(Fiction) reader's block

     It’s been awhile since I’ve picked up a good novel.  Non-fiction has become my area of interest and I’ll be honest why: fiction presents a world – however beautifully wrought – that has the mark of its creator on every page.  The author chooses whichever way, however lyrical, that he wishes to present his story and does so proudly and intentionally.  Plato regarded art as a copy of something that was already a copy, our reality itself just a shoddy version of the true world of the Forms.  Art, novels, are just copies of the already crappy “real” world.

Plato


 May as well enjoy non-fiction, a perhaps unvarnished – okay less-unvarnished – view of reality.

     But the artist is capable of great things.  I can’t forget all those moments I’ve been hooked on a work of literature and I’m talking something here more like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children than Brown’s The DaVinci code.  Writing has the power to venture into mysterious realms and help us look into ourselves.  This is the domain of the liminal.  As Peter Levenda relates to Jasun Horsley: “I think that writing in itself if a liminal occupation. You’re in world where something is uncreated and yet wants to be created, you’re an interface between an idea and something that appears as a physical artifact.” 

 

Peter Levenda

     Pretty amazing.  Who would criticize the novel, beside Plato?

     Georg Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. His work The Theory of the Novel “begins with a comparison of the historical conditions that gave rise to the epic and the novel”: “In the age of the novel the once known unity between man and his world has been lost, and the hero has become an estranged seeker of the meaning of existence.”  Something Lukacs called “transcendental homelessness.” 

     So novels, those wonderful stories, are tools to smooth the edges, to let everyone belong in a world that has been separated from nature – ouch! 

     Lukacs later took it back.  Regardless, though, I admire the perspective that this gives – what are the uses of the novel?  What are the uses of language?  Nothing is simply just what it seems.  Every little thing occurs in an interconnected web and has history.  Dang it but I find Lukacs idea to vindicate my recent disdain of fiction.  It’s complicated but perhaps I will someday overcome my fiction reader’s block.