Dustin Illingworth has started a Substack newsletter focusing on “obstructive fictions” — “fiction that frustrates interpretation.” In his first post, he quotes Gerald Murnane on the opposition between “film-script fiction” and “meditative fiction,” which is a dichotomy dear to my heart. In his second post, he calls for “a less filmable fiction” and considers the utility of discussing fiction in terms of “realism” and “anti-realism.” I subscribe to the newsletter and I’m enjoying it so far. If you have any interest at all in literature that challenges the conventions of the artform, sign up.
Here, though, I want to dwell a little longer on “realism” and “anti-realism.” Illingworth concedes that it probably isn’t useful to think about fiction in these terms, and I agree. But. But what? Well, I write fiction as well as writing about fiction, and I’m conscious of the likelihood that many readers of At the Edge of the Solid World would describe it as a work of “realism,” even though I see the novel as realism’s opposite. I mean, it’s a novel of domestic drama and physicality, texture, sensory input: you could plausibly read it as derivative of, say, Richard Yates, at least up to a point. But I see it as a novel more in the lineage of some of Illingworth’s lodestars — the hermetic-solipsistic Kate in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Thomas Bernhard with his obsessive-recursive approach to minor distinctions of language — despite its veneer of verisimilitude, its false fidelity to a recognisable reality.
In my earlier reflections on writing the novel, I said that I “tried to adopt that mode of writing [ie. realism] as a Trojan horse.” More recently, though, I came across a better metaphor. I read somewhere about the various species of parasite wasps. The female wasp attacks another creature, such as a caterpillar, and lays her eggs inside its body. When the larvae hatch, they devour the organs of the host — killing it in the process — before boring a tiny hole in its skin and escaping, leaving behind the empty husk of a being that otherwise looks alive. That’s how I wanted my readers to look back on realism when they reached the end of my novel.
Yeah, I know. Brass neck, right? Ego. But it’s the truth. And what’s interesting to me about Illingworth’s celebration of “anti-realists” is the way that his unhelpful distinction between realism and anti-realism functions as a sort of critical blind spot, so there’s no space in which the norms of realism might be abused and turned against it. “More and more,” he says,
I find the realist novel’s conscription of detail to describe and systematize the external world frictionless, even embarrassing. In ‘The Reality Effect’ (1968), Roland Barthes suggested that the accumulation of realist detail in fiction serves an ideological function, the seeming innocence of these “useless details” allowing them to escape scrutiny in their contribution to an ambient notion of “the real.” While reading realist fiction, I often have the uncanny experience of a divided mind. I submit to the marvelous artifice set before me, even as some deeper part of my consciousness rejects these “useless details” entirely.
And following this line of thought, a little later, Illingworth characterises realist fictions as those that “purport to be projections of some sedate, agreed-upon reality.”
What beautiful phrasing! So loaded with aesthetic possibilities, though Illingworth himself doesn’t acknowledge the potential. Here’s what I’d say, reflecting anew on At the Edge of the Solid World: it looks like a realist novel in many respects not because it is a realist novel, but because its narrator wants desperately to live in a realist’s world. He has been thrown so far outwith the bounds of a knowable, familiar, agreed-upon reality that the only way he can make his new reality manageable is to first make it conformable to the norms that realism favours, or at least interpretable in the terms of a realist. Every apparent gesture towards realism — in terms of narrative and in terms of style — really signifies “anti-realism” as Illingworth defines it: an unwilled “mapping” of “the chaos of interiority, the spasms of consciousness, the superimpositions of memory.” Details accumulate upon details, yes, but rather as part of a perverse coping strategy — though I hope the accumulation itself becomes so overwhelming that it has an estranging effect on the narrator’s particular reality, rather than an effect that clarifies or confirms a familiar one. Put more simply, the novel doesn’t “purport to be [a projection] of some sedate, agreed-upon reality,” though the conditions of its reality are indeed “projections” of the narrator’s need to determine its terms in a way that all but begs for agreement, affirmation, from those who read his words. An anti-realist novel can invoke and employ the tried and true aesthetic conventions of realism while also repurposing them — even if lay readers who default to realism open the covers and find exactly what they expect from any work of fiction worth their time. Hopefully, though, more experienced readers will see more: more than realism at work in my novel, and more potential uses for elements of realism than those that have grown stale through centuries of overuse.
Infinite Patience 