First published, 4th March 2014
History is a novel without a future.
You know I rather despise the cheap tricks used in genre fiction to hook the reader, suspend the suspense, hang the cliff, as if all that matters is what comes next…
I remember first reading Slaughterhouse-5. What hit me most was the way Vonnegut played with time; the Tralfalmadorian way of viewing history as a picture. Not a narrative picture, I mean a still life. Once you’ve got hindsight, trying to decipher what it all means turns into an examination of reconnaissance photographs. For example, we can see everything that was going to happen from the summer of 1914 as it happened and we can peer down on all the mild anxiety of the blissfully ignorant blundering about a hundred years below. And it all becomes rather static from a distance. How still our planet looks from out-of-space…
Just as much as it is a challenge to the visual artist to convey movement (let alone a story) might it not be a challenge for a storyteller to convey stasis through narrative: for things to happen without time’s arrow? – So, no Benjamin Buttons. No Odilo Unverdorbens…
“I want to be gripped by the first sentence, ripping the pages out to get to the end…”
Oh fuck off agents, publishers, editors, whoever insists that the reading experience must feel like a rape fantasy – reluctant but not really. Sick seduction…
You know, the fact is behind every thriller, every action adventure is a sedative called convention. It means that anyone can be thrilled or seduced, even though they know the ending (even before the film or the novel has been created). No detective novel exists, as far as I am aware, in which the sleuth dramatically fails to solve the crime…
Ah, but it’s not what you do it’s how you do it. We know the crime shall be solved, there shall be a car chase, the good guy shall get the girl, the bad guy shall die in who-gives-a-shit agony. Justice shall be done. But that the mystery will be solved doesn’t detract from the mystery…
Everything that happens is reduced to a sort of glossy veneer; a diverting entertainment put on while we all wait to find out what we already know is going to happen. Well, maybe that’s a narrative structuring that accurately represents human life: beginning followed by a hanging around waiting for Godot. But it’s not gripping. It doesn’t excite me. Personally, it doesn’t turn me on any more than the cum shot at the end of every Scooby-Doo. I know, I know. I’m just weird like that…
Maybe I’m saying that narratives don’t have to pretend that our own lives have a meaningful ending. The whole narrative tradition stems from scripture. It’s theistic rhetoric. Narrative is profoundly teleological. Consequential…
Goddammit. As if our lives were geared to the ultimate consequence of our deaths. How’s that work? – I mean without all the Rococo paraphernalia and painted ceilings…
I’m an atheist. If I felt compelled by ethics, I’d be deontological about animal rights or whatever. If I had to be. Shouldn’t I then be rejecting the whole narrative convention thing? Shouldn’t I be writing unsolved mysteries? As an indie writer I can do that. I mean, no publisher is going to tell me off, roll their eyes. Because publishing is now digital, there are no human beings involved in the process of production or distribution. Just a big machine. There’s no human being at the receiving end either (in my case). So I could start my own silent revolution. How wonderful. I mean, think of the possibilities: Moriarty gets one over Sherlock at last. Darcy gets run over by a coach and six before the wedding…
Of course, such books would land the writer in the morality dock. I mean, suddenly the good guys are getting nailed. Condemned. The bad guys are winning. Extolled…
Ah, well, there you have it. Novels always were just better written Bibles…
Look, the point is this. The deep structures of novels should connect to life, to lives. Books about people should reflect the reality of life cycles, chance situations, stumblings and the stasis that comes from looking down with hindsight. The confusion, the blindness and the humanity. Narratives should not, not anymore, be fixed by the Judaeo-Christian paradigm that insidiously informs us that everything we do in our lives, in our relationships, is being judged by the Wizard of Oz, that the novel somehow carries on after it’s ended…
No. Life is not a story. It’s a dance. When the music stops we stop.