Why Fiction?

My latest at Eclectica…

In his essay on Gogol, V. S. Pritchett wrote about “the carelessness, the lethargy, the enormous bad taste of genius, its liability to accident, it’s slovenly and majestic conceit that anything will do. Don Quixote falls in half, the Chartreuse and Le Rouge et le Noir go shockingly to pieces, Tolstoy stuffs a history book into War and Peace, Fielding and Dickens pad and Dostoevsky wanders into ideological journalism…” Pritchett contrasted these faults in the great novelists of the 19th century with the modern novel which, he says, “has reached such a pitch of competence and shapeliness that we are shocked at the disorderliness of the masterpieces.” But in contrast to the unfinished patchiness of their antecedents, “In the modern novel we are looking at a neatly barbered suburban garden,” while in the greats, “We feel the force of a great power which is never entirely spent, but which cannot be bothered to fulfill itself.”

Not quite what we were taught in our English lit courses. But, true enough, it seems to me, and even more so since the ascendancy of post-modernism. The conclusion one reaches, or at least the one that has nagged at me for years, is that we who practice the art of fiction in contemporary times do so in a kind of silver or perhaps bronze age, unable to reach the heights of the 24-caret stuff produced by those lazy geniuses of the 18th and 19th centuries. We may write, some of us, with good form in carefully constructed sentences, but we’re just not made of the same stuff as a Dostoevsky or a Jane Austen….

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