The "Cell Phone Dilemma" in contemporary American fiction
From the Slate.com discussion I posted yesterday, another excerpt:
"You asked about the multicultural novel. OK, here goes. The majority of so-called multicultural novels are nothing but new wine poured into old bottles. What's the great subject of the novel? Marriage, of course. In the West, we've lost that subject. Marriages aren't arranged anymore. Divorce is no longer unthinkable. You can't have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.
What the multicultural novel has going for it is the marriage plot. They can still use it! The societies under examination are conservative, religious, still bound by custom and tradition. And so—voilà—you can be an Indian novelist or a Jordanian novelist and still avail yourself of the greatest subject the novel has ever had. Arranged marriages, dowries, social stigma at divorce—it's all back again, in perfect working order.
This doesn't mean that these novels can't be enjoyable. I don't blame them for using the marriage plot. But using it in the way they do has consequences. Though these books are coming out now, they're already at least a hundred years old. Plus, the 19th-century subject matter begins to infect the prose. It makes the characterization creaky. There are cobwebs between the sentences. Entire paragraphs smell like mothballs. The multicultural novel is not alone in this. Most novels smell like that. My old teacher, the great Gilbert Sorrentino, used to put it like this. Of all the books coming out, he'd say. "These books don't exist. I mean, they exist. But they don't EXIST!""
This is fascinating, since as an MFA student, I've seen white Western writers being blamed for not being "progressive" or "modern." And yet what Eugenides says here I have found in my (admittedly) limited experience to be true. Our program's minority writers, while very talented, are indeed using this subject matter to power their work. This creates a weird rift between the minority writers (many of whom think they're startlingly avant-garde and au courant) and those who are writing about white American middle-class characters. It's almost impossible to do the marriage plot without having something else: something hugely novel or monumental included in a story/novel--the drama of Westernized/Americanized marriage is nonexistent!
As an aside, this says something interesting about the current significance of marriage in our (American/Western) culture. It is so easily entered into and fled from that there is literally no drama to wrest from a story centered on characters getting together or breaking apart, aside from the universal emotions of joy and anguish, which, incidentally, do not a plot make. Something greater than typical human emotion has to be at stake for a story to work, I think, unless it is being executed perfectly, which I'm certainly not capable of. I like the ideas of societal norms and pressures exerting force on characters and relationships, but in our country, the impact of marriage or divorce on a wider community (beyond the family) is superficial at best. At worst, no one really cares whether the neighbor two houses down gets divorced--we pretend to care, but we're more interested in a voyeuristic, cynical way than sharing actual compassion or empathy. Marriage and divorce are so light and inconsequential in our current white Western cultural moment, that we simply can't use them for much.
I liken this to what I call the "Cell Phone Dilemma." In America today, it is almost impossible to achieve plausible suspense if a character breaks down in an unknown quadrant of a city, or even has car trouble on a country road. Why don't they have a cell phone, the reader can rightfully ask? And if they do, they must use it. Only by working it into the character--oh, he's a creaky old technophobe!--or having a technological malfunction--the battery's dead and I forgot my car charger!--can we even attempt to create the suspense that 15 to 20 years ago arose instantly, naturally from a particular, understood set of circumstances. Our historical literary moment has forever changed, at least in
America. However, the cell phone dilemma can be rectified if you set your characters on a back road in Kenya, perhaps, though even this is becoming more difficult, as industrialization creeps in and offers more and more people the same technologies that Americans have.
Thus, the ability of multicultural writers to utilize the marriage plot.
The next logical step, of course, is, if you're a white American writer, to ask: What's next? As you may have guessed, I haven't yet figured it out, though I'll be pondering this interesting question, in the interest of keeping my writing out of the dark ages and allowing it to truly illuminate the current American cultural moment.
"You asked about the multicultural novel. OK, here goes. The majority of so-called multicultural novels are nothing but new wine poured into old bottles. What's the great subject of the novel? Marriage, of course. In the West, we've lost that subject. Marriages aren't arranged anymore. Divorce is no longer unthinkable. You can't have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.
What the multicultural novel has going for it is the marriage plot. They can still use it! The societies under examination are conservative, religious, still bound by custom and tradition. And so—voilà—you can be an Indian novelist or a Jordanian novelist and still avail yourself of the greatest subject the novel has ever had. Arranged marriages, dowries, social stigma at divorce—it's all back again, in perfect working order.
This doesn't mean that these novels can't be enjoyable. I don't blame them for using the marriage plot. But using it in the way they do has consequences. Though these books are coming out now, they're already at least a hundred years old. Plus, the 19th-century subject matter begins to infect the prose. It makes the characterization creaky. There are cobwebs between the sentences. Entire paragraphs smell like mothballs. The multicultural novel is not alone in this. Most novels smell like that. My old teacher, the great Gilbert Sorrentino, used to put it like this. Of all the books coming out, he'd say. "These books don't exist. I mean, they exist. But they don't EXIST!""
This is fascinating, since as an MFA student, I've seen white Western writers being blamed for not being "progressive" or "modern." And yet what Eugenides says here I have found in my (admittedly) limited experience to be true. Our program's minority writers, while very talented, are indeed using this subject matter to power their work. This creates a weird rift between the minority writers (many of whom think they're startlingly avant-garde and au courant) and those who are writing about white American middle-class characters. It's almost impossible to do the marriage plot without having something else: something hugely novel or monumental included in a story/novel--the drama of Westernized/Americanized marriage is nonexistent!
As an aside, this says something interesting about the current significance of marriage in our (American/Western) culture. It is so easily entered into and fled from that there is literally no drama to wrest from a story centered on characters getting together or breaking apart, aside from the universal emotions of joy and anguish, which, incidentally, do not a plot make. Something greater than typical human emotion has to be at stake for a story to work, I think, unless it is being executed perfectly, which I'm certainly not capable of. I like the ideas of societal norms and pressures exerting force on characters and relationships, but in our country, the impact of marriage or divorce on a wider community (beyond the family) is superficial at best. At worst, no one really cares whether the neighbor two houses down gets divorced--we pretend to care, but we're more interested in a voyeuristic, cynical way than sharing actual compassion or empathy. Marriage and divorce are so light and inconsequential in our current white Western cultural moment, that we simply can't use them for much.
I liken this to what I call the "Cell Phone Dilemma." In America today, it is almost impossible to achieve plausible suspense if a character breaks down in an unknown quadrant of a city, or even has car trouble on a country road. Why don't they have a cell phone, the reader can rightfully ask? And if they do, they must use it. Only by working it into the character--oh, he's a creaky old technophobe!--or having a technological malfunction--the battery's dead and I forgot my car charger!--can we even attempt to create the suspense that 15 to 20 years ago arose instantly, naturally from a particular, understood set of circumstances. Our historical literary moment has forever changed, at least in
America. However, the cell phone dilemma can be rectified if you set your characters on a back road in Kenya, perhaps, though even this is becoming more difficult, as industrialization creeps in and offers more and more people the same technologies that Americans have.
Thus, the ability of multicultural writers to utilize the marriage plot.
The next logical step, of course, is, if you're a white American writer, to ask: What's next? As you may have guessed, I haven't yet figured it out, though I'll be pondering this interesting question, in the interest of keeping my writing out of the dark ages and allowing it to truly illuminate the current American cultural moment.
posted by Tiffany Hamburger at
5:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home