for many forms of literature. Today, poets have the extraordinary freedom to speak in firm voices about events and characters external to their personal lives or their own aesthetic personae. They appear to be quite beyond confessionalism, which to me makes poetry today less boring, more varied, and open to broader fields of experience and mood. Nonfiction prose has often looked toward narrative as a source of its own vigor. The "New Journalism" of the sixties was declared to be a fad when in fact its methods were a classic alternative to straight journalism. By using character, setting, tone, and other vivifying features in their nonfiction prose, writers like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe were not doing anything that James Agee, George Orwell, various muckrakers and uncounted writers of popular history hadn't done before them. The essay itself is a specific type of nonfiction prose—short and, almost by definition, with a discursive rather than narrative form. Yet what can we do with the many contemporary examples of storylike short nonfiction (like Will Baker's in this issue—or Bill Barich's fine pieces about gambling and fishing, or John McPhee's character-inspired journalism) but call them essays! If the purpose of such a work (short, nonfiction, well written) is clearly meditative, then I am happy to call it an essay and be done with the matter. The fictions in this issue are informed by story as ours usually are. By "story" I mean to suggest narrative, character, and broad tonal possibilities—from the restraint of Susan Land's "Coda" to the ferocity of Ninotchka Rosca's "Epidemic" to the delectable nostalgia of Ron Carlson's "At the Hop." I associate one further characteristic (not particularly evident in this issue) with contemporary fiction's emphasis on story, and that is the tendency to sublimate voice or narrator's personality within the larger force and intention of narrative. Looking to the broader world of fiction, this is nowhere more evident than in the narrative inventiveness of certain of the magical realists. By spreading before us the narrative feast of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez inspired, worldwide, renewed interest in the entire novel genre. Yet when Marquez went back to the more obsessive, voice-inspired style of Autumn of the Patriarch, harkening back to his own earlier love for Faulkner, he lost much of his audience. A latter-day magical realist, Salman Rushdie, in his novel Shame, mixes personal essays and explanations with fiction, yet it is neither these metafictional elements nor the almost careless style that define the personality of Shame, but rather the tale itself, wild and fast and full of different moods and effects. If I am right, there's a rising extraversion in good writing today—a hunger for broader realities and more applicable truths. The hangover of formalism, with its fussy self-consciousness about style and unity, is behind us, as is the decadent romanticism that vied with it and took precedence, reigning supreme in the seventies. This open issue...