Response to Harper's

For FC2, Ben Marcus' defense of experimental fiction poses the question of the present. Jonathan Franzen was past before he arrived, but why other words are here now seems puzzling. The fact of mass communication bedazzles everybody. No longer protected by distance or time, we live in the whole world at once, like postmodern gods, experiencing our own flesh and surroundings only disruptively. How could writing read by millions leave no impression? When Marcus quips, "If only writers could give up their interest in language, then they might truly be able to compete for those enormous money-spending audiences" (46), he recognizes a suppressed ambition. Anybody devoting thirty years to publishing books everybody else considers unpublishable experiences the stress. Heart rhythms change, breathing catches the beat. History isn't what's here now; it's what's here and now tomorrow too, but surrounded by so much mayhem; how can this sentence be happening? Of course, there's no telling how the future will imagine us, but if it imagines in language, then this imperfect tense should make our future present. Day in, day out, words come to nothing. At FC2 we imagine it like this: The twenty-first century occurs in the twenty-second. Only then does the writing, philosophy, art, music which created the twenty-first become idiomatic. Historians discover that, what everyone experienced as the twenty-first, was actually the eighteenth in philosophy, the nineteenth in literature, the twentieth in politics, and art just after WWII. The belated rage for the twenty-first postpones the twenty-second a hundred years. What would it mean to be present? FC2's answer is the writing of Michael Mejia, Lydia Yuknavitch, Noy Holland, Brian Evenson, Susan Steinberg, Steve Tomasula, Stephen Graham Jones, Kate Bernheimer, Michael Martone, Lance Olsen, Michael Joyce and others. These are not the names Jonathan Franzen recognizes. Who's absent? It remains to be seen.