Meditations on Fiction

Shamelessly, I am ripping off my own personal blog for dino-content. As I reflected on finishing Stephen Wright’s fantastic novel, Mediations in Green, it dawned on me that the themes put forward by this novel have a considerable amount to contribute to the virulence of the novel as art and entertainment.

The praise I hear (and more often overhear) the most concerning memoirs is that they help real people overcome problems and deficiencies in their own lives. I understand that people can draw support from the success of real life examples, be it in politics and leadership or disabilities and addictions, and I would never want to take that away (though, I might add, if they’d lay their problems on their radio, they might be surprised how quickly the desperate coil unwinds). What bothers me isn’t so much the memoir itself (though, whatever happened to good old fashioned autobiographies?) but the fact that the populace will read an account of one’s life and declare itself cured/entertained to satisfaction. It is impossible for the memoir to delve into the source of our questions and problems because it affords no space for exploring the imagination where these questions crop up.

In Green’s novel, we meet characters who are recurrent, in our lives and literature, in both directions on the time line. Trips, something of a maniac and a misguided companion, is involved in a much more personal war than anything political could muster, and he provides the definitive statement of the joys in art, and fiction in particular, in a sass-filled rant worthy of an upset Oscar Wilde:

“I want to get back to my roots. What’s more American than good honest fraud? Your consciousness can’t be that full of the gritty day-to-day without an appreciation of the delights of deceit. It’s a fun head, knowing and pretending not to know or not knowing and pretending to know or not knowing and not pretending. Wheels within wheels, forging cash value. It can get pretty elaborate but once you work your way in, shake off those qualms, there’s all these cozy layers between you and the other chill. Delusion is a national pastime.”

The delusional joys and escapes are the main goal of the protagonists. If there is one overarching theme that resonated with me, it was the aching question, “How do we make this bearable?” Many people have ‘failed’ this question and suffer addictions and dependencies because of it–but shouldn’t we ask where it comes from, how it’s shared, what is says about the peculiar condition of our peculiar bipedal animal?

In the novel, Wendell, for one, channeling Milo from Catch-22, loses himself in orchestration and a grand sense of recorded control, “He wanted choreography, a dance of death,” as he tries to film a Vietnam epic all while the war itself lacks a cohesive structure or conclusion. Major Holly seeks to paint the base, clean it up, and instill order through discipline. Kraft is unconcerned with the question, while rookie Claypool didn’t even realize there was a question to ask.

Fiction is, of course, the best venue for exploring this topic. Film lacks the length, and expenses will never allow it to fully integrate it, painting hints at the scenes, poetry points to the paradoxes, but only well developed fiction can let characters grow within its pages as the reader reads them. What will become of us when we are no longer willing to ask these questions? What is decadence, if not making a reality of the imaginary conception that all is still beneath the surface?

The question also presents itself, though in a much more subtle and subversive sense, of why we find life unbearable to begin with. It’s old existential angst at its deepest, and like thousands before him, Griffin has been looking for solace in nature, but it seems the aptly named Arden and his patented new-age plant therapy doesn’t cut it for him. Maybe it isn’t the plants, after all, but the process, maybe, Arden suggests, he needs a new base:

“A new motto: If you can’t trans-cend, you might as well descend. I’m scoping out the bottom here. Acquainting myself with our amazing mineral friends. Look at these specimens, for instance. Mass. Density. Permanence. Finality. Termination. Rock. Even the word conveys heft, a certain assurance. No loss of focus here.”

“But what happened to all this plant jive?”

“I don’t know. It’s not working out. Maybe plants are too creepy, swaying between worlds, mind/no-mind, like what’s going on there. It’s scary. Now a rock is something that has weathered the crisis. A rock is a survivor. Look at this stuff. No growth, no decay, no streaming fluids. The substance of walls, of fortification. Like to see a deuce and a half breach two solid feet of that.”

“Words, words, words,” concludes Griffin. And that’s all it is, by now, isn’t it? Arden helps people control their thoughts by giving them a model, plants (or, perhaps soon enough, rocks) to focus their language around and model their being after. These are the powerful tricks that words play on us and fiction is the playground for them and us alike.

Okay, new topics tomorrow.